Heart,

I think anyone who has privilege and claims to be aware of it has a responsibility to use that privilege in a way which doesn't oppress or threaten others.

If One consciously chooses to use that (passing) privilege as a weapon, they are no better than any other oppressor.

Passing for anything isn't a privilege on it's own (we've already agreed on that), but soaking up the privilege and then putting the blame on another group (i.e. because they don't 'recognize') is offensive...and I would even argue privileged in itself.


Dylan

Okay, we agree that passing in and of itself isn't a privilege.

I don't think I suggested anywhere that one should "soak up privilege and then put the blame on another group." Not sure how you got that out of what I have been saying. Or maybe you're just making a different point.

What I did say was that if a person of color is granted white skin privilege (for example), they may choose to confront the racism behind that each and every time it happens, or they may not. It is not, however their responsibility/job to confront it. It may not even be safe to do that.

Not sure we are communicating clearly here so don't want to appear to be having an argument we aren't really even having. Know what I mean?

Heart

What I find interesting here is that with all of the argument on either side about how trans folks have been included or left behind, how femmes can pass or not, how racial appearance matters....we are all apparently willing to let such a messed up fat-phobic statement just slide on by.

Mirandavbrave...I don't know you, and I see that you're new to the site. So...I'll say this gently. Fat does not equal unattractive, or threatening. So...as you are championing your trans brothers and sisters so that they aren't left behind...you might want to think about including your brothers and sisters who are "fat" by your definition as well.

Yeah, I get what you mean. I wasn't having an argument. I thought we were discussing.

I'm not saying anything about POC. I was talking more in terms of general power/privilege dynamics while adding from my own (queer, trans, female-bodied, butch) perspective. I think how anyone confronts the ism is upon the individual. I get that it may not be safe to do that...hence the reason I don't run through the streets announcing my trans status.

I do think though that if One receives the privilege, they DO have a responsibility to be aware of how their received privilege affects others. If I'm in the company of men who are reading me as straight and cis, and a sexist/homophobic/transphobic/racist/ism-ist comment is made, I think I have a responsibility to say something about that comment (if it's safe). Otherwise, it's condoning/perpetuating the ism. I'm a firm believer that complacency perpetuates.


Dylan

I had a hard time understanding the entire post, but I read that part a different way. I read it as acknowledging fat phobia.


But Like I Said, I Had A Hard Time Understanding The Whole Post,
Dylan

In the interests of fairness, I went back and attempted to read the statement as an acknowledgement of fat phobia. Unfortunately, I can't. I think it's the paranthetical nature of the "attractive (not fat)" comment. To me it reads as if there is an assumption that for a person to be attractive, then they must not be fat.

It would be different for me if the post read "slim, attractive, apparently-gender conforming"...but it doesn't.

Yeah... my ex used to feel damned if she did and damned if she didn't. If she did she was faced with defensiveness, excuses, embarrassment minimizing, or outright anger. If she didn't she felt she was colluding. It was emotionally and socially exhausting.

fixing the record: fat phobia
 

Thanks for taking this up. I absolutely meant this as an acknowledgement of fat phobia and I am sorry it did not come clearly across. I've been quite obese and slim (roughly half my life spent in each category) and I will tell you it is as tough being fat (maybe tougher) that being an out dyke. (I use "fat" assertively, as I do "dyke' in this context.) I really was trying to say - and the parens did not communicate it as I had intended - that it is being "socially" attractive (not the eye of the beholder but the eye of social conformity) provides a significant social advantage. People with these advantages have a special chance to act politically and for justice.

Thanks for the chance to clarify.

Hope you see my explanation - I am new here and I am not sure my clarification posted in the right place. I was being fat positive - I meant to be, but can understand how it wasn't clear. Hope my explanatory post pops up on the thread. I am sorry that my 100% alignment with your feelings instead caused you consternation (apparently due to a badly placed parenthesis). But I appreciate the chance to explain.

Thanks mirandabrave...I appreciate your coming back to clarify. I know that the written word can be easily misunderstood despite all of our best efforts on both ends of the communication. :rrose:

Heart,
I disagree with you on this point, at least from how I have experienced it. In and earlier post I made this point.

I was at all times aware, however, that I had the privlege of revealing or not revealing my orientation when in a work or straight social situation. I was aware that I could choose safety if I felt I needed to, or that I could choose to avoid confrontation if was having a weak moment.

This was a privilege my butch friends and partners did not have.

Mrs. Strutt made a similar point in her post

So was the fact I "passed" as a straight woman a privilege in terms of "safety" for me and my child? Yes, it was. It also reminded me I can turn my "passing" on and off at will, for the reasons and situations I choose, while Mr. Strutt cannot.

I believe that at least the freedom to make this choice is a privilege.

Smooches,
Keri

Yes, Keri I see the point that you and Mrs. Strutt have made -- which is the very point that I take issue with. Yes, I see that you may be granted straight privilege, that you may get to make a choice about whether or not to reveal your queer-ness in certain situations, but I don't define that choice (to pass) as a privilege. I define it as a strategy you are using to avoid conflict or danger or confrontation (or whatever in the given situation). If you really had straight privilege, there would be no need to employ the strategy of passing.

I am not denying that passing exists and can be used to one's advantage, what I am suggesting is that we not call that "privilege." Privilege, IMO, has a very specific context and meaning and to use it to define passing just feels problematic to me. For one thing, what would happen if, for example, someone found out something about you being queer and decided to out you. The inherent danger in passing is the risk of being outed -- and the passer has no control over that.

Calling passing a privilege makes it sound like an empowered thing, something that the passer has complete control over -- but that is not the case. The very nature of passing includes an aspect of stealth, subterfuge, (or stealing as I said before), and that puts the passer at risk.

Okay, I think I've now said what I'm trying to say nine ways to Sunday, so if I haven't made it clear by now I should just shut up. ;)

Heart

No! Don't shut up! I have really been interested in your thoughts here. I hate that you feel you are banging your head on the proverbial wall, as I am with you, and have to say thanks for expressing so well a dilemma that I have had a hard time of really honing in on within myself and my experience as a queer and someone who is read as straight--grappling with the fact that I know I certainly feel safer in my skin than so many others might. So what do we call that? Because I totally get you when you say that someone who passes can't own that privilege and that it can be taken from that person at any point. I hear you there.

Firie -- I might call passing a strategy or, at times, an advantage rather than a privilege. Or I might just call it... passing. Passing isn't something you are necessarily doing in an active sense. It's something that is done towards you based upon dominant assumptions and biases. You are passed. This brings things back around to Dylan's assertion of responsibility. Do you proclaim every time you are passed, that you are in fact queer, NOT straight?
This is the tension and dilemma of passing/being passed. This is what can cause feelings of collusion, guilt, and exhaustion.

I am most likely mistaken for straight frequently. I don't proclaim my queerness all day every day. Passing in this manner is not something I feel responsible for. If homophobia/heterosexism is enacted in front of me, I confront it - often by revealing that I am queer, (but not always). Do I have an advantage over someone who cannot disappear into being straight-looking? Yes, I do. I have the advantage of passing. But I am aware that this advantage can turn on a dime and be the very thing that harms me. Passing itself has been the cause of queer-bashing.

Heart

Thank you so much for starting this thread, Nat. The topics of passing and privilege are fascinating and fill my mind with questions about the phenomenon of discrimination, in whatever form it comes. It occurs to me that none of us are immune from prejudice, whether guilty of it ourselves or indicting others.

Jean Cocteau said that "all privilege leads directly to the guillotine". Like a mask, no matter how beautiful, the privilege of passing for something "other" obscures the true self. I think about that a lot. Passing may confer privileges but the beneficiary invariably pays, the amount dependent on the degree to which that passing aligns or is at odds with one's identity and the expectations of others. Whether the self is camouflaged by circumstance, perception or design, all the accolades, critiques and condemnation are based on a fiction. Attribution is given to the alter ego. If privilege is then "presumed" by either those in power or by those who are discriminated against, death of the self comes twice. Once because one is unknown and again when condemned for what one is not.

I recall a story about a man from the islands who was sold to a family for slave labor when he was an infant. He was never given a name, told his age nor spoken to. He recounted that the worst part of his struggle was not his servitude but his utter lack of an identity. His story of being unnamed and unknown reminds me of those who live invisible lives on the margins of acceptability. They are the blank slates upon which others' prejudices and projected self references are writ.

What of the complexities of passing and presumed extreme privilege bestowed upon one by nothing other than an accident of birth? How does one quiet the clamoring of the social climbers that surround those who remain hidden precisely because they want to be truly known? Those who want to be accepted for who they are outside the cliched conclusions about derivative power and protected from those who want it?

I know a girl whose appearance is at once both her truth and her disguise. She hides behind long flowing blonde hair, delicate features and a painfully shy demeanor from those, who if the truth of her birth were known, would be inauthentic themselves. Ironically, it is by passing for what she is not that she is able to truly be herself and discern the truth in others. Her blonde hair and fair skin hide the fact that her mother is a black celebrity. By hiding, she has a voyueristic view into the psyches and unadulterated prejudices of those around her. Her radiance and beauty is a disguise of sorts, too. It masks the loneliness she feels and she is glad for that.

Whether revered or reviled, the self is at least a foundation from which to interact with the world. But some are never seen or worse, denied legitimacy. Sometimes, members of the very communities that are trying to dismantle identity discrimination fall into defensive traps; policing perimeters based on a person's appearance and presumptions about their histories and character. This kind of 'profiling' risks belying not just the individual's truth but reinforces visible and stereotypical markers of all groups' conformities. The marginalized become perpetrators of that which they despise. How often the cruelest cuts come from those about whom one cares the most. So for some, passing can render them orphan of sorts, even when born to castes that are considered untouchable.

To actually exist to people other than oneself is the only way a person has even a hope of mutual regard. Without that, a connection may be intense but one-sided and like gravity, the influence profound but unseen. To what degree is one a slave to social mirrors? At what risk does one break them? What is the price of truth to oneself and others? Sometimes the truth has very grave consequences indeed and not just for the "passenger". I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the balance, on the scales upon which one measures cost and expresses or suppresses according to social perception, reflection and consequence. The answer lies in whether they and those around them can withstand the image shining back from the glass for the mirrors are held in not just their own but by so many other hands. If that mirror cracks and wounds are inflicted, whose hands bear the stains? What good is the chest-inflated pride of belonging if that membership is wielded in a way that causes collateral damage? Fire, whether friendly or not, can still destroy those with whom one shares the trenches.

One of my favorite stories of an insider's view of passing, privilege and the misdistribution of power is from the matriarch of a family who describes herself and her brood of thirteen children as "the league of nations of the hood". The parents have created a rainbow of colors and ethnic backgrounds for the children. Their mother says that separately they each pass for what they are not and are vulnerable in different ways. But together? She sighs with satisfaction and laughs. She says, "Together? When we walk down the street, everybody knows we are a FORCE".

I often think of her insight and words by which she truly lives. When we are together it is our differences that make us stronger.

Dear Enigma,

I want to not let the opportunity pass to say that your words - the way your process complicated connections that intersect, intertwine and are deeply integrated in social settings as to identity, privilege, power, and a host of other processes - is beautifully stated and I feel enlightened and humbled and honored, as if all at once, to have partaken of the 'supper of manna' you have left for us to nourish our minds with.

*thank you so much*

~ALK