I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression.

Oh dear. I think you can probably guess where this is going. The creative juggernaut in question is Hari Ziyad, “a black non-binary artist and writer whose work centres on creating through the arts alternative ways of living outside of systems of oppression.” And hence being published in Everyday Feminism, where readers and contributors are so varied and diverse, so daringly different.  

Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations… It’s comforting not to have to constantly explain yourself and your work. It’s beautiful to learn from and be around folks who understand ideas like microaggressions, gaslighting, white fragility, and all the other odd terms that describe the myriad, important, and insidious ways oppression operates.

And being around other, eerily similar people with similar educations, all begging eerily similar questions, saves so much time and potential aggravation. Instead, the group can bask in its mutual gloriousness as it hovers high above the herd and any unsophisticated objections.

But wait, even paradise has its vipers:

Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone.

Well, obviously. After all, “social justice spaces” are for beings who are lofty and deluxe, and who, like our Everyday Feminist author, a theory girl with a beard, find “academic jargon comforting.” Which is to say, people who are enlightened, piously fretful, ostentatiously egalitarian, and therefore superior. The kinds of people who, unironically, write things like this:

I’d been frustrated by the workings of neoliberalism for the longest,

And,

When I wrote one of my first pieces on my gender journey, I naturally used a quote from Judith Butler about gender realities. Regarded as one of the foremost queer theorists, it made sense to use her words to explore my queer complexities.

Rise up, ye proletariat! Judith Butler will set you free!

Attention, citizens. A hate crime has been detected at Salisbury University:

The image, found April 10 on a whiteboard in Blackwell Library, showed a stick figure being hanged and labelled with a racial slur. Underneath was the hashtag “#whitepower.”

That’s this image here. 

After much wailing and fretting, and declarations of being “passionate about diversity and inclusion,” and after the involvement of police and the Wicomico County State’s Attorney’s Office, the white supremacist culprits have now been apprehended:

The university confirmed Tuesday, April 26, that the students involved in the incident were black.

Why, it’s almost as if fabricating racial animus were fashionable on campus. And of course beyond. 

Joshua Yasmeh on the travails of attempting to speak on a left-leaning campus: 

Ben Shapiro spoke to the students at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, which purports to be a “Christian, liberal arts college.” Unfortunately, there was nothing “Christian” or “liberal” about the administration’s decision to censor all video coverage of Shapiro’s speech. Luckily, the ever-resourceful Shapiro decided go full MacGyver, evading the Orwellian police and streaming a live broadcast via Periscope with his own selfie stick.

The video, selfie stick and all, can be viewed here. 

Dave Huber on the public’s general preference for men’s sporting events over women’s: 

If you’re a sports fan (like me) who likes to watch the very best athletes engaged in the highest level of competition, then Daniela Brighenti’s article in the Yale Daily News won’t make a lot of sense to you. Desiring to watch the best sporting events, you see, is merely a “societal (and cultural) bias” against women.

And further to this farcical episode, the arrest of serial vandal and race-baiter Denzel McDonald has apparently caused uproar and searing mental trauma across campus, or at least among other pernicious little clowns in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Afro-American Studies:

“We will be walking out of our classrooms to stand in solidarity with him and to organise against the anti-Black racism that has plagued our campus historically and contemporarily,” organisers state on Facebook. “We will be delivering our demands to the Chancellor and UWPD and need student support. We have to let them know that there are consequences for perpetuating white supremacy.”

Because when the police calmly and politely arrest a thug who’s wanted for threatening behaviour and 11 counts of vandalism, causing thousands of dollars of damage – specifically, by spraying deranged anti-white racist graffiti on campus walls – then this arrest somehow constitutes “white supremacy.” And the real victims here, apparently, are professors of Afro-American Studies – who, along with their students, are supposedly experiencing “a version of post-traumatic stress syndrome” and “a mental health crisis as serious as those following campus shootings or natural disasters.” 

Following his appearance at a “white privilege” conference, a white male sociologist corrects a small factual error – and is promptly denounced. 

You see, politely correcting a factual error – and thereby revealing an insinuation of “white supremacy” as absurd – is somehow proof of “defensiveness,” “white fragility,” and, by implication, latent white evil. 

Via Damian, who adds, “It doesn’t matter how actually correct you are; you will never appease the politically correct.” Quite. Because the drama, indignation and passive-aggressive spite must go on indefinitely. How else will people know their place in the egalitarian pecking order, and to whom they should defer, always and forever?

My whole life, I had struggled with patterns of behaviour and emotion that I knew were “bad,” but couldn’t seem to control. I lied compulsively about things that didn’t make sense. I was terrified of being abandoned, to the point that I became furiously, sometimes abusively, upset if I thought that my friends were hanging out without me. I was full of self-loathing and anger that I bottled up, and then released by self-injuring.   

Yes, we’re visiting the pages of Everyday Feminism. How could you tell? 

And, of course, I had grown up as a closeted trans girl of colour in a cis, white supremacist society.  

So far, so humdrum.

Ever since I could remember, I had been filled with rage and fear and self-loathing as a result of the constant messages that society, friends, and family sent me that said I was deviant, bad, wrong to the core.

A chronic rage that, we’re told, prompted some introspection, of a sort, and a peek inside a textbook on abnormal psychology:

My “symptoms” fit the profile of a mental disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder, a condition closely associated with psychopathy. It was, the textbook said, historically considered untreatable.

Oh, I’m sure lashings of strident feminism and identitarian seething will put that right in no time. No? The author of this cheerless tale, Ms Kai Cheng Thom, a “trans woman writer, poet and performance artist based in Montreal,” then goes on to bemoan the fact that “disorders like violent psychopathy” are “generally considered unlikeable,” possibly hazardous, “even in social circles that consider themselves progressive.” And that, while the public at large may be sympathetic towards people suffering clinical depression, “compassion for psychopaths, pathological liars, or narcissists” is, inexplicably, harder to come by. It’s all terribly unfair. Because incorrigible monsters bent on the manipulation and harm of others have feelings too: