Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

This was hard to write, and even harder to post. Harder still to post publicly. Still, here it is – after having sat in my drafts folder for about four months, but thrown to the world at last.

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In an effort to help people understand privilege, its forms and complexities, I'm going to use myself as a case study. I'm going to examine a lot of the ways privilege affects my life, positively and negatively. So, while I will be pointing out ways in which I'm disadvantaged, I'm also going to try to own up to a lot of my own privilege, because it's really not a simple thing. You can be privileged in one way and disprivileged in another.

This isn't meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive. It's meant to provide a few glimpses into things people might not otherwise think about, especially with regards to the difference between who and what you are and what privilege you are accorded. It's beginning to unpack the invisible knapsack, but it's not finishing it.

It's a starting point, which will hopefully get people thinking.

So let's start.

Privilege I have

American privilege

What I am: A US citizen by birth, residing in the United States.

For one, as an American citizen I have the option of ignoring the rest of the world.

As Michael Schwalbe notes in the CounterPunch article, "The Costs of American Privilege", "Not having to think about the experiences of people in subordinate groups is another form of privilege." He puts a few points much more saliently than I could, so I'll quote him here:

People in [Third World] countries must, as a matter of survival, pay attention to what the U.S. does. There is no equally compelling need for Americans to study what happens in the provinces. And so again the irony: people in Third World countries often know more about the U.S. than many Americans do.

We can thus put these at the top of the list of American privileges: not having to bother, unless one chooses, to learn about other countries; and not having to bother, unless one chooses, to learn about how U.S. foreign policy affects people in other countries. A corollary privilege is to imagine that if people in other countries study us, it's merely out of admiration for our way of life.

The list of American privileges can be extended. For example, Americans can buy cheap goods made by superexploited workers in Third World countries; Americans can take a glib attitude toward war, since it's likely to be a high-tech affair affecting distant strangers; and Americans can enjoy freedom at home, because U.S. capitalists are able to wring extraordinary profits out of Third World workers and therefore don't need to repress U.S. workers as harshly.

English-Language privilege

What I am: a native English-Language speaker.

Well, for one, the internet is written for me. A large and growing number of nations have English as an official language, and I can be assured that I can travel a majority of the world and likely find people who will understand me. Speaking Standard American English exempts me from stereotypes which follow people who speak with other English dialects - the stereotyping of Southern American English speakers as backwards rednecks, for example.

There's an immense amount of literature available and being written in my native language. News from many countries is available in my native language - I can read the China Daily or Pravda.ru or Al-Jazeera or the Korea Herald, all in English, at my convenience.


Educational privilege

What I am: college-educated, with a BA degree from a four-year public university.

In job interviews, I will be taken more seriously than an equally competent applicant without a four-year degree. People will assume that because I've completed formal schooling, I am more intelligent than my peers who have not. And for five years, without the pressure of supporting myself 100%, I was in an environment whose purpose was to expose me to new ideas. Yes, people can educate themselves, and gain all the knowledge a university would provide. For me, it was made easy, and I was placed in an environment which made it more likely I would succeed. That's an advantage - a privilege.


Economic privilege

What I am: Comfortably employed in a salaried job, having lived in a middle-class American family all my life.

I have always had a roof over my head, a refuge from the weather, a warm place to be in the winter. Even when times were tight, I have never been in serious danger of starving. I can pay for medical care, should I need it. I can save money for my future and as a hedge against bad times.

And those things aren't even touching on the benefits I reap like being able to afford fresh, healthy food; being able to afford new clothing and high-quality clothing; being able to afford computers and internet access, which have prepared me for a more technologically-fluent workforce; being able to afford vacations and extracurriculars; being able to afford education (even if I am in debt via student loans, I am not in debt in a way which cripples me); being able to afford a car...

There are a lot of manifestations.


Thin privilege

What I am: 5'8" and usually in the vicinity of 120 pounds. (Or, for the metric-minded among you, about 1.52m and 55kg, if my converter isn't lying.)

People treat thin people differently than they treat heavier people. Having never experienced fatphobia myself, I can't set myself up as an expert (one of the things privilege does is to camouflage the ways in which it benefits you), but I do know that people tend to be less hostile to thin people. They tend to think more favorably on us, hold better opinions of our habits and even totally unrelated things like our morality and intelligence. There's a social meme that says that fat people are disgusting, which is not something I'm burdened by. This may all seem like little stuff, but having an entire society judge you on something you often don't have a great deal of control over does affect you. (For a discussion of the phenomena as it applies to racism - and please do point me toward any studies on this done regarding fatphobia, if they exist - see "Racism's Hidden Toll".)

If that doesn't convince you, here's one more, very important manifestation of thin privilege: I am more likely to be taken seriously by medical personnel. And, yeah, having the establishment responsible for keeping you alive if things go wrong take you seriously? That's something earnestly to be desired.

Privilege I sometimes have

Neurotypical privilege

What I am: ...I'm not diagnosed with anything, and I'm going to try to avoid a few cans of worms by not addressing this in terms of recognized disorders, which is what people often think of. See the following text.

This is a privilege that, when I've lost it, has made my life a living hell. When I've had it, it's smoothed the way for me more than almost any other kind of privilege in my life.

When I've lost it, it tends to be in the realm of emotions, because from everything I've observed, I do not process emotions normally. For my value of "normal" I'm using "what's expected in the American culture in which I grew up"; what is and isn't an appropriate way to experience/express these things has a lot more to do with culture than you'd think.

Dealing with my father's death is the most severe and hurtful example. During my father's sickness and after his death, the way in which I reacted to and displayed emotion (very low on the "expression" end, for one, as well as trying to avoid conflicts) was regarded as inappropriate; assumptions were made about what I was feeling and to what extent, and decisions were made based on those assumptions which, among other things, resulted in my not being informed of my father's funeral, and not being informed of his death until two days after the fact. Years later and I'm still hurting from that, though - again - you'd probably not know it to look at me.

And then there's the flip side, where I've reaped definite benefits. I was, though not exactly, very close to the neurotypical sort of person our public school systems seem to be designed for; I functioned well in a classroom setting, was able to adapt, adapt to, or employ the strategies which were mandated by the schools, and scored well above my peers on my SAT. Having a much more analytical than emotional brain served me incredibly well here, whereas school simply didn't work for a lot of the people I knew. Because I was able to perform well in school I got into a good university, I completed a four-year degree, and that's put me in a position of significant advantage both socially and economically. (See the educational privilege section above.)


Heterosexual privilege

What I am: asexual.

Asexuality tends to be a very quiet thing, unless you make a big deal of it. And because asexuality is not overtly marked, people tend to assume the default: that I'm heterosexual. I'm not subject to gay jokes, harassment, etc.

At the same time, as any decisions regarding something like marriage would take place on the basis of associational/affectional orientation rather than something sex- or gender-based, there is a chance that if I ever chose to marry, I would not be allowed to in certain parts of the country, my marriage would not be recognized in certain parts of the country, and I would be assumed to be homosexual despite the fact that I am not.

Male privilege

What I am: biofemale, identifying as agendered.

I'm relatively tall for a biofemale, on the thin and flat-chested side of things, and have fairly androgynous features. This means that, depending on length and type of interaction and what I happen to be wearing at the time, I can sometimes pass for male. Usually it's a young male - I get questions asking if I'm 18, or whatever - but it's still male. And let me tell you, as someone who was raised female? This privilege is palpable if you manage to invoke it.

And there are times when I will specifically invoke it. Walking home alone, for example, I have a much lower chance of being harassed or assaulted if I pass for male, in a town where sexually harassing female pedestrians seemed to be a fad for a couple of years. If I'm on the phone with places like tech support, they tend to take me more seriously if I can pass for male-voiced.


Cisgender privilege

What I am: Transgendered, agendered, gender-spectrumed, genderqueer.

Cisgender privilege is easier, I think, for female-bodied people to get than male-bodied people, though "easier" is still a relative term. Not only are the permanent effects of testosterone hard to cover up for a male-bodied person passing as female, but female-bodied people can wear a much wider range of clothing without setting off alarm bells. The term "tomboy" may not always be positive, but it doesn't carry half the negative implications a slur like "tranny" might.

So if I pass for male, I'm read as male and this is socially acceptable. If I don't pass for male, I'm read as a tomboyish female and this is socially acceptable. People do not tend to look at me and see obvious markers that I am a transgendered person, and being a transgendered person is not socially acceptable. A big part of privilege comes from what status people accord you when they have to deal with you.

Another part of privilege comes from how you feel and are able to cope with the world around you, though, and I don't carry as much privilege in these areas. I still don't feel comfortable using public bathrooms, because my gender presentation is neutral/male but my coworkers, friends, casual acquaintances, etc. know that I'm biofemale. Sometimes, when I'm dressing comfortably, I walk a line where I seem to pass or not pass according to what five-minute stretch you catch me in, and that makes choosing what door to walk into difficult. I often find myself in situations where, if I'm using a women's restroom, I perform a slightly exaggerated form of femininity (which I do not enjoy) in order to head off any suspicious looks when I walk in.

Privilege I don't have

White privilege

What I am: biracial, with my maternal family being of German descent and my paternal family being of Nigerian.

But that doesn't really matter in most of America, which is still operating under the one-drop rule. My heritage is exactly as white as it is black, but I have never worried about being accused of lying about my race if I select "black" on a form. If I select "white", I imagine there would be social and bureaucratic hell to pay.

Police officers have asked my friends if I can speak English when I'm in a car they've pulled over. This assumption about my linguistic abilities reflects assumptions about nationality which could cast suspicion on my in areas such as crossing borders. (Or Arizona. Saddest "Zing!" ever; though I'm unlikely to be taken for an illegal immigrant from Mexico, American-born Hispanics are probably facing much the same prejudice in Arizona now, and the palpable effects on their lives would be much more severe. But that's not about me specifically, and this post is.)

I am and have been uneasy about visiting other countries. Russia especially, for all that I deeply want to go back to school and finish my Russian major - Routine attacks by skinheads and gangs of youths on foreigners and people with non-Slavic features are a regular occurrence in Moscow and St. Petersburg, increasing sixfold in 2008. It gives me a lot of second thoughts about trying to study abroad.


Monoracial privilege

What I am: biracial, with my maternal family being of German descent and my paternal family being of Nigerian.

When I went to get my driving learner's permit in Nebraska, circa 2001, one of the sections on the form I had to fill out was "race". At that time, there was no "multiracial/other" category, so I did what seemed sensible: I marked down both "white" and "black."

I was called back up to the desk with an explanation that I could only select one. I explained that I wasn't just one, and to her credit, the woman staffing the desk seemed to recognize that this was unfair, but few things in life are as rigid and inflexible as government bureaucracy. My learner's permit identified me as "black".

Even in places where a "multiracial/other" category exists, the message I can't ever help reading is that this is other, this is abnormal. No distinction exists between myself, as an African/European multiracial person, and people whose racial backgrounds might be Asian/Latino, Native American/Eastern European, Filipino/Inuit/Australian Aboriginal, Indian/European/Hispanic/Chinese/African, or any other possible permutation. The important thing to recognize, it seems, is that there are categories of races, and then there are those who have crossed them. There are the purebreds, and there are mutts. About the mutts, nothing need be said except that they are mutts.

Special notes

Privilege is not universally desirable.

One of the things that seems to tag along with male privilege is the privilege to be intimidating. While this is useful in warding off some types of harassment, it can be very unsettling when invoked accidentally. When I used to walk home alone while my city was having its big, well-reported problem with people being sexually assaulted walking around after dark, I'd occasionally find myself walking down the same stretch of road, presenting as male, to all appearances following a solitary female pedestrian. As someone who doesn't want to come across as threatening to innocents, this was not a comfortable space to be in.

Privilege is not universally bad. In a lot of cases, the effects of privilege aren't things people should feel guilty for experiencing. The problem arises when they're privileges and not rights - the privilege to escape harassment, for example, is a privilege because it's a right which is denied to people like women, transgendered persons, poor persons. etc. The privilege to be taken seriously by doctors is a right which is often denied to fat people and people of color.

Passing is a way of accessing privilege.

If I pass for male, I access aspects of male privilege. If someone passes for white, they access aspects of white privilege. This can happen involuntarily as well as voluntarily, and someone can be passed as well as passing. One example of this is a person of color who's granted "honorary whiteness" by their friends - their friends will stop noticing that they're a person of color, even to the point where they'll have a moment of "Huh, they are" when it's brought up. Another example is a person with a mixed ethnic background who appears white enough that people assume they are white.

Privilege is multifaceted.

Even at its most simplistic, we can split it into two parts which have to be evaluated separately: the personal, what one experiences, and the social, what one is accorded. This is how someone with severe gender dysphoria who nonetheless passes for their assigned gender can both experience and lose cisgender privilege; feeling comfortable with one's own body and expected social roles is a cisgender privilege which they have lost, while the ability to exist and function in society without being harassed on the basis of their gender is one they maintain.

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Am I not cis-gendered? This is very weird for me to own up to. I… do? identify as genderqueer? Usually I just like to go with “queer” and have that count for everything. “I am not cis-gendered,” seems weird because I identity with women; I’m so feminist. I even identify as a woman, especially when speaking about feminist stuff. I own my body. But that’s also a political identity, a way of connecting with a community made up of people who have shared similar experiences. I don’t know if it’s anything more than politics though. It’s not really personal. Among them but not of them.

Oh well, fork this. ;P

Okay this is my body. Damn, that is a sweet world body… WRANG. I am not a fan of the tits. If they were, like, Lisbeth Salander size I would be all for that. But, I mean, I don’t hate them how they are. They’re just part of my body and I can ignore them most the time. Accept that I’d rather be binding them. I don’t have anything for that yet, but sometimes I’ll wear a sports bra and tight tank top under my shirt to make them… less noticeable? Less out there? I love boys’ chests though. Not when they’re all muscley, but relatively flat, ya know?

I’m kinda chubby and I don’t mind that so much, especially around the sides of my body, because it makes me feel more solid, like there’s more of me there. Boys are so solid around their torso, and I wish I could emulate that.

I LIKE SHAVING MY PUSSY AND IT’S NOT CAUSE I WANT TO LOOK LIKE A PRE-PUBESCENT GIRL. Just wanted to get that out there. I feel more ‘womanly’ with my vulva shared. (As in, mature adult versus child, not really a gendered thing.) I mean, you can see it better for one, right? I like to look. There’s still some stubble there and I like the rough texture. And plus, when I’m on my period I where pads, right? And there is so much less to clean up when I’m shaved, because when there is hair down there, the blood is just all over the hair and it gets all matted and clotty and downright disgusting.

I like hair on my legs. Like, pretty much. I like seeing other people with shaved legs. Especially men and women. But I like my legs more when they are not shaved.

I’m kinda fine with my face. My profile isn’t excellent and my chin might double sometimes, but WHATEVER. My face is awesome. I could draw it all day (and have down so on at least a few occasions).

Right now, I just want to gain more muscle. Especially in my triceps and shoulders. They’re just kinda flabby now, which isn’t terrible because at least they’re not slight, but I’d rather them be more defined. I want to lose fat in my breasts. Does that even make sense? If I lose weight, they would smaller, so that’s what I want. I’d also be happy binding more, but I’ll work up to that. I kinda… don’t mind? my stomach? It makes me feel kinda womanly and I’m okay with it there. I guess it could be cool to be toned around my stomach and be slimmer around my thighs, but it’s not a huge deal, you know? I can rock my hips. If I had just a little bit less fat around my thighs that would be cool with me though; more muscle in my legs - I’m totally jealous of Sarah’s calves. ;)

And I dig the short hair-cut, of course.

I would also dig walking around in frilly tank tops and sporty shorts while looking like that, more masculine-bodied. *sigh* That would be so beautiful. It’s pretty beautiful doing it how I look now, actually.

So basically what my gender is telling me now is that I have a female body but wish for a more masculine body so I could dress up with a more feminine presentation while still looking like a boy? Could I deal with that? I would rock skirts and masculine pronouns. I’d also like to point out that I never wore skirts until I divorced them from the gender binary and accepted that guys could totally where skirts if they wanted and still be guys.

Of course, Lisbeth Salander is also the height of beauty and feels like a boy in her body, so I would definitely not mind looking like her. ;)

No

1. You don’t have a gender; you do gender.

2. I’d like to be free from gender norms.

3. Cis and transgender people are people, not genders.

4. Gender is always mixed up with ethnicity, sexuality, class, age and culture.

5. Doing gender is hard work.

6. Gender and violence are never far apart.

8. Masculinity is the most unexamined aspect of gender.

9. Gender and power are inextricably linked.

10. My response to gender is to hack it.

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Thoughts On A Pink Bathing Suit; Hacking Fat Gender And Considering Femme
Published June 1, 2010

Did I tell you we planned (very last minute) for a Body Acceptance Swimming session at this year’s Wiscon? If I didn’t, we did. It was superb. A variety of bodies, all in the water, in a range of styles, with a bunch of different activity levels. There were one pieces (with and without skirts) and tankinis. There were straight-up fatty fatty bikinis. There were board shorts and tank tops. The styles of suit were as varied as the bodies in them. There was swimming, splashing, lounging, etc.

My own suit was a two piece. Bright hot pink boyshort bottoms with ruching on the side that tied with bows and a black and white polka-dotted halter top. I’d pinned my hair up to go with the dress I was wearing earlier and I had on bright red lipstick that was also a left over from my little foray into dressing up.

It’s important, for context, to note that I didn’t plan to go to the pool with my hair up and my lipstick on. It just happened that way. And when packing I grabbed the cute bathing suit instead of the practical one because, hey, I didn’t anticipate swimming in a practical sense. (I was right about that – I spent most of the session in the hot tub because omfg hot tub.)

So that sets the scene, I suppose, into which Hack Gender and gender presentation emerged as topics. I’ve been thinking about it pretty much ever since, especially the explicit statement that I was the most femme person in the pool at the moment. *laugh*

I identify as cisgendered. If you are not familiar with the term, it means that my gender identity and my biological sex are the same, that I am comfortable with the gender I was assigned at birth. It is a companion – a comparative term – to transgender that provides a descriptor for non-trans folks instead of just leaving non-trans as an alienating and assumptive default.

But issues of gender presentation are more nuanced than just “are you a girl or a boy?” even among the cisgendered. It’s when we’re forced into one of two arbitrary expressions, after all, that we’re the most limited. So I tend to think of orientation and presentation as two entirely different (though related) categories for discussion. Even so, I’ve not ever been particularly articulate when discussing my own gender presentation.

I genuinely like pretty things. “Pretty” has a pretty wide definition (and certainly no one owes it to anyone else) but I like hot pink and I like ruffles and I like sparkly rhinestones. I like makeup and shoes and fashion that is more excessive and decadent than the occasion calls for. I didn’t think twice about going down to the pool with my hair up and my lipstick on because I wasn’t going with the intention of swimming much (I didn’t want to get my hair wet) and, well, I often just forget that I have the red lipstick on. *laugh* But when I picked that swimsuit out, initially, for last year’s Convergence, I wanted the Gidget-iest swimsuit I could find and that just about did the damn trick. There were other suits, plenty of other suits I could have picked up and there were other suits I could have packed because I have a tidy little stack of swimwear at this point.

It might be time to admit that, yes, really, I am quite girly. Some might even say femme.

This shouldn’t be a hard thing to admit; it’s really kind of a no-brainer when I think about the way I pack for out-of-town trips (always viewed as opportunities to dress up) or my penchant for trying on formalwear for fun. But here’s the thing: it’s all complicated by growing up fat.

I was, it should be noted, thin when I was very young. It wasn’t until I was seven years old that I fattened up one summer and the die was cast. I don’t remember much about my preferences as a young child. I have a kindergarten school photo of me in a red Izod polo shirt (you can’t see the khakis but I know they’re there). I do not think I picked out that outfit. It’s probable, given the outfits I picked out to start other school years when I had the chance (almost always involving skirts and/or hats) that I was into frilly things even then.

But the fat girl-child is, alas, often the desexualized girl-child and I don’t mean that in a creepy way – maybe it’s the de-gendered girl-child? It’s the way you don’t get the frilly dresses, you don’t get the makeup, you don’t get the social assumptions that assume you’re going to be boy-crazy and think about clothes all the time.

There’s a freedom to that, certainly, but as with anything else that determines identity for you instead of helping you develop it on your own for yourself, it’s vastly restricting. Because I wasn’t really allowed to be a girl. Nothing explicit, really, just…. It wasn’t even an option, really, except in fits and starts. I wore a lot of jeans and I ran around with the boys in my neighborhood because the girls were mean. I was into the metal music that the boys let me listen to instead of the New Kids on the Block and I rode my bike and largely wasn’t even aware that I was being barred from femininity.

To be fair, none of it seems deliberate. I had that whole defense mechanism in place really quickly and there were those back-to-school skirt outfits. But I was teased when I actually wore them and it was made pretty clear to me that fat girls didn’t get to be pretty. Putting a dress on a fat girl was like putting a dress on a pig. That’s the crux of things, I think, when I consider my own gender presentation and my own discomfort with certain kinds of femme style (for myself, not for others).

I am not entirely certain I will ever be comfortable with myself when I try to achieve elegance, for example. I’m not a satin and pearls kind of person, I say when questioned – but that leaves open the question of what kind of person IS a satin and pearls kind of person. Why not me? I am comfortable with over-the-top performance, with costume, with theatrics. I am not comfortable with “understated.”

This isn’t a failing, you understand. It simply is the way it is, an underpinning of my style as it has evolved up until today. I don’t wear skirts every day – the realities of my life mean I am still more comfortable reaching for pants when I’m getting ready for work unless it’s something I know, something I’ve planned, something I coordinate down to my accessories. Basically, I don’t give myself enough time in the morning for performing femme, y’all. I perform, instead, awkward but mostly comfy business casual and it feels like a costume but I am mostly okay with that.

But it’s one reason why I’ve never embraced femme (much less high femme) as a label for myself. I’m not consistent and I’d rather not be accused of being a fraud. I’m still fat, you see – and I can still hear the echoes of all of that de-gendering.

The last night of Wiscon, many of my friends and I dressed up. There were so many representations of fancy – it was amazing. There was a photobooth, which was actually a professional photographer, to take pictures of anyone who wanted one and my friends and I all planned in advance to take advantage of it. There was retro 50s glam, right down to the white gloves. And a one-shouldered evening gown with a super dramatic sleeve. There was a ruffle-trimmed wrap dress and makeup. I wore a bandage dress from Torrid and fishnets and zipper boots and makeup and hair up and flower in hair and.…

And, yeah, it was very much with the performative femme and it was awesome. Also, I felt like I should be in Hawaii but I think that was the hair flower talking. It makes me think I am, perhaps, a reluctant femme – not because I have no desire to participate in the deliberateness of the identity but simply because I am not sure I am very good at it. And I wonder how much of that uncertainty rests with my fat body, how that intersection of body and culture has itself limited my options for defining and participating in my own gender presentation. We’ve talked, at some length, about how lack of clothing options for fatties, especially above a certain size, limits self-expression, denies fatties the ability to define themselves and control their presentation; this is true for issues of gender presentation as well.

At the end of the day, I’m left with knowing that I polished my nails before going to bed last night. Not out of any sense of cultural obligation or inherent feminine imperative. I did it because it’s pretty and I like it and I want to have green fingernails. Is that part of performing femme? Maybe it is for me, for my fat body, at least until I have the chance to dress up again.

Blog post available at: http://www.therotund.com/?p=827