So I just got the idea for this post when I was at work, and since today will probably be the last time I actually have both the time and energy to write on here until at least the end of June (when two of my classes end), I wanted to address it while I still had the time. This post will mostly be a braindump but let's go for it.
Just to warn everyone, this post is going to be rambling and disorganized because ADHD is Fucking With Me but I'll try to keep things coherent and then edit later.
And...yeah. Passing privilege. If you're involved in or affiliated with any kind of social justice community, you've probably heard the term before. It refers to the ability of a marginalized person to pass as their more privileged counterpart, and more specifically the (conditional) material benefits they receive from that.
I'm not going to go into white-passing privilege and colorism since it's not in my lane (though Marina Watanabe has a video on this if anyone's interested, and would a PoC please let me know in the comments section of this post if it's fucked up in some way? I know Marina has said and done some shitty/ignorant things so I wasn't too sure about linking her video, but as a Japanese person she still has 1000x more right to talk about racism and white privilege than I do), but the idea of passing privilege affects me in a lot of ways and I just wanted to...I don't know, address it?
So. How does passing privilege affect me, race aside?
For starters, I'm pagan. More specifically, I'm a culturally Catholic pagan, who is generally still assumed to be Christian because that's what my family is.
Especially now, with this political climate, it's easy for me to see the privileges that I have over other non-Christian people. Politicians don't talk about me the way they do Jewish people. No one has ever tried to pull off my headscarves, and I've never been accused of being a terrorist.
But at the same time...I just really resent the way people, especially Christians and non-pagan atheists and agnostics, act like being pagan is a goddamn privilege. I'm not sure oppression is exactly the right word for the religious discrimination I face as a white Hellenic polytheist/revivalist, but there's also been a huge difference in the way I've been treated since converting and there are things pagans systemically face that Christians don't.
The definition of institutional oppression, according to Portland Community College, is "the systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions, solely based on the person’s membership in the social identity group." The incidents I cite in this post definitely indicate mistreatment, though I'm not sure if it would be considered systematic. It's supported and enforced by dominant religion and by academia. But what you see a lot of there as well is that a lot of these people are able to go to the police and the courts, file lawsuits and report discrimination, and win. That's not something many Jewish people and people of color - of any faith - are able to do.
Yes, it could be argued that most of the reason white pagans are able to do that - because a lot of these people are white - is that their white privilege gives them an advantage, as does the fact that Wicca and European revivalism aren't racialized the way Judaism is. But anti-pagan sentiment doesn't have the same history of oppression that racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, intersexism, antisemitism, and classism do. Obviously, Christianity did attempt to wipe out most indigenous polytheist religions...but their motivations were mainly based in racism. And don't talk to me about the Burning Times because they were not based in hatred of pagans - they were based in misogyny, racism, ableism, and antisemitism. Not to mention, a lot of discrimination against pagans is also applicable to pagans of all religions and christopaganism can look generally like garden-variety Christianity aside from how it's labeled. We're not really a coherent class, thanks to how broad pagan is as an umbrella term.
Which doesn't mean there's no discrimination against us at all. Like Canada's anti-witchcraft law - that's going to hit Canadian pagans pretty hard, since a lot of pagan religions are witchcraft/magic-based or have practices that are similar to witchcraft, and since a lot of people think witchcraft and paganism are the same thing. Or like our homes and businesses being vandalized. Or lack of legal recognition. Or pagans being harassed and bullied to the point of suicide. Or this stone circle used by a pagan group being obliterated and this statue of a pagan sea god being stolen. Or propaganda being used against us. Or lack of access to political power and denial of religious freedom to incarcerated pagans. Or this pagan couple not being allowed to open a religious temple when their faith was discovered. Or police opposing our gatherings and festivals. And just read this article on the stigma and widespread distrust against us. Then there's workplace discrimination, more workplace discrimination, yet more workplace discrimination, and even more workplace discrimination.
There's also harassment, this court order demanding that a pagan couple not raise their son in their religion, this woman being kicked out of a store for wearing a pentacle, these students not receiving adequate protection from harassment, interpersonal discrimination from Christians, the way stereotypes and media portrayals prevented this woman from defending her kids against bullying, this woman who was fired because of her coworker was afraid of Wicca, this Wiccan author who had her home vandalized, these pagans who were cornered, yelled at, and had salt thrown in their faces by Christian pilgrims, this young pagan girl who was bullied for her religion and forced to participate in Christian traditions in school, this Christian man who harassed a pagan lesbian couple while evangelizing to them, the repeated harassment and threats this woman endured, this witchcraft shop that was threatened with arson, Etsy's ban on the sale of pagan items, this report indicating that 22.6% of pagans had been threatened or harassed for their religion, this pagan woman whose store was vandalized, this pagan woman who was run out of her home and whose career is suffering because of the harassment she has endured, these pagans who were denied legal help after reporting death threats to the police, this little pagan girl who was told not to wear her pentacle to a public school, this woman who experienced workplace discrimination after her managers found out she was pagan, and this little boy who was harassed for staying home from school on Samhain.
Or just the casual, everyday interpersonal luxuries granted to Christians that pagans don't have: being able to talk about your religion without fearing the other person's reaction, being able to evangelize (pagans don't actually evangelize anyway unless you count the "But the threefold law!!" crap some Wiccans promote, but that's mostly directed at other pagans anyway), time off for religious holidays, having easy access to a house of worship and faith community for your religion, and being able to trust that you will never be the only person of your religion in a room.
I've only ever heard of three pagan temples in the entire U.S., and like...there were these two old men trying to give me a Bible on campus today. They weren't forceful or anything, but can you imagine the outrage that would happen if I walked around trying to preach the good news of Aphrodite? If I told Christians they were going to Erebos (essentially Greek hell) for their hubris in saying that a human was the reincarnation of a god, when such a thing isn't inherently wrong in their religion? If there was a widespread problem of pagans forcing our religious values into government and holding everyone else to those standards, whether they actually followed our religions or not?
And honestly? I'm pretty shielded from a lot of this because, for a white person in the Midwest, I live in a fairly progressive metropolitan town, go to a progressive college with a lot of diversity panels, and don't really communicate with any wider pagan community in my area. My outlook on this might be radically different if I lived in a small town in North Carolina, and the same could be said for a lot of different forms of oppression I face. Like, as a femme-read (though not femme-identified) wlw who doesn't have a girlfriend (unfortunately) and is mostly closeted, I'm not going to directly, actively face homophobia the same way an out, visibly gnc woman living with her girlfriend/wife in rural Indiana will. But that doesn't mean I don't face it and just because gay marriage is legal and not all sga people are equally vulnerable, doesn't mean homophobia doesn't exist anymore. Paganphobia, or anti-pagan discrimination, or whatever you want to call it, is similar in that way.
A lot of the privilege white gentile pagans have over Jewish and Muslim people comes from white supremacy. Even though both Jewish and Muslim people can be white, the fact remains that much of antisemitism and islamophobia is racialized. Since Muslims are assumed to be Arab, their oppression is heavily tied to anti-Arab or anti-Desi racism. Even for white Muslims, privilege can be conditional. Like, there are white hijabis and niqabis, and a fascist probably won't ask nicely what color hair or skin is under someone's veil before ripping it off. And ethnically Jewish people often have a complicated relationship with race, since their ethnoreligion is older than that concept and many of them have heard family stories about the Holocaust, in which they definitely weren't viewed as white. Also, stereotypically Jewish features like olive skin, a large nose, brown eyes, beards, bushy eyebrows, and thick dark curly hair are often portrayed as sinister (i.e. Mother Gothel from Tangled or how people joke about Shel Silverstein, a Jewish man, looking "evil" in his picture from The Giving Tree), which alienates Jewish people with those features from fully conforming to the beauty standards of white gentiles.
Are white Muslims and white Jewish people still racially privileged? Absolutely. You don't need to be at the top of the pole to piss on the people below you (in their case, people of color).
But the same applies to me. I don't need to be at the top of the pole - in my case, a white gentile Christian rather than a white gentile pagan - in order to piss on the people below me.
Next...I don't really know if this counts as a "passing privilege", but I felt it was relevant.
So. I have ADHD and I'm probably also autistic. For both reasons, I'm considered "mildly disabled" or "high-functioning" and I also generally have a greater ability to pass as neurotypical than, say, someone who can't work, or someone who is completely nonverbal, or who has trouble with incontinence, or needs an aide around them all the time. And I have some material benefits from that, including being viewed as "acceptably disabled", being less likely to be used as inspiration porn, being less likely to be subjected to ABA, etc.
But being perceived as "high functioning"/"mildly disabled" comes with its own challenges:
Physically speaking, I have chronic pain and astigmatism and strabismus, as well as some blood sugar issues that I suspect relate to my ADHD.
I'm pretty indifferent to my eye-related disabilities, so I'll ignore them here.
My pain usually affects my back and knees and gets worse when it's cold, and I use a brace part-time (I want a second brace, but the only one that doesn't chafe my skin and actually feels comfortable to wear is the one I have now). I haven't experienced too many problems with it in terms of active oppression, beyond people not understanding that they can't push me as far physically as they can an able-bodied person, and that someone as young as me can even have joint pain.
My blood sugar issues are...harder to explain. They match up really closely to the symptoms of hypoglycemia. I need something to eat, preferably complex carbs, every two waking hours or so, or I get tired, shaky, and irritable quickly, my heart starts beating weirdly, and I get migraines. This is obviously going to be a problem in class or at work, when I can't drop everything to eat something. So I tend to stock up on things like canned V8 (if you didn't know, this is a brand of vegetable juice that tastes vaguely like gazpacho) and granola bars, and I carry them around with me so I can get my blood sugar up while walking to class or to either of my two jobs.
If you're wondering how this relates to ADHD, there's an ADHD thing called hyperfocus that sometimes causes me to focus really intensely on one specific thing, sometimes for hours at a time, to the point of forgetting to do anything else...bathing, doing my homework, taking my meds, drinking water, eating, and sleeping. This is the only time I can focus on anything I'm not genuinely excited about, and it would be so great except that it's virtually useless and it results in me having headaches, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and an unstable metabolism and blood sugar.
And while I've had issues with both, I don't feel that I've been as personally affected by ableism relating to my physical disabilities to the same extent a lot of other physically disabled people, people whose disabilities are more visible, have.
That said, this could have to do with the fact that I also don't interact with communities based around physical disability.
Why would I? They revolve around pride, and disability pride is for people who are, well, proud to be disabled. And I am proud to be disabled, just not physically disabled. After all, my pain and unstable blood sugar result from chronic illness, and being visually impaired is just an annoying pain in the ass for me but really nothing more.
But the point of this is to talk about ableism. Like...one of my teachers is Deaf, and while he doesn't wear hearing aids or Cochlear implants, you can tell he's not able-bodied much more easily than you can with me. Things like not responding to noise or needing closed captions give him away quickly. He doesn't talk or lipread, so he uses sign language to communicate - and while sign language is something that I would definitely benefit from and desperately wish I'd had a chance to learn when I was a kid, I can still hear and speak and just that has made my life a lot easier.
Or how the head of the accessibility office at my college is blind and while I didn't know this immediately when I first met her, that could be because I'm just really shitty at reading between the lines and sometimes even noticing the obvious. I just wondered why her computer screen wasn't on, and who that mysterious voice belonged to (it was just her text to speech program). But for someone who's better at these things than me, all those little details - the white cane I had ignored earlier, the talking computer, the way her colleague read all the files out loud to her, the milky eyes that I hadn't noticed because I don't look people in the eyes - immediately mark her as different.
Or my friend Nicole, who's a full time wheelchair user. You don't even have to talk to her to know she's disabled. She's hypervisible, no matter how much people try to ignore her wheelchair and pretend she's just like them - and, I admit, I've been guilty of this myself, but I'm trying to stop.
Meanwhile, the only indications I outwardly give that I'm physically disabled are the accessibility functions on my phone (which people don't usually notice because they don't use my phone), the food I carry around with me in order to regulate my blood sugar content, the way I kneed my joints in order to relieve pain, the way I hold things so closely to my face, and the brace wrapped around my knee. If people ask about these things at all, they usually just assume I'm wrapping an injury or that I'm eating something small because I'm either dieting or too busy to sit down for an actual meal. And I'm content to let them think that.
The fact that it's immediately obvious that these people are disabled means that people's reactions to their disabilities are also immediate, and that increases the likelihood that someone will act violently toward them - especially Nicole, since she's specifically a black woman in a wheelchair. And, white privilege aside, that's not something I have to worry about as much.
Next there's sexuality.
This is a complicated subject for me because, beyond being sapphic, I'm not totally sure what my sexuality even is.
And because I may or may not have a crush on a man, and thanks to my disability related traits (i.e. alexithymia, low empathy, hyperromanticism) and the fact that coercive heterosexuality is a thing, it's hard to tell what these feelings even are.
I talked to Roman about it, and I'm not going to go into detail because it was honestly the weirdest conversation I've ever had, not to mention entirely too nsfw to repeat to our resident fourteen-year-old mod as well as any other minors who might be reading this. But anyway. It thinks that this crush, we'll call him Danny, is the result of coercive heterosexuality.
And that makes sense, because while Danny doesn't look like the muscular manly-man or androgynous pretty boy types that are more common choices for coercive het crushes, he's still a decent-looking unattainable man who is nice to me and comes across as nonthreatening.
But at the same time, all of that doesn't mean I couldn't actually have feelings for him, and it also doesn't really feel like coercive het. I don't get uncomfortable around him, I actually have things that I like about him that aren't dependent on his gender, I'm genuinely happy to see him, and if our situation was different the idea of dating him would be appealing. It just feels like attraction, genuine attraction, but there's also a strong possibility that this attraction, and the man who is the object of it, simply feels safe to me. After all, realistically I'm probably never going to interact with him again after this summer.
And thanks to our age difference (Danny's in his mid-twenties) and other factors that result in a difference in power and maturity between us, I'd probably think he was a piece of shit if he actually tried to pursue a relationship with me, a more naive, barely legal woman who is still learning how to be an adult and is questioning their sexuality. Which makes things so much more complicated.
But then again...I've also had crushes on unattainable, sometimes older, women in positions of power - including straight women. A couple of my teachers, one of my managers (though the age difference in that case was only about a year). And since this (one-sided) attraction was between women, it obviously wasn't coercive het. Which means that obviously, someone being older than me and in a position of authority doesn't mean I can't be attracted to them.
And this is all just very political. Really nothing is apolitical or completely separable from privilege and oppression, I know, especially things related to gender and sexuality. And there's a reason for almost everything, but sometimes...it's just not that deep. And given that I'm generally an over-analytical hot mess, I could totally be overthinking this and not be forcing anything and the moral of the story is @Aphrodite help me.
So anyway. I'm still questioning and I definitely have a strong preference for women and would rather seek out, date, kiss, fuck, and grow old with a woman, but I do also feel like there have been a handful of men and nonwomen that I've been attracted to and that I at least have the potential to feel that way again. Like, I don't think someone being a man wouldn't be an automatic, no-holds-barred deal-breaker for me, sexually speaking, but if offered a choice between a man and woman who I found otherwise equally attractive, I would probably pick the woman.
It's like...like food, I guess, as corny and annoying as food comparison for sexuality are. Like, I'm flexitarian, which is essentially half vegetarian and half not. I don't eat beef or pork. At all. I do eat seafood and poultry, and I'd be willing to try venison once in a blue moon, but I'm generally more likely to choose vegetarian options over any kind of meat. I've been fully vegetarian in the past and I'm thinking about trying it again, but I'd rather put that decision off for now.
To lesbians, men are beef or pork: not appealing at all. To me, men are venison, women are tofu, and nonbinary people who align with both or neither are chicken, turkey, and fish.
I'm rambling, but I warned you.
TL;DR this could change and I might decide to be with women exclusively, but for right now and for simplicity's sake, the sexuality label I'm going with is bisexual.
And that, really, is a major reason I finally decided to make this post.
There are a lot of cases of lesbians and non-bi people in general overpoliticizing bi women's attraction and relationships, or reducing them to whether they're politically progressive enough, and then reduce bi women ourselves to how radical they think we are (hint: never enough) and acting as if we're just available bodies for consumption, tainted by the unholy touch of cishet dick, or submissive extensions of our partners without an identity or autonomy of our own.
Holy fuck, just let us be people. Honestly, the way men (including mlm) and non-bi people talk about bi women is so dehumanizing and disgusting. They act as if everyone gets to fetishize, scrutinize, and offer an unwanted opinion on bi women's personal lives and how we express our sexuality - except, of course, bi women ourselves.
I can admit that being in a m/w relationship can have material benefits, like being able to get married, being able to talk openly about your relationship to strangers, not being ostracized for your relationship by most religious communities, being able to openly show affection to your partner without worrying about putting yourself in danger, having your relationship affirmed by the media, being able to hide your sexuality more easily, not being fired for your relationship, and being able to introduce your partner to your family without being disowned for it, but those benefits are conditional and non-bi people don't need to be leading discussions of any privilege bisexuals gain from them.
Just to warn everyone, this post is going to be rambling and disorganized because ADHD is Fucking With Me but I'll try to keep things coherent and then edit later.
And...yeah. Passing privilege. If you're involved in or affiliated with any kind of social justice community, you've probably heard the term before. It refers to the ability of a marginalized person to pass as their more privileged counterpart, and more specifically the (conditional) material benefits they receive from that.
I'm not going to go into white-passing privilege and colorism since it's not in my lane (though Marina Watanabe has a video on this if anyone's interested, and would a PoC please let me know in the comments section of this post if it's fucked up in some way? I know Marina has said and done some shitty/ignorant things so I wasn't too sure about linking her video, but as a Japanese person she still has 1000x more right to talk about racism and white privilege than I do), but the idea of passing privilege affects me in a lot of ways and I just wanted to...I don't know, address it?
So. How does passing privilege affect me, race aside?
For starters, I'm pagan. More specifically, I'm a culturally Catholic pagan, who is generally still assumed to be Christian because that's what my family is.
Especially now, with this political climate, it's easy for me to see the privileges that I have over other non-Christian people. Politicians don't talk about me the way they do Jewish people. No one has ever tried to pull off my headscarves, and I've never been accused of being a terrorist.
But at the same time...I just really resent the way people, especially Christians and non-pagan atheists and agnostics, act like being pagan is a goddamn privilege. I'm not sure oppression is exactly the right word for the religious discrimination I face as a white Hellenic polytheist/revivalist, but there's also been a huge difference in the way I've been treated since converting and there are things pagans systemically face that Christians don't.
The definition of institutional oppression, according to Portland Community College, is "the systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions, solely based on the person’s membership in the social identity group." The incidents I cite in this post definitely indicate mistreatment, though I'm not sure if it would be considered systematic. It's supported and enforced by dominant religion and by academia. But what you see a lot of there as well is that a lot of these people are able to go to the police and the courts, file lawsuits and report discrimination, and win. That's not something many Jewish people and people of color - of any faith - are able to do.
Yes, it could be argued that most of the reason white pagans are able to do that - because a lot of these people are white - is that their white privilege gives them an advantage, as does the fact that Wicca and European revivalism aren't racialized the way Judaism is. But anti-pagan sentiment doesn't have the same history of oppression that racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, intersexism, antisemitism, and classism do. Obviously, Christianity did attempt to wipe out most indigenous polytheist religions...but their motivations were mainly based in racism. And don't talk to me about the Burning Times because they were not based in hatred of pagans - they were based in misogyny, racism, ableism, and antisemitism. Not to mention, a lot of discrimination against pagans is also applicable to pagans of all religions and christopaganism can look generally like garden-variety Christianity aside from how it's labeled. We're not really a coherent class, thanks to how broad pagan is as an umbrella term.
Which doesn't mean there's no discrimination against us at all. Like Canada's anti-witchcraft law - that's going to hit Canadian pagans pretty hard, since a lot of pagan religions are witchcraft/magic-based or have practices that are similar to witchcraft, and since a lot of people think witchcraft and paganism are the same thing. Or like our homes and businesses being vandalized. Or lack of legal recognition. Or pagans being harassed and bullied to the point of suicide. Or this stone circle used by a pagan group being obliterated and this statue of a pagan sea god being stolen. Or propaganda being used against us. Or lack of access to political power and denial of religious freedom to incarcerated pagans. Or this pagan couple not being allowed to open a religious temple when their faith was discovered. Or police opposing our gatherings and festivals. And just read this article on the stigma and widespread distrust against us. Then there's workplace discrimination, more workplace discrimination, yet more workplace discrimination, and even more workplace discrimination.
There's also harassment, this court order demanding that a pagan couple not raise their son in their religion, this woman being kicked out of a store for wearing a pentacle, these students not receiving adequate protection from harassment, interpersonal discrimination from Christians, the way stereotypes and media portrayals prevented this woman from defending her kids against bullying, this woman who was fired because of her coworker was afraid of Wicca, this Wiccan author who had her home vandalized, these pagans who were cornered, yelled at, and had salt thrown in their faces by Christian pilgrims, this young pagan girl who was bullied for her religion and forced to participate in Christian traditions in school, this Christian man who harassed a pagan lesbian couple while evangelizing to them, the repeated harassment and threats this woman endured, this witchcraft shop that was threatened with arson, Etsy's ban on the sale of pagan items, this report indicating that 22.6% of pagans had been threatened or harassed for their religion, this pagan woman whose store was vandalized, this pagan woman who was run out of her home and whose career is suffering because of the harassment she has endured, these pagans who were denied legal help after reporting death threats to the police, this little pagan girl who was told not to wear her pentacle to a public school, this woman who experienced workplace discrimination after her managers found out she was pagan, and this little boy who was harassed for staying home from school on Samhain.
Or just the casual, everyday interpersonal luxuries granted to Christians that pagans don't have: being able to talk about your religion without fearing the other person's reaction, being able to evangelize (pagans don't actually evangelize anyway unless you count the "But the threefold law!!" crap some Wiccans promote, but that's mostly directed at other pagans anyway), time off for religious holidays, having easy access to a house of worship and faith community for your religion, and being able to trust that you will never be the only person of your religion in a room.
I've only ever heard of three pagan temples in the entire U.S., and like...there were these two old men trying to give me a Bible on campus today. They weren't forceful or anything, but can you imagine the outrage that would happen if I walked around trying to preach the good news of Aphrodite? If I told Christians they were going to Erebos (essentially Greek hell) for their hubris in saying that a human was the reincarnation of a god, when such a thing isn't inherently wrong in their religion? If there was a widespread problem of pagans forcing our religious values into government and holding everyone else to those standards, whether they actually followed our religions or not?
And honestly? I'm pretty shielded from a lot of this because, for a white person in the Midwest, I live in a fairly progressive metropolitan town, go to a progressive college with a lot of diversity panels, and don't really communicate with any wider pagan community in my area. My outlook on this might be radically different if I lived in a small town in North Carolina, and the same could be said for a lot of different forms of oppression I face. Like, as a femme-read (though not femme-identified) wlw who doesn't have a girlfriend (unfortunately) and is mostly closeted, I'm not going to directly, actively face homophobia the same way an out, visibly gnc woman living with her girlfriend/wife in rural Indiana will. But that doesn't mean I don't face it and just because gay marriage is legal and not all sga people are equally vulnerable, doesn't mean homophobia doesn't exist anymore. Paganphobia, or anti-pagan discrimination, or whatever you want to call it, is similar in that way.
A lot of the privilege white gentile pagans have over Jewish and Muslim people comes from white supremacy. Even though both Jewish and Muslim people can be white, the fact remains that much of antisemitism and islamophobia is racialized. Since Muslims are assumed to be Arab, their oppression is heavily tied to anti-Arab or anti-Desi racism. Even for white Muslims, privilege can be conditional. Like, there are white hijabis and niqabis, and a fascist probably won't ask nicely what color hair or skin is under someone's veil before ripping it off. And ethnically Jewish people often have a complicated relationship with race, since their ethnoreligion is older than that concept and many of them have heard family stories about the Holocaust, in which they definitely weren't viewed as white. Also, stereotypically Jewish features like olive skin, a large nose, brown eyes, beards, bushy eyebrows, and thick dark curly hair are often portrayed as sinister (i.e. Mother Gothel from Tangled or how people joke about Shel Silverstein, a Jewish man, looking "evil" in his picture from The Giving Tree), which alienates Jewish people with those features from fully conforming to the beauty standards of white gentiles.
Are white Muslims and white Jewish people still racially privileged? Absolutely. You don't need to be at the top of the pole to piss on the people below you (in their case, people of color).
But the same applies to me. I don't need to be at the top of the pole - in my case, a white gentile Christian rather than a white gentile pagan - in order to piss on the people below me.
Next...I don't really know if this counts as a "passing privilege", but I felt it was relevant.
So. I have ADHD and I'm probably also autistic. For both reasons, I'm considered "mildly disabled" or "high-functioning" and I also generally have a greater ability to pass as neurotypical than, say, someone who can't work, or someone who is completely nonverbal, or who has trouble with incontinence, or needs an aide around them all the time. And I have some material benefits from that, including being viewed as "acceptably disabled", being less likely to be used as inspiration porn, being less likely to be subjected to ABA, etc.
But being perceived as "high functioning"/"mildly disabled" comes with its own challenges:
- I'm less likely to be recognized by other disabled people as one of them and therefore less likely to be able to access disabled culture and community
- The fact that no one has ever taken seriously the possibility that I could be autistic, because of cissexism and the erasure of autistic women and girls, has prevented me from accessing needed accommodations, being able to learn sign language, and letting people know when I'm having trouble talking (i.e. slurred speech, rushed speech, echolalia, being nonverbal, having trouble controlling the volume and pitch of my voice) which means that I end up in situations where speech is important and I then have difficulty communicating
- People are sometimes more willing to make ableist microaggressions around me that they wouldn't if they knew I was disabled
- When I do need help and accommodations, it's less likely that they'll be provided because people can't believe that a "high functioning" disabled person like me still needs help
- Neurotypicals use my "high functioning" status to excuse their ableism (e.g. the infantilized way my mother, a neurotypical, talks about the mentally disabled students in her classroom, or the way eugenics apologists will use the fact that I'm a "high functioning" autistic/developmentally disabled person to tell me that I couldn't possibly understand how it's totes okay to forcibly institutionalize autistic people and subject them to physical and mental abuse because I've obviously never "lived with autism" the way those brave autism warrior mommies have)
- Even the phrases "high functioning"/"mild" and "low functioning"/"severe" take any sense of pride, history, and culture out of disability, reducing it to a medical diagnosis
Physically speaking, I have chronic pain and astigmatism and strabismus, as well as some blood sugar issues that I suspect relate to my ADHD.
I'm pretty indifferent to my eye-related disabilities, so I'll ignore them here.
My pain usually affects my back and knees and gets worse when it's cold, and I use a brace part-time (I want a second brace, but the only one that doesn't chafe my skin and actually feels comfortable to wear is the one I have now). I haven't experienced too many problems with it in terms of active oppression, beyond people not understanding that they can't push me as far physically as they can an able-bodied person, and that someone as young as me can even have joint pain.
My blood sugar issues are...harder to explain. They match up really closely to the symptoms of hypoglycemia. I need something to eat, preferably complex carbs, every two waking hours or so, or I get tired, shaky, and irritable quickly, my heart starts beating weirdly, and I get migraines. This is obviously going to be a problem in class or at work, when I can't drop everything to eat something. So I tend to stock up on things like canned V8 (if you didn't know, this is a brand of vegetable juice that tastes vaguely like gazpacho) and granola bars, and I carry them around with me so I can get my blood sugar up while walking to class or to either of my two jobs.
If you're wondering how this relates to ADHD, there's an ADHD thing called hyperfocus that sometimes causes me to focus really intensely on one specific thing, sometimes for hours at a time, to the point of forgetting to do anything else...bathing, doing my homework, taking my meds, drinking water, eating, and sleeping. This is the only time I can focus on anything I'm not genuinely excited about, and it would be so great except that it's virtually useless and it results in me having headaches, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and an unstable metabolism and blood sugar.
And while I've had issues with both, I don't feel that I've been as personally affected by ableism relating to my physical disabilities to the same extent a lot of other physically disabled people, people whose disabilities are more visible, have.
That said, this could have to do with the fact that I also don't interact with communities based around physical disability.
Why would I? They revolve around pride, and disability pride is for people who are, well, proud to be disabled. And I am proud to be disabled, just not physically disabled. After all, my pain and unstable blood sugar result from chronic illness, and being visually impaired is just an annoying pain in the ass for me but really nothing more.
But the point of this is to talk about ableism. Like...one of my teachers is Deaf, and while he doesn't wear hearing aids or Cochlear implants, you can tell he's not able-bodied much more easily than you can with me. Things like not responding to noise or needing closed captions give him away quickly. He doesn't talk or lipread, so he uses sign language to communicate - and while sign language is something that I would definitely benefit from and desperately wish I'd had a chance to learn when I was a kid, I can still hear and speak and just that has made my life a lot easier.
Or how the head of the accessibility office at my college is blind and while I didn't know this immediately when I first met her, that could be because I'm just really shitty at reading between the lines and sometimes even noticing the obvious. I just wondered why her computer screen wasn't on, and who that mysterious voice belonged to (it was just her text to speech program). But for someone who's better at these things than me, all those little details - the white cane I had ignored earlier, the talking computer, the way her colleague read all the files out loud to her, the milky eyes that I hadn't noticed because I don't look people in the eyes - immediately mark her as different.
Or my friend Nicole, who's a full time wheelchair user. You don't even have to talk to her to know she's disabled. She's hypervisible, no matter how much people try to ignore her wheelchair and pretend she's just like them - and, I admit, I've been guilty of this myself, but I'm trying to stop.
Meanwhile, the only indications I outwardly give that I'm physically disabled are the accessibility functions on my phone (which people don't usually notice because they don't use my phone), the food I carry around with me in order to regulate my blood sugar content, the way I kneed my joints in order to relieve pain, the way I hold things so closely to my face, and the brace wrapped around my knee. If people ask about these things at all, they usually just assume I'm wrapping an injury or that I'm eating something small because I'm either dieting or too busy to sit down for an actual meal. And I'm content to let them think that.
The fact that it's immediately obvious that these people are disabled means that people's reactions to their disabilities are also immediate, and that increases the likelihood that someone will act violently toward them - especially Nicole, since she's specifically a black woman in a wheelchair. And, white privilege aside, that's not something I have to worry about as much.
Next there's sexuality.
This is a complicated subject for me because, beyond being sapphic, I'm not totally sure what my sexuality even is.
And because I may or may not have a crush on a man, and thanks to my disability related traits (i.e. alexithymia, low empathy, hyperromanticism) and the fact that coercive heterosexuality is a thing, it's hard to tell what these feelings even are.
I talked to Roman about it, and I'm not going to go into detail because it was honestly the weirdest conversation I've ever had, not to mention entirely too nsfw to repeat to our resident fourteen-year-old mod as well as any other minors who might be reading this. But anyway. It thinks that this crush, we'll call him Danny, is the result of coercive heterosexuality.
And that makes sense, because while Danny doesn't look like the muscular manly-man or androgynous pretty boy types that are more common choices for coercive het crushes, he's still a decent-looking unattainable man who is nice to me and comes across as nonthreatening.
But at the same time, all of that doesn't mean I couldn't actually have feelings for him, and it also doesn't really feel like coercive het. I don't get uncomfortable around him, I actually have things that I like about him that aren't dependent on his gender, I'm genuinely happy to see him, and if our situation was different the idea of dating him would be appealing. It just feels like attraction, genuine attraction, but there's also a strong possibility that this attraction, and the man who is the object of it, simply feels safe to me. After all, realistically I'm probably never going to interact with him again after this summer.
And thanks to our age difference (Danny's in his mid-twenties) and other factors that result in a difference in power and maturity between us, I'd probably think he was a piece of shit if he actually tried to pursue a relationship with me, a more naive, barely legal woman who is still learning how to be an adult and is questioning their sexuality. Which makes things so much more complicated.
But then again...I've also had crushes on unattainable, sometimes older, women in positions of power - including straight women. A couple of my teachers, one of my managers (though the age difference in that case was only about a year). And since this (one-sided) attraction was between women, it obviously wasn't coercive het. Which means that obviously, someone being older than me and in a position of authority doesn't mean I can't be attracted to them.
And this is all just very political. Really nothing is apolitical or completely separable from privilege and oppression, I know, especially things related to gender and sexuality. And there's a reason for almost everything, but sometimes...it's just not that deep. And given that I'm generally an over-analytical hot mess, I could totally be overthinking this and not be forcing anything and the moral of the story is @Aphrodite help me.
So anyway. I'm still questioning and I definitely have a strong preference for women and would rather seek out, date, kiss, fuck, and grow old with a woman, but I do also feel like there have been a handful of men and nonwomen that I've been attracted to and that I at least have the potential to feel that way again. Like, I don't think someone being a man wouldn't be an automatic, no-holds-barred deal-breaker for me, sexually speaking, but if offered a choice between a man and woman who I found otherwise equally attractive, I would probably pick the woman.
It's like...like food, I guess, as corny and annoying as food comparison for sexuality are. Like, I'm flexitarian, which is essentially half vegetarian and half not. I don't eat beef or pork. At all. I do eat seafood and poultry, and I'd be willing to try venison once in a blue moon, but I'm generally more likely to choose vegetarian options over any kind of meat. I've been fully vegetarian in the past and I'm thinking about trying it again, but I'd rather put that decision off for now.
To lesbians, men are beef or pork: not appealing at all. To me, men are venison, women are tofu, and nonbinary people who align with both or neither are chicken, turkey, and fish.
I'm rambling, but I warned you.
TL;DR this could change and I might decide to be with women exclusively, but for right now and for simplicity's sake, the sexuality label I'm going with is bisexual.
And that, really, is a major reason I finally decided to make this post.
There are a lot of cases of lesbians and non-bi people in general overpoliticizing bi women's attraction and relationships, or reducing them to whether they're politically progressive enough, and then reduce bi women ourselves to how radical they think we are (hint: never enough) and acting as if we're just available bodies for consumption, tainted by the unholy touch of cishet dick, or submissive extensions of our partners without an identity or autonomy of our own.
Holy fuck, just let us be people. Honestly, the way men (including mlm) and non-bi people talk about bi women is so dehumanizing and disgusting. They act as if everyone gets to fetishize, scrutinize, and offer an unwanted opinion on bi women's personal lives and how we express our sexuality - except, of course, bi women ourselves.
I can admit that being in a m/w relationship can have material benefits, like being able to get married, being able to talk openly about your relationship to strangers, not being ostracized for your relationship by most religious communities, being able to openly show affection to your partner without worrying about putting yourself in danger, having your relationship affirmed by the media, being able to hide your sexuality more easily, not being fired for your relationship, and being able to introduce your partner to your family without being disowned for it, but those benefits are conditional and non-bi people don't need to be leading discussions of any privilege bisexuals gain from them.
- Bi trans women in relationships with men can't usually reap any of these benefits, especially not in comparison to non-trans women
- As a gnc bi woman, I am out all the time, regardless of my relationship status (the fact that I'm "femme-read" comes from the fact that I have a summer internship in an office and have to look the part, my only office-type clothes are feminine, and I can't usually be bothered to change after I leave)
- As a gnc, woman-aligned nonbinary bi person, I'm actually alienated from most media portrayals of women (whether straight or mga) in relationships with men, because they revolve around feminine-presenting cis women
- Because I bind, use he/they pronouns, am considering medical transition, and am occasionally read as male, there's a strong possibility that instead of reaping all that sweet, sweet unconditional straight privilege biphobic gay people seem to think I have, I'd just be mistaken for a petite, gnc gay man instead (I honestly don't mean to co-opt the struggles of actual gay men, just to point out that because I'm nonbinary, my m/w relationships will not necessarily be read as m/w)
- Also, there are bi women (both cis and not) dating men who aren't cis
- There are bi people in visibly interfaith or interracial relationships who, regardless of their partner's gender, still receive harassment based on that
- There are bi people who receive ableism-based harassment for their relationships (i.e. bi people in relationships where one person is a wheelchair user and the other isn't, or one person is a little person and the other isn't. Or like, with me and Danny, we're both at least partially nonverbal, so we would sign to communicate and if we dated, we would probably be harassed based on the fact that we would be two disabled ASL users in a relationship. Yes, that relationship is still privileged over a gay couple's, but it's also not as privileged as a relationship between two abled cishets.)
- There are polyamorous bi people who are dating people of multiple genders at once
- A lot of the interpersonal homophobia and biphobia I've experienced hasn't actually relied on me dating a woman (since I'm currently single, due to the fact that whenever I see a beautiful woman I tend to get so flustered that I literally can't talk) and therefore I can only assume that my experiences wouldn't change that much if I had a boyfriend
- Our attraction to men is much more complicated than lesbians seem to think, because of the compounded homophobia/biphobia and misogyny we face, so our experiences with relationships and sex are very different than straight women's
- this x10 for bi women of color and bi women whose boyfriends/husbands are privileged over them on axes other than misogyny and homophobia
- Stop saying anything along the lines of "bi women are available to men". We aren't sex objects, don't talk about us like we are
- Stop saying "het-partnered bi women". The "het" part compares us to straight people, it sounds way too close to bihet, and the phrasing puts our relationships before ourselves. Say "bi women in m/w relationships" or "bi women with boyfriends/husbands" instead
- Learn the difference between not caring about m/w relationships and not caring about the bisexuals who have or want them
- Also the way people talk about bi people's privilege in m/w relationships is so sexist and bimisogynistic honestly
- We are more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence, usually from men, than people of any other gender and sexuality combination, and yet people only ever talk about bi women's privilege in relationships with men...do bi men not also have privilege in relationships with women???
So m/w relationships aside, there are just a lot of other things I wanted to discuss about bimisogyny and its intersection with m/w relationships.
First of all, the word itself: bimisogyny. I only ever see mga women using it. Like...when discussing lesbians' oppression specifically and how it's different than the oppression of other sga people, you don't just say homophobia (or, at least, you shouldn't) - you say lesbophobia. Because that's what it is, and because lesbians are different than gay men.
Likewise, when talking specifically about biphobia against women, don't just say biphobia because it's not just biphobia. Biphobia is something that affects all mga people, and things like accusing bi women of being drunk, overly sexual party girls who fake our sexualities for attention, or calling us attention-seeking and entitled, or saying we're untrustworthy sluts who will only break lesbians' hearts as we run back to men, are not about all mga people. They're about mga women, girls, and woman-aligned nonbinary people. Acknowledge and respect our specific experiences by listening to us and using the terminology - including the word bimisogyny - that we ask you to use.
Also, the way lesbians talk about bi women's gender expressions, specifically our gender nonconformity, is just so disrespectful sometimes. When they're not stereotyping us as feminine (specifically submissively hyperfeminine), they're saying shit like "non-lesbian women aren't as gender nonconforming as they think they are" or assuming the only reason we would identify with butch and femme are entitlement to lesbian history - as if those terms aren't our history, as wlw, too. Or as if they wouldn't be culturally relevant to us in terms of our sense of self and gender performance in relation to our sapphic attraction, or as if the most important thing about us is our attraction to men.
Regarding butch and femme, I agree that those terms are only useful and relevant in the context of woman/woman attraction...which is exactly how I and most other bi women (outside of MOGAI and liberal feminism) use them. Stop assuming that just because I can see myself happily dating a man, I would automatically use a woman-for-woman identity (in my case, butch) in reference to a boyfriend or husband I might never even have. Stop reducing me to my m/w relationships and viewing me as an extension of my hypothetical partners. You know damn well that with any other woman, you would call that out for the misogyny it is, so it's just gross that you won't grant mga women the same courtesy.
The way I view tomcat and doe, on the other hand, is more dependent on personal identity as a wlw rather than relationships. Tomcats can exist without does, because you can be a tomcat with a boyfriend. And does can exist without tomcats, because you can be a doe with a boyfriend. But even though there are butches dating butches and femmes dating femmes, and lesbians and wlw who are neither, butch and femme are identities that cannot exist without one another.
It's sort of similar to my relationship with my hearing, and specifically HoH identity. For those of you who don't know, I have auditory processing issues relating to my autism and ADHD. Because of this, there's controversy in the d/Deaf and HoH community over whether I can or should identify as hard of hearing.
I can relate to some of the problems caused by spatial hearing loss: tinnitus, having difficulty focusing on conversations, difficulty telling where sounds are coming from, difficulty understanding people in environments where there's an echo, difficulty multitasking when sound is involved (i.e. taking notes during a lecture), difficulty concentrating on multiple sounds at once or understanding when there's background noise. I have a hard time understanding lyrics unless I see them with just the words, and I've gotten orders wrong at work because machines would always be running at the same time and I'd have to focus on both listening to customers and writing the order down.
But at the same time, it's not the same thing. I don't need hearing aids or interpreters (I use social scripts and gestures in order to get through situations where I have to talk but it's not speech is just not Working). I usually do okay without closed captions. Just...watching people who are undebatably deaf, I don't really navigate the world like they do. Like when I'm in the disability tags on Tumblr or other social media and there are d/Deaf people talking about their experiences with deafness and audism. Or when I was in class and there were two people having a conversation really loudly in the hall, and the teacher had no idea until someone got up to close the door. Or how, when Danny was in high school, he once tried to sneak out of his house and got caught because he didn't know that keys make noise. I can't relate to that.
I'd never really had to confront this weird internal conflict until my last ASL class, when we were learning how to tell people if we were deaf, hearing, or HoH. So except for our teacher and one of my classmates, everyone signed 'hearing' when asked what they were. And then I was the last one left, and I didn't totally know how to answer. I signed hearing (which is like a swirly sign in front of your mouth), just in case, and it could be the fact that I'm kind of terrible at reading body language but...he seemed kind of surprised that I didn't call myself hard of hearing.
I can relate to some of the problems caused by spatial hearing loss: tinnitus, having difficulty focusing on conversations, difficulty telling where sounds are coming from, difficulty understanding people in environments where there's an echo, difficulty multitasking when sound is involved (i.e. taking notes during a lecture), difficulty concentrating on multiple sounds at once or understanding when there's background noise. I have a hard time understanding lyrics unless I see them with just the words, and I've gotten orders wrong at work because machines would always be running at the same time and I'd have to focus on both listening to customers and writing the order down.
But at the same time, it's not the same thing. I don't need hearing aids or interpreters (I use social scripts and gestures in order to get through situations where I have to talk but it's not speech is just not Working). I usually do okay without closed captions. Just...watching people who are undebatably deaf, I don't really navigate the world like they do. Like when I'm in the disability tags on Tumblr or other social media and there are d/Deaf people talking about their experiences with deafness and audism. Or when I was in class and there were two people having a conversation really loudly in the hall, and the teacher had no idea until someone got up to close the door. Or how, when Danny was in high school, he once tried to sneak out of his house and got caught because he didn't know that keys make noise. I can't relate to that.
I'd never really had to confront this weird internal conflict until my last ASL class, when we were learning how to tell people if we were deaf, hearing, or HoH. So except for our teacher and one of my classmates, everyone signed 'hearing' when asked what they were. And then I was the last one left, and I didn't totally know how to answer. I signed hearing (which is like a swirly sign in front of your mouth), just in case, and it could be the fact that I'm kind of terrible at reading body language but...he seemed kind of surprised that I didn't call myself hard of hearing.
The way I reconcile the whole thing is that I don't consider myself hearing, but I also don't ordinarily identify as HoH or d/Deaf, because I don't want to intrude on that community and appropriate a word that doesn't belong to me. However, in disability justice circles where people like me are considered HoH or part of that community, that's what I call myself.
I make this comparison because, just like butch, I only call myself hard of hearing in contexts where it's relevant for me to do so. However, if you don't want non-lesbians identifying as butch/femme, you'd damn well better feel just as strongly about non-mga women not identifying as tomcats, stags, and does.
As for the "non-lesbians (read: bi women, because it was just really blatantly about bi women) aren't as gnc as they think they are" bullshit, that's a comment I'm actually directly quoting from a specific lesbian and an attitude I've seen from countless others.
And it's bullshit for multiple reasons:
I make this comparison because, just like butch, I only call myself hard of hearing in contexts where it's relevant for me to do so. However, if you don't want non-lesbians identifying as butch/femme, you'd damn well better feel just as strongly about non-mga women not identifying as tomcats, stags, and does.
As for the "non-lesbians (read: bi women, because it was just really blatantly about bi women) aren't as gnc as they think they are" bullshit, that's a comment I'm actually directly quoting from a specific lesbian and an attitude I've seen from countless others.
And it's bullshit for multiple reasons:
- Appearing visibly gender nonconforming is...actually a pretty important part of being gnc and experiencing prejudice as a gnc person for a lot of us like sorry to break it to you but when butchphobes are talking shit about me they're generally not making absolutely sure I'm not bisexual first
- Lesbians' opinions on bisexuality and bi women's gender nonconformity are Unnecessary, and yet they still feel some strange need to share them - even at the expense of actual gnc bi women and without giving a fuck about our perspectives.
- Will they stay in their lane??? We just don't know
- Implying that bi women can't be gender nonconforming, that we can't accurately judge our own gender expressions, or that we "exist within acceptable womanhood" more so than lesbians is bimisogynistic and frames us as confused and submissive
- A bi woman would be eaten alive, and rightfully so, by lesbians, mga women, and wlw who are neither if she said anything similar about lesbians - and I expect that same show of solidarity when it comes to fighting bimisogyny, both lateral and not
- It's also transphobic, because there are cis lesbians and nonbinary/trans bi women and because if you tell me, a nonbinary person, that I'm "not as gender nonconforming as I think I am" then your shit is clearly coming out your mouth instead of your ass
Speaking of transphobia, let's talk about that.
I can recognize that because I'm a woman-aligned nonbinary person who isn't transfeminine, I have some conditional privilege over trans women. I'm more easily able to pass as cis than most trans men and women, for starters, and therefore less likely to receive street harassment, to be physically attacked, or to face healthcare discrimination for being trans.
But that's mostly because I'm not transfeminine, and most trans people aren't...yet people are so much more quick to make assumptions about the experiences of TME (transmisogyny-exempt) trans people who are woman-aligned and to dismiss us.
You ever hear an anti-sjw or truscum mock nonbinary people? The first ones they'll mention are demigirls and afab genderfluid/multigender people who are partially women. Or they'll use misogynistic insults like 'tumblrina' in order to make fun of nonbinary people. Our experiences are constantly scrutinized, we're expected even by other trans/nonbinary people to prove how trans we are. Do you bind? What are your pronouns? Have you changed your name? Are you really just a cis girl with internalized misogyny? Do you have any agency and ability to determine your own life and judge your own experiences and identity?
That's one reason I'll probably never be as out as I want to be. And while the closet can be a shield, it sometimes feels more like a chokehold.
I did make two other posts about my experiences with transphobia, both from other trans people and from cis people, and if you could read them that would be great, since I have basically no energy right now.
But that's mostly because I'm not transfeminine, and most trans people aren't...yet people are so much more quick to make assumptions about the experiences of TME (transmisogyny-exempt) trans people who are woman-aligned and to dismiss us.
You ever hear an anti-sjw or truscum mock nonbinary people? The first ones they'll mention are demigirls and afab genderfluid/multigender people who are partially women. Or they'll use misogynistic insults like 'tumblrina' in order to make fun of nonbinary people. Our experiences are constantly scrutinized, we're expected even by other trans/nonbinary people to prove how trans we are. Do you bind? What are your pronouns? Have you changed your name? Are you really just a cis girl with internalized misogyny? Do you have any agency and ability to determine your own life and judge your own experiences and identity?
That's one reason I'll probably never be as out as I want to be. And while the closet can be a shield, it sometimes feels more like a chokehold.
I did make two other posts about my experiences with transphobia, both from other trans people and from cis people, and if you could read them that would be great, since I have basically no energy right now.
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