#minor edits for grammar and like...skipping words cuz brain faster than hands

[frogeyedape]

Got some anons recently hating on me for disagreeing with terfs. Well. Good for you, I've blocked you! I continue to disagree with terfs.

What is interesting to me is that their arguments are in such bad faith that it's clear they completely overlooked half of what I was saying.

So I'd like to say it explicitly.

The patriarchy privileges and hurts, without regard to whether the target was previously privileged or harmed. Same with white supremacy, and sexism, and any other power system.

Who benefits in a patriarchal, white supremacist, sexist, capitalist community? Anyone who is more male, more masculine, more white, more conformist, stronger, has more capital. Anyone who is less colored, less female, less feminine, less weak, less considerate. And you only have to beat 1 person to benefit in this system. You only have to beat the next person down and you benefit from their weakness or femininity or poverty. So if you wanted to measure it out, in the whole community, there's one person who doesn't benefit, who has no one in the community who is beneath them. And then they can say, but the outsider is worse! I'm better than an outsider! And so they benefit from the harms done to immigrants and those dirty foreign nations that it's morally correct to wage war against. Everybody benefits, just a little, from this system. And they're all hungry to be the person at the top, the one who benefits the most.

That hunger? That's the root of the harm, maybe. Because everyone who's hungry is willing to drag down the person above them and stand on their head to get a little higher. Just a little higher. Doesn't matter much who you trample in that system, especially if they were actually always weaker than you, and how could they end up beneath you if they weren't? And there's that fear, that you're weaker than you think, deserve less than you think, that you'll be the one torn down next. That you're as worthless as all the other nobodies all around you.

So you see, while everybody benefits, everyone is also harmed by this system! The benefits and harms don't cancel out. Let's build a person as an example.

Chris is a white-passing Hispanic woman, with a solid middle class job, a husband, and two kids. Her husband, with mixed Black and Hispanic heritage, has a blue-collar job, and earns less than her despite being five years older and ten years further in his career.

Who's benefiting from the way society is set up? Who's being harmed? Chris -- short for Christine, but she chooses to go by Chris professionally -- has a male-passing nickname, which is really handy for job applications. She benefits from better access to jobs than an otherwise equal Christine who chooses to go by Christine. She also is potentially harmed, because now her choice on how to name herself is influenced by her need to be marketable to a hiring manager. Her choice has been restricted; there is a very tangible cost to adding the "tine" back to her name.

I could go on practically forever with the possible benefits and harms. Benefits: Chris is lauded among friends and coworkers for her ability to juggle work and family; she is praised as the breadwinner; her friends are jealous of her once-every-three-years 4-day vacation lifestyle; her kids' teachers respect her work ethic; her parents are proud she's settled down with a family. Harms: people look down on her husband (and by association, her, for having chosen him) for earning less than her; she has to deny her Hispanic heritage to maintain any privilege that comes with being white-passing; she has to swallow the indignity of others ignoring or refusing to believe in her Hispanic heritage; she still remembers the taunts from boys and girls alike on the playground because she had a boy's name (non-conformity to her gender); she loves her husband and doesn't care if he makes less than her but it's still a trouble spot in their relationship; she can't afford to get sick; she can't afford to come home and relax because after work there's Being a Mom.

People, individual people, are not monolithic any more than a group of people is. We are all, each of us, remarkably complex. We all benefit, we all are harmed, in complicated webs of interaction. The benefits don't cancel out the harms. The harms don't cancel out the benefits. Imagine a bunch of orange and green stones. One benefit equals one orange stone; one harm equals one green stone. Gather your pail of stones. How many orange? How many green? Are the green worth it if you get to have the orange?

If you mix additive pigments orange and green, you get the color gray. (red and green makes brown, orange and blue makes brown, but orange and green is gray). Are any of your stones gray? Is your whole pailful a sea of gray, or is it stone after stone after stone, each green, or orange, each separate and distinct? Maybe a lot of your stones are tiny; they're like grains of sand; they do mix; and you get gray sand. But if you put them under a microscope, you still find no gray, just orange and green.

I'm not a fan of the patriarchy. I'm AFAB, feminine-leaning agender. It sucks. I also benefit from looking white, from speaking "well", from my parents' rise through the middle class to a working-class rich. (Oddly enough, they're still pretty much paycheck to paycheck. Hence the working class part of it). I benefit when I lean into my femininity because to do otherwise would disrupt people's understanding of gender. (Please stop acting like I'm gonna bite your head off when you see me and call me sir and then my voice comes out all high and you realize I'm "actually" a woman. I could like being called sir if not for that reaction). But liking or disliking the patriarchy isn't my point. My point is, everyone, everyone, everyone, both receives benefits from, and is harmed by, our lovely little society.

Who benefits, and who is harmed, when you compare a lower working class white man with an upper middle class Black woman?

It's not a simple question. Throw down some ideas yourself. Toss it around. Think about it. The world doesn't exist in black and white, but it's not all shades of gray, either. Look at your pail full of green and orange stones, and remember that it's not a competition. It's supposed to be a community. Which means we need to actively, consciously decide to stop trying to drag other people down, to stop stomping on the people beneath us, and instead lift each other up. The only person you can throw down on is the one who's refusing to lift anyone, and only stomping, stomping, stomping. And then once they're down, unless you want that stomping idea to flourish, you gotta teach the helping hand.