It's all kicking off at the just-opened Vancouver Women's Library. What's the problem? Well, trans activists GAG (Gays Against Gentrification) turned up to disrupt proceedings and demand the banning of certain books because…

…all of the organizers have been linked to an organization that does not support trans women, active drug users, or active sex workers and collectives that call for the exclusion of trans women and femmes, abolition of sex workers rights, and that center a feminism that excludes anyone who is not white, cisgender, or doesn’t fit into western constructs of womanhood.

Cis white women are the beneficiaries of white supremacy. People who are the most affected by police brutality, settler colonialism, racialized violence, incarceration, gentrification, sexual violence, ableism and houselessness can and should be the people creating safer spaces for those most impacted by these experiences.

…The same ideology and praxis of hate is present and replicated in right-wing/alt-right/neo-nazi organizing. TERFs and SWERFs organize for the same violent policies and work in partnership with right-wing hate groups to replicate settler-colonial white-supremacist constructions of cisheteropatrarchy that outright reject, erase, and deny IBPOC sovereignty, body sovereignty, and all peoples that do not fit under euro-centric nativism…The moniker ‘self-identified’ is used by cis women as a move to innocence from their complicity in violence against trans women. It is used to mark trans women as ‘Other’ and centre themselves again as victims of patriarchy. This will not stand.

Ophelia B at Butterflies and Wheels has all the details.

Posted in

6 responses to “Settler-colonial white-supremacist constructions of cisheteropatriarchy”

  1. TDK Avatar
    TDK

    I have to say. Orphelia writes “You can see how dishonest it is. It’s Trump-level dishonest.” but the text it relates to is standard left wing boiler plate about exclusion with nothing to distinguish it from other assertion-heavy left wing boiler plate that you see daily in the Guardian.
    Hoisted by their own petard.

    Like

  2. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Well yes – she’s saying it’s Trump-level dishonest because it’s startlingly, brazenly dishonest, not because it’s anything whatsoever to do with Trump.
    It’s left-wing boilerplate, if you like, but of a very specific and unpleasant kind: Trans activists attacking feminists, and demanding certain feminist books get removed, but claiming to be acting from a progressive agenda against “cisheteropatriarchy” and all the rest of that wretched gender-politics-speak.

    Like

  3. Graham Avatar
    Graham

    ‘cis… TERF… SWERF… IBPOC..’ – On a psychological level, isn’t the impulse to constantly coin all these acronyms a sign of supremacism and separatism? If you understand/use this jargon you’re one of us – one of the good people; if not, you’re ‘other’? Isn’t it also rather insecure and childish?

    Like

  4. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Yes, it is.

    Like

  5. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    Americans think of Canada as our saner more civilized mirror image. All that changed when Justin Trudeau was elected. Now there seems to be a single-purpose internet cable connecting the countries and every piece of insanity that starts here ends up there magnified by 10 or so. Cisheteropatriarchy. Jesus Christ!
    I miss the old days when we told jokes like Mount Rushmore from the Canadian side:
    http://www.theroamingboomers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Mt.-Rushmore-Canadian-Side.jpg

    Like

  6. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    That’s funny.

    Like

Leave a reply to Mick H Cancel reply