Philadelphia Trans Health Conference Report

[areyououtthere]

I moved to the house I did in Philadelphia, despite the random people and dirty kitchen, largely so I could be here in time to go to the trans-health conference. After moving, I waffled a lot--wouldn't I be disrupting other people's safe space, could my turning up there be interpreted as me doing the obnoxious "it's your job as an [insert minority

Comments

[orawnzva]

It is a sign of my massive amounts of white privilege that it didn't occur to me how problematic this could potentially be until we had to start running our hands through our hair.

Define "problematic". Every time I see this formulation of "privilege", it seems to suggest that one should have known better than to do that. Is every act of role-playing someone different from you a violation? If so, how can you ever actually learn about people different from you? Did you learn something from this exercise? (It sounds like you did.)

I'm really troubled by this aspect of the critical theory discourse, whichever privilege binary it's being used to address. The following combination of ideas are disempowering to privileged people in a way which doesn't shift that power onto less-privileged people, but simply dissipates it in misunderstanding in a way that is, I think, dangerous to the movement in the long term:

* Privilege is something that you can't really escape.
* People with privilege should feel remorse about exercising it.
* People with privilege should learn about and question it.
* Only people without privilege can really see privilege at work.
* People without privilege have no obligation to help people with it to learn about it.

You came to this conference to learn something. You learned something. That's a win - it's not healthy for you or for the cause of equality for you to wallow in how much you didn't know before. Go learn the next thing. Don't apologize for yourself - apologize for your behavior when your behavior hurts someone. Far better to learn what you learned in a role-playing exercise than to learn it when you get called on absent-mindedly running your hands through someone else's actual hair without their permission (not that you'd do that).

Getting privileged people to feel bad about their privilege and getting them to do something about it in a way that actually helps are two very different things, which may even be at odds in a given situation. Likewise, getting people to understand Critical X Theory 101 and getting people to adopt it are two very different things. I'd love to see this cluster of movements realize that and choose wisely which of them it's really trying to accomplish.

[orawnzva]

To clarify why that combination of ideas is problematic, by the way: It creates a situation in which (a) newcomers to the conversation are treated as uninitiated, (b) lots of people are willing to put them through an ordeal, but (c) nobody is willing to create any of the other conditions for a successful initiation experience.

I've seen this happen in thread after thread of RaceFail and related conversations. Examining one's privilege is an ordeal initiation, and initiations cannot take place unless a space is created that is safe for the intiate. Telling the (privileged) initiate that they don't deserve a safe space because they have the whole rest of society to be safe in is never going to help. It's not even true - there are all kinds of ways to feel unsafe, and no kind of privilege protects from all of them.