when thinking about how oppression works, on a structural level, my guiding principle is that I must spend at least as much time looking down as I do looking up.
what do I mean by this? here's an example. when my surgery is delayed multiple times, I spend a little time looking up (there is only one surgeon in the entire area who will perform this surgery on trans people, so every trans person's surgical timeline is bottle-necked and delayed by months every time he goes to a conference or takes a vacation or experiences an injury. in other words, if I was cis, I would not encounter this difficulty in accessing surgery). and then I spend time looking down (due to nonstop harassment and legal threats, this practice now only treats adults and will no longer perform surgeries on minors. in other words, my access to surgery is predicated on adult privilege I have at the direct expense of trans youth's lack of access).
if you do not build a habit around thinking in this way, you will become the person Audre Lorde describes as "so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face." If we are seeking to dismantle structures of oppression, rather than to simply use and climb them, then we absolutely must make a practice of looking in both directions, especially when we feel like we're on the bottom.
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