1. Keep your business within the stall under two and a half minutes. Any longer and the Cisgendered person becomes suspicious. If you still need to go, use a different bathroom.
2. Be as quiet or still as possible. They can’t see movement.
3. Use as little toilet paper as possible. I mean, they’re judging the shit out of you already, don’t give them more of a reason. This is more the case in any government building or library. They don’t want their taxpayer money going to a Transgirl’s ass.
4. Similarly, when washing your hands, sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in your head twice, but don’t use too much water. Use minimal soap. When drying your hands, make sure you’re thorough but also not using the air dryer too long or too many paper towels. They’re analyzing how many resources you’re taking up.
5. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE EYE CONTACT.
6. If there is no one in the bathroom at the time you enter your stall you may act as if it was a single stall bathroom. But remain vigilant…
7. If someone enters the bathroom while you are in the stall you must believe they are a Cisgendered person.
8. If you see another Transgirl in the bathroom, even if you personally know them, you must not acknowledge their presence as stated in Article 3, Section 21.b of The Official Transgirl Handbook. The only exception is when there is no one else in the bathroom and you know the other Transgirl personally. But this is risky since a Cisgendered person may enter the bathroom at any moment.
9. In fact, don’t talk to or acknowledge anyone when inside a multi-stall bathroom. The only exception is when a Cisgendered person says “Hello.” If they do, you must greet them as well. If they ask you any questions you must respond but make your answer brief.

Following these steps is critical to maintaining the slim levels of respect we have from the Cisgendereds. This respect helps alleviate some of the pains of awkward family reunions, co-workers, and those people who you sorta vaguely knew in High School and thinks of you as one of the Cisgendereds. Keeping the respect of Cisgendered persons in bathrooms is a collective effort! They will hold any slight misstep against all Transgirls complaining about it to no end. We must look out for our fellow Transsisters (Article 1, Section 7). I don’t care if they don’t respect or see all my identities and lifestyle choices,  I just want to be able to have some sort of passing respect and to not worry about pissing or shitting my pants.

Or, y’know, be physically assaulted.

When I was a kid, Roseanne was a person who challenged the order of things. Now, it feels like she’s upholding it.

In 1988, a TV show premiered that portrayed the white American working class with a honesty and humanity that had been absent from television before, and hasn’t been replicated since. I’m talking, of course, about Roseanne. This March, ABC is rebooting the show, bringing the Conner family back to prime time (and Dan back from the dead, for some reason). Revisiting old TV shows to cash in on nostalgia is often a bit disappointing, but though I haven’t seen it yet, I fear this particular reboot is destined to be especially awful. The reasons have to do with the show’s creator and lead, Roseanne Barr, and her abominable politics.

Sitcoms follow a fairly specific format, and tend to portray mostly middle class and upper middle class families. This was true before Roseanne, and while shows like Malcolm in The Middle and Everybody Hates Chris have also offered us portraits of the working class, it is still mostly true today. When we do see poor and working class people on our screens, the portrayals are rarely realistic. Either they are sloppy caricatures, actors portraying what the comfortable believe about the poor rather than the poor themselves, or they are idealized to the point of either not seeming human or not seeming poor. These characters will often tell you they are struggling financially, but are never shown to be actually struggling. Think of Lorelai Gilmore on The Gilmore Girls. She’s a struggling single mother, but her struggle all occurs off screen before the show actually begins, and despite her rejection of her parents’ wealth, she can still afford constant takeout and new clothes.

Roseanne was different. I had watched some of it in my childhood, but only remembered it vaguely (along with my dad’s rants about how annoying Roseanne was as a person). When I rewatched the show a few years ago, I was struck by how familiar it all seemed. As a working class white woman myself, the Conners’ home looked like the kinds of homes I spent my childhood in. The furniture was old and followed no principles of interior design. The house was cluttered, and not artfully so. I gasped when I realized that there were piles of stuff on the staircase, leaving only a small space for walking. Seeing the world they inhabited made me feel seen in an unexpected way, and it gave me a newfound appreciation and affection for my own childhood home.

Moreover, the Conners themselves were shown as real human beings, who were really frustrated and overtired. Roseanne worked a factory job until she became a waitress, and Dan worked in construction (and was often looking for work). They yelled at their kids. They drank beer. They sat at the kitchen table to figure out which bills they could afford to pay this month, and which they could put off until another check came through. The constant running of numbers to keep the lights on and food on the table is such an integral part of not having enough, to see it portrayed honestly on screen made me gasp.

But the realism of the characters extended beyond simply “passing as real poor people,” because they were also multifaceted and not defined solely by their economic status. Roseanne and her husband Dan are both fat, but their personalities aren’t reduced to fat jokes or a constant struggle for weight loss, and they are shown to actively desire each other (gasp). The show even featured gay characters at a time when most shows didn’t (those portrayals were far from perfect, but at least the characters themselves were more than stereotypes).

And while the white working class is often viewed as conservative, Roseanne is shown having a more nuanced understanding of politics. In one episode, a politician going door-to-door comes to the Conner house, and she takes him to task for giving out-of-state businesses tax breaks, busting unions, and asking workers to work for “scab wages.”

I grew up in a fairly conservative, white, working class home. I’m intimately familiar with how people screwed over by the system can be totally invested in said system, and how Fox News can take over a living room. Most of the working class conservative men I was around voted Republican, and they tended to cling to patriarchal systems because they convinced themselves it was the last bit of power they had. These men were extremely uncomfortable with Roseanne Barr, her show, and everything that she stood for — her outspokenness, her opinions, her unabashed confidence. Their squeamishness around her was rooted in sexism for sure (she was so “shrill!”) and it gave me a pretty good idea of how I would be treated if I grew into a woman who challenged them. I found the whole thing intriguing and scary in equal measures.

Since Roseanne went off air in 1997, Roseanne the person has changed quite a bit, and her public persona has stayed controversial, though not always in a way that challenges the powers that be. In 2012, while she was a presidential candidate for The Green Party, she posted a series of transphobic tweets. Since then she has only dug her heels in when it comes to transgender people and issues, and she has also vocally swung to the right politically. It’s not unheard of for anti-trans “feminists” to support conservative politics when those politics align with their own transphobia, and I’m not convinced Barr’s stance on transgender issues and her political 180 aren’t related. In fact, she’s been known to share alt-right conspiracy theories and in January announced that her character, Roseanne Conner, would be a Trump supporter.

“It’s just realistic” Barr has said, implying that since many working class white people voted for Trump, those of us who didn’t are, I guess, unrealistic.

If You’ve Never Lived In Poverty, Stop Telling Poor People What To Do

This, I think, illustrates what is bound to be so very different about this reboot than the original show. When I was a kid, Roseanne was a person and a show that made the conservative men in my life extremely uncomfortable, because she challenged their supremacy and the patriarchal order of the world. By now publicly endorsing both transphobia and Trump, she’s instead protecting that order. The belief that it was the working class that elected Trump, when in fact white middle class and rich people are just as responsible (if not more so), plays right into the caricature we so often see of poor people. Poor people, we are told, are stupid and unable to look out for our own interests. We focus on excusing the bigotry of poor folks due to their “economic anxiety” and lack of education, so we won’t have to look at the bigotry of the people who are actually in power.

But Roseanne Barr is not a working class person struggling to get by, she’s an extremely well off celebrity, and one who has made the choice to support another extremely well off celebrity. That she sees this as being reflective of the working class shows, in some ways, how completely out of touch she has become. Rather than a nuanced look at poor folks who are intelligent enough to call it like they see it, question politicians, and push back against unfair systems, the reboot offers us something else: a Roseanne who falls in line.

I hope I’m wrong. Supposedly the Conner family will not be a monolith of political belief, and apparently Darlene and David’s daughter is to be “gender creative” (I sure hope she isn’t a punchline). Perhaps a strong cast will be able to carry the show and offer some much needed nuance.

But with the history of ham-fisted reboots, and the show’s star and creator choosing to side with bigotry, I won’t be holding my breath.

I was editing an essay when the first email notification came in, but I ignored it. Then came a second, and a third in quick succession. Curious, I switched tabs to see three emails about Trump’s trans military ban. Editors were emailing to ask if I would cover it for them, but I had missed the news when it first broke. When I do my writing, I keep my cell phone off and in another room to avoid distractions like Twitter, so I hadn’t seen the tweets from Trump declaring the service of 15,000 trans people in the military invalid.

I had missed most of the previous two work days because of personal stuff, like meeting fellow trans Establishment contributor Sam Reidel in person for the first time. Wednesday was supposed to be my day to catch up, so my first instinct was to focus on my existing deadlines and sit this news cycle out. But as I tried to connect back to my editing, I couldn’t dispel a nagging thought: Who was I to sit this one out? My followers and regular readers look for my opinion and reporting because they put value into what I have to say. How could I not write about such a major trans story, possibly one of the biggest of all time?

Once I made the decision to cover Trump’s tweets, I immediately jumped into action, pitching several websites with article ideas. Slowly the assignments started to come back in, from ELLE, GO Magazine, and The Washington Post. Everything happened so fast, and the deadlines were so tight, that I felt like I had no chance to breathe. I had no time for Twitter or Facebook. The story was all that mattered. I dove completely into my work.

How could I not write about such a major trans story, possibly one of the biggest of all time?
Click To Tweet

I quickly churned out an op-ed for GO, which the editor published immediately in the early afternoon on Wednesday with very little editing, then shifted my attention to my piece for WaPo. Not having any time to make myself lunch or go out to grab anything, I actually called my mom and asked her to come over and help me out. (It is a little embarrassing to admit, yes.)

Through it all, the emails kept coming in. Editors who had ignored my pitches for months were suddenly changing their tune and seeking out my work on the ban. I felt like their token. I’ve struggled with being labeled “the trans writer” for awhile now. While I’m blessed to have had my work on my own identity open so many career doors, it’s also difficult to be continuously pigeonholed into writing only about that identity. Even now, I’m aware of the fact that editors are much more likely to say yes to me if my pitch is about a trans issue. I’m painfully aware of my typecasting, and was reminded of my place in the media landscape once again as the requests for work came pouring in on Wednesday.

The Real Cost Of Donald Trump’s Anti-Trans Military Stance

I took a break that evening and substituted an evening job and a shower for my dinner, then came back to my work to edit and add citations to my latest piece. Somewhere around 10 p.m., I finally collapsed in my bed, after 13 hours of writing and reporting work. It was easily the longest continuous output of my career so far.

When the election happened, my manager at my day job made a chilling comment that has stayed with me: “Trump getting elected will be good for your writing career.” There’s a degree of cynicism to this that bothers me, but in essence, my manager was correct. Months later, here I am, essentially profiting off of Trump’s bigotry. Intellectually, I understand that I should be fairly compensated for my work, but at the same time, so many trans people are going to get hurt from Trump’s ban. Who was I to make money off of that?

Yet, Thursday morning, I went right back to work, trying to catch up on the work I was meant to do on Wednesday before completing reporting on my piece for ELLE. My partner, herself a trans advocate, came to visit later that afternoon. We quickly dropped into a rhythm, her taking calls from reporters while I pecked away at the keys on my laptop with moments of conversation peppered in between.

I decided to go to bed earlier that night after about 10 hours of writing, and as I lay there scrolling through my Twitter timeline for the first time in what felt like days, the momentousness of Trump’s tweets started to viscerally hit me.

Covering trans issues as a journalist often makes me feel disconnected from the community. I work alone, at home, mostly interfacing with others through social media or with my editors through email. Covering trans issues as a professional means I need to maintain a certain distance in the name of journalistic integrity. But no matter what, these issues affect me as an individual, as a citizen. In order to survive, and to deliver stories for the greater good, I’ve had to learn to compartmentalize my own fears and anxieties as a trans person.

Covering trans issues as a journalist often makes me feel disconnected with the community.
Click To Tweet

And the ban that had so thoroughly demanded my professional effort the previous few days was profound in its personal implications. It wasn’t just targeting trans people serving their country — it was a symbolic blow against every trans American. The Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQ religious organization, has laid out a five-step plan to make it impossible for trans people to exist in American public life, and step five is a total ban on trans people serving in the military. Since Trump’s election, the FRC has made significant progress on completing its list, a terrifying prospect for myself and all of my trans friends.

Despite my dogged writing, I couldn’t help but feel completely powerless to stop the continued hate campaign that Trump’s ban represents. “Should I seriously look into moving to another country?” I thought as I saw the despair and anger coming from the trans community. My work combating Trump’s transphobia is crucial, I realize, but it can also feel like not enough in the face of such unending attacks. Despite my platform, I often feel helpless to exact real change.

These feelings are compounded by the fact that I don’t fully trust our allies — who make up much of the audience I’m serving — either.

The Left’s Long History Of Transphobia

Sometimes I get the feeling that allies who read my work aren’t really interested in helping to improve the lives of trans people. While the right seeks to eliminate us from public life, so often the folx on the left meant to protect us are arguing with us or making their allyship conditional on the tone we use in our advocacy. What good is having a platform in The Washington Post if those likely to read my words end up arguing about ancillary topics like whether a trans woman’s sexual partners are gay or not, or whether we’re “biologically male”? Plenty of liberal publications have covered detransitioners like Walt Heyer, who the White House cited in an official memo justifying the ban. Whether they feel like it or not, those outlets are complicit in thwarting progress for trans rights.

While I’m professionally engaged in emotional labor with the hope of telling trans stories that enable people to learn, I still see the constant Twitter threads and the comments sections calling me a man or mentally ill, or both. And there are always trans stories from well-meaning cis allies that unknowingly end up hurting my community in how they frame and handle trans stories.

Sometimes I get the feeling that allies who read my work aren’t really interested in helping to improve the lives of trans people.
Click To Tweet

At the same time, I’m thankful for the platform that I do have. I’m lucky to be able to speak to so many people about my community’s struggles. I constantly get messages from people who tell me that my work changed their life and honestly, the feeling I have when I hear that is indescribable. When it comes to the nasty comments sections, well, there’s a reason why my name is at the top of the article and not the bottom. Being a self-employed writer is a tough gig.

My precarious existence as a trans freelancer came into full focus Thursday night as the Senate prepared to vote on the “Skinny Repeal” of Obamacare. As a self-employed writer, I depend on the Affordable Care Act for my health insurance, and as a trans woman, I depend on Planned Parenthood for my hormone prescription. After the anti-trans politics of earlier in the week, the vote was the final push my emotions needed before breaking. After almost 24 hours of work with only sleep breaks in between, I openly wept.

The next morning, my words would go out to thousands, and yet, in that moment, I felt so utterly voiceless and alone.

The world had been sad since Tuesday.

This is how Gabriel García Márquez begins his story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” And never has a sentence felt so prophetic, so precise.

Márquez writes of a seaside town in a dreamlike state where a family must daily battle the crabs inundating their home seeking refuge from a days-long rainstorm.

“The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.”

It was in this light that Pelayo crossed his courtyard to throw the crabs into the sea. Upon his return, he discovered a wondrous being, a very old man with fantastical features.

“He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”

In this story, Márquez, a master of magical realism, which pirouettes between the physical and the fantastical, satirizes our attempt to familiarize the extraordinary. Pelayo gets his wife to show her the man in their courtyard, who Márquez describes as a nightmare with not only huge buzzard wings, but a bald skull and a nearly toothless mouth.

“They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.”

Like all great stories, Márquez’s is open to interpretation; the old man could be seen as so many things. But in the wake of our current surreal reality, it led me to wonder: Has the strange beast of hate and bigotry become normalized as well? And if so, how do we resist this familiarity breeding dangerous inaction?

There isn’t time to accept indifference, because the world has been sad since Tuesday and we must channel this universal despair into something greater, into our future.

But first we must get one thing clear. We must continue to hate oppression; we must continue to hate the oppressor. Hate cannot be loved into submission. Hate must be hated. And we cannot require or expect anyone to forgive the hatred that brought us here.

If you’re not fully invested in the most vulnerable among us, then you’re standing in the way of progress and deserve every particle of shame that it is humanly possible to feel. Those of us fighting do not have an iota of energy to spare for bruised egos. There is no time nor room left for meaningless slogans. “Love Trumps Hate” is now and has always been a lie. If standing up against hate with all the rage, contempt, and horrified anger that can be mustered is an act of hate in and of itself — we must embrace it.

We must denounce the lie of White Supremacy that if we “refuse to hate,” then the ugliness in the world will somehow go away. This isn’t a fairytale, a game, or an alternate reality — this is real life. We cannot lovingly call someone in from the darkness. No, we scream at the top of our lungs, “You’re killing us!” We can no longer stand there and cower, unable to act due to shock or fear.

Those of us fighting do not have an iota of energy to spare for bruised egos.
Click To Tweet

In order to conquer the ugliness in this world, we have to defeat the ugliness within — the defensive tone, the hurt feelings, the endless amount of excuses we make so as not to take responsibility for the pain caused to someone else. But too many see things differently and are clinging to the lies that brought this darkness upon us.

A week before the election, Colby Itkowitz authored a piece for The Washington Post entitled, “What is this election missing? Empathy for Trump voters,” in which he interviewed sociology professor and author Arlie Russell Hochschild. When asked about what Trump is tapping into, she stated, “There are fundamental differences, but there are yet more fundamental commonalities. He speaks to their underlying feeling of invisibility and being disparaged.” Hochschild later argues, “Progressives have to get out of their corner and reach out . . . Extreme blame-pinning rhetoric tends to extinguish empathy toward the ‘other’.”

After the election, Michael Lerner demanded on the New York Times opinion pages that we “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters.” He writes that shame played a role in Trump’s victory. “Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed.” He concludes, “The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear, [and] if the left could abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base.”

The myth of two sides states that two contrasting points of view, by virtue of opposition, are equally valid and worthy of consideration. When this untruth is accepted as matter of fact, we see anyone who challenges anyone else as the perpetrator of undue shame . . . when in fact, if one group is having its very livelihood and welfare threatened by another group, it should have every right to react with anger.

Daniel Sznycer, coauthor of “Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said: “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.” Coauthor Leda Cosmides added, “When people devalue you, they put less weight on your welfare. They help you less and harm you more. This makes any information that would lead others to devalue you a threat to your welfare.”

The lie of two sides needs to die a fiery death before it consumes us all and there is nothing and no one left. Michael Lerner wrote, “The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they are vulnerable . . . because of the selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).” We know the supposed threat to their welfare is based on a racist, sexist, hateful lie, and whether they do or not is irrelevant. Their actions have deadly consequences on the most vulnerable in our society.

Causing them to feel shame isn’t the problem; the bigotry they accepted as a means of self-protection is.

The Brown, Queer, And Poor Are Not The Ones Holding The Left Back
theestablishment.co

There is no escape from the world now that the era of “Hope and Change” is over. The bigots are emboldened. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in the first five days following the election, there have been more than 400 documented incidents of harassment and intimidation Suicide prevention hotlines have been bombarded with calls. Black university students are being threatened with racist violence. Literal symbols of hate have been scrawled onto buildings. Muslim Americans are being attacked. Pride flags have been burned. Our friends, neighbors, and relatives tell us stories of abuse they experienced in school, at the gas station, on their way to work, doing nothing differently than they did on Monday — if you haven’t heard those stories, either no one feels safe telling you, or your circle is filled with the bland, cishet, white men and women that brought this painful era upon us.

Now the monsters have taken off their masks and feel safe. They should never feel safe.

The bigots are in the streets unafraid of repercussion for their violent actions, and we’re supposed to listen to what they have to say? Because if we don’t, their feelings will be hurt? The bruised ego that shame may cause will never be equivalent to the physical, psychological, and spiritual violence that racism, transphobia, queerphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, sexism, ableism, and every other form of bigotry enacts on the marginalized every damn day.

In Márquez’s story, Pelayo and Elisenda overcame their surprise and found the wondrous being, hunched in the mud before them, familiar. The horror they first felt was extinguished. How familiar has bigotry become in our eyes?

As I wrote before:

“When a professional abuser is uncritically profiled in a magazine, or a president of a hate-group is presented as an opposing expert in a reported piece, it perpetuates a cycle of violence on our psyches and our bodies and maintains the status-quo of discrimination, inequity, and inequality.”

Now a transphobic, abusive, ableist, White Supremacist, KKK-endorsed, sexual predator has been elected President of the United States and he’s filling his cabinet with like-minded individuals whom the media has always presented as “just another side to consider.” And we’re supposed to empathize and refuse to shame those who put him in office? FUCK. NO. That request is an act of violence, and those who refuse to hate the hatred that brought us here are perpetuating the very thing they profess to stand against.

Now the monsters have taken off their masks and feel safe. They should never feel safe.
Click To Tweet

The most privileged among us keep murmuring that it’s all going to be okay. No, it’ll be okay for them, but the rest of us have to fight because those that don’t have to will never fight hard enough — their survival does not depend on it. As I wrote before, “Living with trauma means learning how to cope and few people will ever approve of how you cope because empathy is the enemy of capitalism.”

There’s going to be more people than there ever were before who are going to have to learn how to cope. And if you cannot fight — if you’re too tired, too drained, too overwhelmed from the world kicking you over and over again — we’ll take care of you. We, those of us fighting alongside you, will clear a path for you, get you to safety, protect you. And when you’re rested, and renewed and able, ask one of us if we need a break. Don’t believe us when we say we’re fine.

We have to look out for each other now because the world has been sad since Tuesday, and we must do everything in our power to make it better for all those grieving.

 I hear with increasing frequency this lament of liberal elites: The left will eat itself. Cries of concern are usually focused on people like me, people who are marginalized: the loud and disenfranchised, the uncompromising and unforgiving, the brown, the queer, the poor, the disabled. We are never satisfied. We sacrifice the greater good for our own selfish needs. We are distracting the left from their mission. We are dividing the party. We are creating a quagmire. We are the regressive left. We are the illiberal left. We are the new dictators. We are why the left eats itself.

I hear from white men about how I have demonized them, the founders of liberal ideology, and made them afraid to speak their minds. I hear about how they used to support me and my feminist and anti-racist causes, but how I’ve made it impossible for them to do so now because of my anger at their privilege.

I hear from white women about how I’ve fractured feminism with my need for intersectionality. I’ve made feminism too personal, too selfish. I’ve sacrificed them for the needs of black men, trans people, disabled people. It used to be about something bigger than your own needs, they cry.

“[T]he new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence,” says Jonathan Chait in one of his many essays dedicated to raising alarm about how hard people like me are making things for good white people like him.

College students who shut down appearances by problematic figures, Twitter rebukes that coerce apologies for questionable statements, protests that shut down political appearances — all of these have been used to sound the alarm in the progressive movement. All have been used to paint a picture of a world where the oppressed has become the oppressor, and the ultimate victims are the allies who used to fight next to the disenfranchised.

But this imagines a world before where we were once united. Where people of all races, gender identities, incomes, and abilities worked together in harmony for the true good of the left. We were all freedom fighters united by the call of justice and equality.

This world did not exist.

Yes, we worked together for women’s suffrage — only to find that the white women at the front of the movement would use the fear of the black vote to get it. Yes, we marched on Washington together — but when the marching was over, it became clear that many white liberals would turn on us the moment we asked for changes in their actions and in their communities.

We were only supported so long as we did not ask for too much too soon, so long as we asked politely and thanked profusely. And we were not satisfied with that arrangement, not even then.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”

What we see now is not the left “eating itself” and the destruction of the great coalitions that brought so much progress in decades past. What we are seeing is what we’ve always seen: privileged white liberals demanding that those of us on the bottom sacrifice ourselves on the altar of the greater good. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who still refuse to actually listen to those they claim to represent. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who see the acknowledgement of the left’s racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia as a larger threat than the bigotry itself. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals refusing time and time again to reflect upon their actions and actually get better.

It is ironic to see privileged liberals bemoan how the left is now eating itself when they have been eating the less privileged since their inception. We have been used for food and fuel, barter and trade. Our issues have been raised when convenient, silenced when not. We finally have some power to say no, to refuse to be sacrificed, and for that we are accused of destroying the movement. The privileged among us refuse to see that every call-out is an opportunity to learn and engage, an opportunity to fix our mistakes and become more of what we claim to be: progressive.

What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who see the acknowledgement of the left’s racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia as a larger threat than the bigotry itself.
Click To Tweet

Those with nothing new to say should not be speaking for our progressive movements. Those with little to lose should not be defining the greater good. Those who refuse to be inconvenienced should not call for the sacrifices of others. Your place at the front of a movement is not grandfathered in because the leaders of the past have always looked and sounded like you. By definition, progressives move forward, and we should not let the pace of that movement be set by those who like to sit and rest at the stops that meet their goals.

If the privileged of the movement refuse to let go of their trickle-down progressivism, they will find themselves increasingly embattled with the demands of those who are not content to wait their turn. But if they hold out, the cries will fade. And this won’t be because the privileged few have won — it will be because they will have become irrelevant and nobody will bother.