Fucking...even when I was at my worst in MOGAI hell, I never believed in that shit.
But, of course, when I was at my worst in MOGAI hell, I was still just a seventeen-year-old trans kid with a boatload of internalized homophobia, some mental issues relating to attraction, and a giant, unrequited, should-have-been-painfully-obvious crush on an ace girl who I just wanted to please. And I've changed since then. Not that any of this excuses my past words and actions, of course.
I wasn't, you know, a grown-ass twenty-something cis aroace homophobe who compares trans people to TERFs and thinks she gets to kick actual LGBT people out of our own community for telling her she doesn't belong in it. No, that would be Ettina.
Here's my response to this...this absolute headache of a woman and her ridiculous blog post.
First of all, Franklin Veaux's definition of privilege is way too vague. Privilege isn't just "unearned benefits"; if it were, tall privilege would exist because tall people have the unearned benefit of always being able to reach the top shelf. Or, I don't know, something equally as ridiculous like extrovert privilege or right-handed privilege.
I mean, Ettina probably believes in all of those too so....
Here's what oppression ACTUALLY is: systemic, long-term social, institutional, and political bias and marginalization against a coherent class of people.
This bias must be widespread, affect politics and people's daily lives, and result in material obstacles against members of this aforementioned social class, such as bigoted laws, hate crimes, medical abuse, housing discrimination, social ostracization, hate groups, and employment discrimination. This bias also must yield social, economic, and political benefits, called privilege, to people not affected by it.
Transphobia, homophobia, ableism, racism, misogyny, classism, intersexism, and (in the west) Christian hegemony are all examples of oppression. Aphobia and singlism are not, because LGBT people don't benefit from them, whether we're single or "allo" or both or neither.
That should explain everything. But I have a feeling it won't. So I'll continue.
Ettina says next that gay couples have been fighting for marriage for so long because it comes with a long list of legal benefits. Which is...kind of true but, the fact that Ettina really needs to shut up about gay people aside, there's two things she's not considering:
1. Our need for those legal benefits comes from a long history of oppression. In America, the fight for gay marriage has roots in bar raids and the AIDS crisis.
When LGBT people were unjustly arrested and imprisoned during bar raids, their partners could be forced to testify against them because they weren't married. When gay men were in the hospital with AIDS, their boyfriends couldn't visit them because they weren't married. When gay people died, whether from homophobia-related causes or not, their bodies were turned over to their homophobic families and their partners could be banned from the funeral - something that took an even heavier toll on trans people, since it almost always meant that they would be buried under their deadnames, given eulogies that talked about them as a gender they weren't, and shown them at their wakes in clothing they never would have worn when they were alive.
Those things don't affect cishets, whether ace, aro, or neither, the same way because their relationships are seen as loving, real, and important whether they are married or not. A non-LGBT person's primary partner, even if that partner is ~kweerplatonic~, will likely be able to access them when they need to - even if the two aren't married.
2. We can't always access the benefits of (man/woman) marriage even if we are married.
Imagine me, five or ten or fifteen years down the road with my wife. We're trying to rent an apartment together - and are denied a lease because we're a gay couple.
Or maybe we move into a new neighborhood and have neighbors preaching at us about what horrible, hellbound sinners we are. Maybe our house or apartment gets vandalized.
Maybe we adopt a kid together, and our kid gets bullied for having two moms. Maybe we get banned from participating in school activities because suburban straight white mom Karen with the I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager haircut complained to the PTA about how she doesn't want her little Jimmy being exposed to such depravity.
Maybe one of us gets fired for saying "my wife" in conversation with a coworker. Maybe we can't go to family reunions together - god knows my cousins aren't going to want their future kids to see two women happily married, especially when at least one of them isn't cis. Maybe we get ostracized at our house(s) of worship for showing up together. Maybe we can't even kiss in public without worrying that someone is going to get angry and shoot up a gay nightclub because they saw us. Maybe we get followed home for holding hands. Maybe our families won't even come to our wedding. Maybe every little flaw we have, every argument, every mistake we make, is exploited by straight people and used against us to say that we don't belong together and should have just married men like everyone wanted in the first place.
And even if that doesn't happen, we'll still be outing ourselves every time we actually try to access those benefits. That means we'll be at the mercy of the (presumably straight) people who are providing them for us, and we'll have no idea how accepting they are. Some of those straight people have the power to hurt us and we won't necessarily be able to stop them.
"Only recently did Canada allow a mother's best friend to undergo a second-parent adoption."
You know who that would mostly affect, for the majority of Canada's history? Sapphic couples.
It wasn't until 2005 that sapphic Canadian couples could even get married, and if a lesbian or bisexual woman doesn't WANT to get married, it would have affected her even after gay marriage was legalized there. The same wouldn't apply to straight women who wanted their boyfriends or male friends to co-parent with them.
Not to mention polyamorous sapphic women, aromantic sapphic women, or sapphic women trapped in relationships with men but still finding ways to date women anyway.
If it affects straight or aroace women (which it doesn't to the same extent), I don't really care honestly unless they're trans or nonbinary. Sorry.
"Speaking of gay couples, next, they bring up how many of these couple's privileges aren't available to non-heterosexual couples. I'll acknowledge that point, although I'd argue it soon won't be true anymore."
I promise, it will still be true. Sorry, Ettina, but gay and lesbian couples won't ever be able to oppress you.
"Just because a certain set of privileges isn't afforded to everyone of a certain identity doesn't mean that identity isn't privileged. After all, trans people can be straight, but they certainly don't access straight privilege."
One, a cis person is in no way qualified to talk about this.
Two, straight people who aren't cis can still conditionally access straight privilege. They can access it when they are able to pass as cis, which I admit is generally the only way they can access it over cis LGB people.
But even before then, they still have privilege over trans/NB people who are also LGB. A straight trans man is often going to have an easier time getting a referral for HRT than a gay trans man. A straight nonbinary woman who otherwise expresses their gender similarly to how I do - same pronouns, same clothing taste, same desires when it comes to social and medical transition - is still going to be less likely than I am to face job discrimination and will generally have an easier time navigating their material reality than I do.
Now let's apply that analogy to couple privilege. Straight trans/NB people are to SGA people as SGA people are to heteronis without cheese.
In this analogy, straight trans/NB people still DO have some privilege over cis LGB people. They also have privilege over LGB trans/NB people.
Gay and lesbian couples don't have privilege over single straight or aroace people, obviously. They also don't have privilege over me, and when I have a girlfriend I won't have privilege over single LGB people either. If I get a boyfriend, our relationship would be privileged over an SGA one, but that's not couple privilege.
If couple privilege existed the way Ettina thinks it does, SGA people in monogamous relationships would still be able to oppress single and polyamorous SGA people. But the reality is that they can't.
Straight people in monogamous relationships can't oppress straight people who aren't, either. This especially applies to disabled people, women, trans people, intersex people, people of color, undocumented people, and religious minorities.
Which means that "couple privilege", much like "allo privilege", is almost entirely exclusively accessed by abled, dyadic, cishet, white Christian men - who already had privilege over the entire goddamn world anyway and whose "couple privilege" (and "allo privilege") is actually just an amalgamation of the privileges they have that actually, you know, matter and exist.
So after all of this I decided to check out the article Ettina references. It's excellent, by the way. It's called "Five Reasons Couple Privilege Doesn't Exist" and the author, Lola Phoenix, is a nonbinary bisexual person who constantly notes their own experiences and those of their lesbian mother throughout their article. I definitely recommend Googling it because it, unlike the trash that Ettina writes, is actually worth looking up and reading.
But, of course, when I was at my worst in MOGAI hell, I was still just a seventeen-year-old trans kid with a boatload of internalized homophobia, some mental issues relating to attraction, and a giant, unrequited, should-have-been-painfully-obvious crush on an ace girl who I just wanted to please. And I've changed since then. Not that any of this excuses my past words and actions, of course.
I wasn't, you know, a grown-ass twenty-something cis aroace homophobe who compares trans people to TERFs and thinks she gets to kick actual LGBT people out of our own community for telling her she doesn't belong in it. No, that would be Ettina.
Here's my response to this...this absolute headache of a woman and her ridiculous blog post.
First of all, Franklin Veaux's definition of privilege is way too vague. Privilege isn't just "unearned benefits"; if it were, tall privilege would exist because tall people have the unearned benefit of always being able to reach the top shelf. Or, I don't know, something equally as ridiculous like extrovert privilege or right-handed privilege.
I mean, Ettina probably believes in all of those too so....
Here's what oppression ACTUALLY is: systemic, long-term social, institutional, and political bias and marginalization against a coherent class of people.
This bias must be widespread, affect politics and people's daily lives, and result in material obstacles against members of this aforementioned social class, such as bigoted laws, hate crimes, medical abuse, housing discrimination, social ostracization, hate groups, and employment discrimination. This bias also must yield social, economic, and political benefits, called privilege, to people not affected by it.
Transphobia, homophobia, ableism, racism, misogyny, classism, intersexism, and (in the west) Christian hegemony are all examples of oppression. Aphobia and singlism are not, because LGBT people don't benefit from them, whether we're single or "allo" or both or neither.
That should explain everything. But I have a feeling it won't. So I'll continue.
Ettina says next that gay couples have been fighting for marriage for so long because it comes with a long list of legal benefits. Which is...kind of true but, the fact that Ettina really needs to shut up about gay people aside, there's two things she's not considering:
1. Our need for those legal benefits comes from a long history of oppression. In America, the fight for gay marriage has roots in bar raids and the AIDS crisis.
When LGBT people were unjustly arrested and imprisoned during bar raids, their partners could be forced to testify against them because they weren't married. When gay men were in the hospital with AIDS, their boyfriends couldn't visit them because they weren't married. When gay people died, whether from homophobia-related causes or not, their bodies were turned over to their homophobic families and their partners could be banned from the funeral - something that took an even heavier toll on trans people, since it almost always meant that they would be buried under their deadnames, given eulogies that talked about them as a gender they weren't, and shown them at their wakes in clothing they never would have worn when they were alive.
Those things don't affect cishets, whether ace, aro, or neither, the same way because their relationships are seen as loving, real, and important whether they are married or not. A non-LGBT person's primary partner, even if that partner is ~kweerplatonic~, will likely be able to access them when they need to - even if the two aren't married.
2. We can't always access the benefits of (man/woman) marriage even if we are married.
Imagine me, five or ten or fifteen years down the road with my wife. We're trying to rent an apartment together - and are denied a lease because we're a gay couple.
Or maybe we move into a new neighborhood and have neighbors preaching at us about what horrible, hellbound sinners we are. Maybe our house or apartment gets vandalized.
Maybe we adopt a kid together, and our kid gets bullied for having two moms. Maybe we get banned from participating in school activities because suburban straight white mom Karen with the I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager haircut complained to the PTA about how she doesn't want her little Jimmy being exposed to such depravity.
Maybe one of us gets fired for saying "my wife" in conversation with a coworker. Maybe we can't go to family reunions together - god knows my cousins aren't going to want their future kids to see two women happily married, especially when at least one of them isn't cis. Maybe we get ostracized at our house(s) of worship for showing up together. Maybe we can't even kiss in public without worrying that someone is going to get angry and shoot up a gay nightclub because they saw us. Maybe we get followed home for holding hands. Maybe our families won't even come to our wedding. Maybe every little flaw we have, every argument, every mistake we make, is exploited by straight people and used against us to say that we don't belong together and should have just married men like everyone wanted in the first place.
And even if that doesn't happen, we'll still be outing ourselves every time we actually try to access those benefits. That means we'll be at the mercy of the (presumably straight) people who are providing them for us, and we'll have no idea how accepting they are. Some of those straight people have the power to hurt us and we won't necessarily be able to stop them.
"Only recently did Canada allow a mother's best friend to undergo a second-parent adoption."
You know who that would mostly affect, for the majority of Canada's history? Sapphic couples.
It wasn't until 2005 that sapphic Canadian couples could even get married, and if a lesbian or bisexual woman doesn't WANT to get married, it would have affected her even after gay marriage was legalized there. The same wouldn't apply to straight women who wanted their boyfriends or male friends to co-parent with them.
Not to mention polyamorous sapphic women, aromantic sapphic women, or sapphic women trapped in relationships with men but still finding ways to date women anyway.
If it affects straight or aroace women (which it doesn't to the same extent), I don't really care honestly unless they're trans or nonbinary. Sorry.
"Speaking of gay couples, next, they bring up how many of these couple's privileges aren't available to non-heterosexual couples. I'll acknowledge that point, although I'd argue it soon won't be true anymore."
I promise, it will still be true. Sorry, Ettina, but gay and lesbian couples won't ever be able to oppress you.
"Just because a certain set of privileges isn't afforded to everyone of a certain identity doesn't mean that identity isn't privileged. After all, trans people can be straight, but they certainly don't access straight privilege."
One, a cis person is in no way qualified to talk about this.
Two, straight people who aren't cis can still conditionally access straight privilege. They can access it when they are able to pass as cis, which I admit is generally the only way they can access it over cis LGB people.
But even before then, they still have privilege over trans/NB people who are also LGB. A straight trans man is often going to have an easier time getting a referral for HRT than a gay trans man. A straight nonbinary woman who otherwise expresses their gender similarly to how I do - same pronouns, same clothing taste, same desires when it comes to social and medical transition - is still going to be less likely than I am to face job discrimination and will generally have an easier time navigating their material reality than I do.
Now let's apply that analogy to couple privilege. Straight trans/NB people are to SGA people as SGA people are to heteronis without cheese.
In this analogy, straight trans/NB people still DO have some privilege over cis LGB people. They also have privilege over LGB trans/NB people.
Gay and lesbian couples don't have privilege over single straight or aroace people, obviously. They also don't have privilege over me, and when I have a girlfriend I won't have privilege over single LGB people either. If I get a boyfriend, our relationship would be privileged over an SGA one, but that's not couple privilege.
If couple privilege existed the way Ettina thinks it does, SGA people in monogamous relationships would still be able to oppress single and polyamorous SGA people. But the reality is that they can't.
Straight people in monogamous relationships can't oppress straight people who aren't, either. This especially applies to disabled people, women, trans people, intersex people, people of color, undocumented people, and religious minorities.
Which means that "couple privilege", much like "allo privilege", is almost entirely exclusively accessed by abled, dyadic, cishet, white Christian men - who already had privilege over the entire goddamn world anyway and whose "couple privilege" (and "allo privilege") is actually just an amalgamation of the privileges they have that actually, you know, matter and exist.
So after all of this I decided to check out the article Ettina references. It's excellent, by the way. It's called "Five Reasons Couple Privilege Doesn't Exist" and the author, Lola Phoenix, is a nonbinary bisexual person who constantly notes their own experiences and those of their lesbian mother throughout their article. I definitely recommend Googling it because it, unlike the trash that Ettina writes, is actually worth looking up and reading.
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