You don't need anything from me in order to be different from me. You can simply be you, and leave me to either notice or not notice, care or not care.

But if you feel the need to explain that you aren't ashamed of this difference, that you don't consider this difference an inferiority, and that you would not wish this difference away even if you could, then you may feel the need to tell me that not only are you different from me, you are glad of it. That you would not want to be like me.

Interestingly, one experience that might provoke you into doing that is me telling you that am glad I am not like you.

"It's not the same", a primal part of me rushes to shout. "There were always a whole bunch of you, defining yourselves as normal, and singling me out as the one that the rest of you were glad you didn't resemble."

That's true enough, but put a pin in it for a moment. (I won't forget that aspect of things, I assure you. I just want to focus on something else today).

Is it only sheer weight of numbers that makes our situations different? Is your reaction to my difference otherwise equivalent to my reaction to yours?

There, too, I tend to rush forward to say that you folks who are in the majority are fearful and easily threatened by difference, your defensiveness making it get all hostile. And that, too, makes our situation different.

But I need to be honest. I disapproved of you, growing up. I felt superior to you. I definitely thought you folks were doing it all wrong. Your hostility may have made me emphasize how much I didn't want to be like you, but I was already partway there before I fully noticed that. And if I'd been a lot more plural -- that is, if there had been a whole bunch of people like me, people I could compare notes with and discuss you folks and your behaviors and antics and your way of being in the world -- we might have solidifed each others' contempt for how you are. For how wrong you are.

Oh, is this news to you? It really never occurred to you that marginalized folks like me were rolling our eyes at you not just for your unfair and oppressive practices, and not just for going around acting like your identity and personality and behavior are good and praiseworthy and ours is not, ...but that we find your difference from us to be creepy and repulsive and pathetic and disgusting? Okay, we mostly don't give voice to that because we mostly had a lot more reason to outgrown that kind of provincial narrowness. Unlike you, we were in a situation that prompted us, at least most of us, to think a lot about fairness and equality and being careful and thoughtful about passing judgment on folks and their perceived differences. About hating on difference for its own sake.

Well, true confession time, then. I have a better understanding of your hostile xenophobia hatred than I tend to let on. That. Does. NOT. Make it. Okay. If you try to draw that conclusion, I'm going to stick you with something sharper and meaner than a pin.

But what it does do is encourage us to set aside the notion that all such oppressive and hateful behavior originates in a desire to be oppressive and hateful, which would leave you and your majoritarian kind utterly incomprehensible to us who have been shoved to the social margins. It actually opens the door on the possibility of forgiveness. If there's understanding, if you get it, if things click into place for you and you see us and see how wrong this adversarial difference-hating is, then yeah, for me at any rate forgiveness is in the works.


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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir.Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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Once upon a time there was a culture, and as you might expect, the people in that culture held beliefs about how life was for them.

The predominant notion, the one held by the mainstream of people, was that relationships were sort of like parallel lines, moving in the same direction, although that direction might change from time to time; there would be some zigs and some zags, but the lines never touched, and were not supposed to.

Something like this, if you were to draw it like a diagram:



This is fundamental to our culture, they said; this is the floor upon which everything else resides, so this is important!




Well, there were people who interacted differently, and experienced matters differently, and they were considered by the mainstream to be doing something they were not supposed to. These folks spoke with each other about their own experience and discarded the predominant notion, and formulated their own beliefs about how life actually was.

Relationships were actually like cells, and all cells touched adjoining cells and there was nothing akin to the untouching parallel paths that the mainstream folks liked to describe.

They began drawing this symbol and wearing it on their t shirts and putting it on flags that they carried at their rallies:



"What's WRONG with the mainsteam people?", some of them asked each other. "Why do they insist that reality is something it so obviously is not? We have shown them, we have pointed, and still they deny the absolute truth of the touching cells -- why?"

"Oh, they do it specifically because they hate us", came the answer. "It's a lie, since the truth is plain to see. The purpose of the lie is to have an excuse to condemn us!"

And in mutual support and solidarity, they embraced the understanding they had as the foundation of liberty and equality and all possibility of peace, so that lies like this could not bring them down again.




Then one day some other people who also interacted with a different pattern than the one prescribed by the predominant culture spoke up and said "Actually we do have the lines. We also have cells but for us the cells don't touch each other. They're separated by lines. We think you've got it a bit wrong. It's really more like this:



And the touching-cell activists frowned in disapproval of these new dissidents. "We support you for being hated on and attacked by the dominant culture group, but you really need to listen. You are falling into their trap by believing in separation. Your model would leave cells so that they don't adjoin each other and that is the real essence of what is bad about the mainsteam insistence on parallel lines that never touch. So you need to get over that, okay?"

Meanwhile, the mainsteam folks were quick to condemn the new dissidents the same way they had done for the touching-cell folks, because they were all threats to the essential doctrine of separate parallel lines. It was okay to zig and zag but not to touch!

Pretty quickly the new dissidents got mad and began saying that the touching-cell folks were lying and were full of hate, because the baseline truth was right there in plain sight if one cared to look, and this intolerance could not be excused just because the touching-cell movement people considered themselves outcasts and therefore social victims of the mainsteam.



This is, of course, a metaphor, and you probably already anticipate the visual punch line:




Before you say "Yeah yeah, blind men and elephants, etcetera, and 'why can't we all just get along' thrown in at the end, seen it and heard it before", the point is actually not so much "Gee why can't we just get along", nor is it "let everyone have their own reality and don't condemn anybody else", really. The point I'd like you to take back from this is that things look differently based on how the light falls on them and the angle from which one views things, but if, instead of contradicting what someone else is seeing, you get them to start there and move their eyes far enough to see how the other interpretation can be perceived as part of the same overall pattern -- then you have a chance of communicating.


And yeah, I had specific groups in mind. Of course I did. The mainstream view is the cisgender heterosexual patriarchal floor plan. The touching-cell folks are the second wave radical feminists. The new dissidents are the gender identity activists, including trans and genderqueer and nonbinary people.

I don't care who you are, quit holding on to the notion that in order for you to be right, they have to be wrong. Quit using their hate and intolerance as a reason for ignoring their perspective. Of course hate and intolerance is wrong, and of course their insistence that your truth is wrong is, itself, wrong. But be leery of the possibility that their hatefulness and their refusal to listen to you is being mirrored in your own behaviors.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.

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I say I'm not a socialist; I'm less than enthused when you want our group to affirm in one of its planks that we are.

You say, "I'm surprised and disappointed, Allan". You say, "I really would have thought that you'd be on the side of the poor and the working class. That you'd see that the system is rigged against them, unfairly. I never knew you were a friend of the bankers and corporations and such an ally to the rich and powerful. But seriously, you think capitalism is fair and that people get what they deserve in the free market?"

So we need to have a conversation.




A lot of my friends and associates in the Green Party, among feminists, and within the LGBTQIA+ community, when they say "socialist", mostly mean "Gee, capitalism is unfair, most of the people doing the work don't get the benefits, and it's set up that way, and I'm against all that" and so on.

But would you consider yourself a radical feminist for thinking, "Gee, it's a man's world and it's unfair to women"? Radical feminism is more than just that, there's an attempt to get a handle on why, and how it works and what to do about it and how it should be instead. Socialism, as I think of it, is that way too. It contains a theory of what the oppression and exploitation is, and why it exists; it identifies causes and mechanisms of power and inequality, it defines relationships between categories of people. It diagnoses the problem and it proposes a solution.

Radical feminism says that it all started with sex and reproduction, that sexual inequality arose between the male and female people of our species -- that it wasn't inevitable or natural, and doesn't have to be that way, but somehow became that way, a male supremacy system where men had power over women, and that later that inequality became a blueprint for disempowering and oppressing other categories of people.

Socialism says that it all started with property and control of the means of production, that wealth inequality arose between those who owned or controlled the land (and, later, other means of production, e.g. factories etc) and those who did the labor. In the era when Marx formulated his theories, it was radical to insist that it wasn't inevitable or natural to have a nobility and a working class. Socialism says it doesn't have to be that way, but it became that way, and that fundamental inequality became a blueprint for disempowering and oppressing other categories of people as well.

I hope that when stated that way, you can see that all the intersectionality in the world still leaves us with a disagreement between these theories. They can both be right about the oppression of the working class and the oppression of women, and about how one form of oppression can be mirrored in how yet another category of people get oppressed. But they can't so easily both be right about their sense of where the root of the problem lies. And it goes deeper, as roots tend to.



Radical feminism, or at least most of it, does not posit that male people are inherently the enemy of equality or that they represent a permanent threat of oppression. But socialism specifically fingers the ruling class, the wealthy oligarchs, the wealthy, as inherently oppressors. The social construction of their class directly depends on exploitation and oppression of the majority, and their very existence, along with the system that enshrines them, are the reason the problem exists in the first place.

Part of the difference is due to the realness of biological sexual dimorphism and the artificiality of class. There is the sense that the ruling class are who they are because of their behaviors, because of their participation in the system that rewards them and exploits the others. In contrast, in a radical feminist context, while the same case can be made that male people are responsible for their participation in patriarchy, we assume they would still be male whether they participated or they didn't, collectively and individually.

Socialism points a finger. "Those people", it says, identifying the ruling class, the rich owners of the means of production, "it is their fault, they are the reason capitalism exists and they are the force that perpetuates it".

Radical feminism, despite its (un)popular image as a hateful indictment of men, actually is a lot more nuanced. Most radical feminist theory recognizes that if male dominance isn't built-in biological as part of nature, it has to be explained; something besides maleness needs to have caused it and to be responsible for the problem.

So socialism has a central adversarial streak. It has culprits in a way that radical feminism does not. Radical feminists may state that males benefit from patriarchy, and have a tendency to support the patriarchy in their behaviors because of how they perceive their personal interests, but they also tend to state that feminism will be of benefit to everyone, not just women, whether men realize it or not.

This makes a significant difference to me. There is an undertone of hate and blame, of culprit-blaming and resentment, in socialism. I find it detrimental, conservative, politically cancerous.



Socialist thought contains an inconsistency in how class is viewed. Historically, Marxist thought on the relationship between classes and individuals who were of those classes held that people's identities and interests are shaped by their class. As one of the original prototypes of what became the field of Sociology, this theory tended to treat individuals as blank slates. As I said before, it was radical for its time to posit that the built-in nature of people did not differ, that we were all the same at heart, and that only our social conditions turned us into lords of the manor or peasants of the field. And the classic finger-pointing was actually aimed at the class of people, the ruling class, and not the individual people who comprise it. So it isn't entirely fair on my part to say that socialism hates individual wealthy people and blames them as culprits, as in the formal sense it doesn't, it views all individuals as puppets of their upbringing and social status. But while you can have a revolution against a class of people, when you line them up against the wall you still end up dealing with individual people.

In order to explain how the masses of people are kept from always already being in a state of revolution against the minority of wealthy bourgeois ruling class, Marxism, and the socialist thought that built upon it, speaks of false conscousness and class consciousness. But when you start off with individuals painted as blank slates whose consciousness is caused by their class membership and social situation, there isn't much room to examine the process of perceiving, realizing, knowing. Or of being misled, fooled, deluded into believing the ruling class's ideologies and propaganda about proper place and capitalism as a meritocracy and so forth. Socialist consideration of consciousness, identity, and social participation is clumsy and limited.

Radical feminism's view of the individual isn't a blank slate model. There is a strong thread of thought within radical feminism that revalorizes emotional cognitive processing, both as a critique of patriarchal worship of emotionally detached logic and reason, and as a key to intuition, seeing past what has been taught, seeing through even an omnipresent social ideology.

It's inherently better at not collapsing the individual person into their membership in a category, and to see all the categories and all social structures as participatory behaviors of individuals, not as things in themselves.

The socialist will often consider the individual person who has privileges within the oppressive world and think to themselves, "This person has the power to stop the oppression but doesn't". Or they may not merely think this to themselves but say it loudly, while pointing the finger.

It isn't like that. Power, first off, isn't what the world tends to think it is. What patriarchal ideology says that it is. Power over other people isn't a substance that the powerful possess, the way one possesses a candy bar. Power is a social relationship. It is defined within social structure, and, within that structure, the powerful are as thoroughly defined by it as the powerless. Radical feminism shows us that all structures are dances, verbs, processes that individuals engage in, and do not have genuine existence as nouns outside of that. But one individual, one dancer, can't use the power defined for that position to do completely other things with it. One can occasionally abdicate, but in leaving the dance floor one leaves behind the power; one does not get much opportunity to weild that power to stop the dance. It just doesn't work that way.

There is power to effect change, and it lies in communication. To modify the dance, one must engage with the other dancers and compare notes and change behaviors, and there are ways in which the privileges and opportunities of the powerful do make some actions possible at the individual level that are not available to the less privileged, but to far lesser and more intricately nuanced degree than implied by the socialist's glare.




The socialist shows up at the meeting with a military bearing, serious and ready to engage in the struggle, committed to the cause, deliberately dangerous to the oppressors and adversaries, and prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to triumph in the revolution. It's an attitude, a way of framing the approach. Sometimes you can almost see the olive drab fatigues and the cartridge belt.

View it from a radical feminist perspective. It's hard to get more masculine than military. The adversarial oppositional approach, the erasure of sensitivity in favor of blunt realpolitik, the sacrificing of gentle inclinations, the cessation of patience and flexibility in favor of demands and the undercurrent of threat.

Communication, as I said, is power, the real power to change things. One communicates by being open, sharing, listening, caring, merging one's perceptions with another's. We are all socially situated and none of us had more than a peripheral range of choice in picking our social situation. Blame has no useful role, and picking fights with the other dancers in the dance won't often increase the likelihood of listening and learning. Anger has a valid role in communication but it needs to be accompanied by compassion.



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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in late 2021. Stay tuned for further details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

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A lot of people appear to think it's a radical critique of our society to stare at the unfairness of inequality and resent the privileged few who undeservedly sit in power.

It isn't.

Many people go beyond hating the unnecessary division into winners and losers and get really irate about how the privileged ones don't play fairly even by the rules that already give them a ridiculous number of official advantages. And they seem to believe they're speaking truth to power when they say so.

They aren't.

We once may have had a social system where everyone believed their social status was fairly doled out to them by God or fate, and that we were all in the position we were supposed to be and deserved to be, but that was replaced quite some time ago.

It turned out to be more efficient to have the have-nots and marginalized people glaring at the entitled and saying to themselves and their neighbors, "Those people have done nothing to deserve their position. Why should it be them? I think it should far more righteously be someone like me sitting there all cushy and comfortable".

Envy of the powerful is not a critique of the system, it's a component of it. If there weren't resentful left-out oppressed people unhappy about their lot in life, the system would find it useful to create them.

The powerful get to strut and push out their chests and say "I got it so good, so much better than those folks. Everybody wishes they were me!" They get that and they also get to feel wily and clever, and lucky, because yes they game the system, they get opportunities not on merit but through who they know, and by one hand washing the other, and by being given a courteous nod from the rules-enforcers as they break rules. So in addition to getting to look over at the rest of us and feel superior, they get the satisfying secret rush of feeling like they're getting away with stuff.

Oh yes, they don't so much feel that they deserve what they've got, not in a merit-based kind of way, so much as they feel like you and I would do exactly the same thing if we had the opportunity and the smarts to take advantage of it like they did. That's almost exactly what they'd say: "You know those people in the streets complaining about inequality and unfairness, they'd jump on any chance to game the system if they saw one, because it's all corrupt so why not? I did! We're all the same!"

What do the entitled powerful people not get? They don't get to live peacefully in voluntary cooperation with free neighbors. They don't get to live in a world based on trust and sharing. But, hey, they get to feel better than you, that must count for something, right? And the shelves of our markets glitter with luxuries in response to them saying, "I have power, I can have anything I want! Now...what the hell's worth having?"

Getting you to envy them, getting you to see it as fundamentally unfair that it is them and not you, is not a bug of the system. It's a feature.

As long as everyone, privileged and disenfranchised alike, thinks that the privileged folks have it better than they could have it any other way, that the oppressors oppress because they can, we're effectively saying "Yeah, because who wouldn't?" We're agreeing with the powerful who say we'd do what they're doing if we had the opportunity.

And as long as people think that way, they aren't seeing the whole system as stupid and unnecessary. They aren't seeing that we could share what we have and live as equals and cooperate voluntarily in peace and freedom. They aren't seeing that that's more desirable for everyone. So they have no vision of that, they have no hope of that.

Resenting and hating the privileged isn't revolutionary. Envy is always resentful (if it were not, it would merely be admiration). Envy always aspires to have what the envied have. That doesn't facilitate revolutions. It facilitates rotations.

We're being played.


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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

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There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.

That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.

In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.

So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.

Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???

Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?

It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.

I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.

Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.

Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.



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Item: When rallying in protest against yet another incident in which the victims were blamed for their own victimization, one of the oppressed said, "I am so tired of people asking what the Victim could have done differently. It's not the Victim's behavior that caused this. It's the Perpetrator's behavior that has to change! It's the Perpetrators who are doing this, not their Victims!"

Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"



I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.

It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?

But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?



If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.

That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.

But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.

Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.

Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.


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