#oppression olympics

The ones who routinely regard murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?

Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognitive distortions?

This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.

So, for example:

A white woman might face sexism but not racism.

A Black man might face racism but not sexism.

A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.

This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?

Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.

So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.

Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.

People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.

If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.

The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.

(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)

Oppressor/Oppressed

So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.

This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.

Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:

That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.

This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.

But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.

This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.

If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.

If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.

Wait, though - it gets worse.

Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.

Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.

So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."

Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.

In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.

You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.

Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.

The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:

Palestinians = oppressed

Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...

Israel/Jews = oppressors

Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.

And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.

(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)

This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.

Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?

(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get CisHet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)

Israel as White Colonial Power

Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).

Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'

The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.

Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genocide?

Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?

Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognitive distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.

Palestinians as Eternal Victims

Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.

Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.

Like children. Initializing, isn't it?

Power is Oppression

Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?

Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.

Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:

Jewish indigeneity to the land.

The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII

The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.

~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.

This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.

De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.

So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)

Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'

The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.

That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:

Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.

The next question is:

Can they be de-programmed?

*takes you gently by the hand* (or not if touch makes you uncomfortable) /gen

Talking about oppression isn't about 'who has the most'. It's about acknowledging what is going on, the systems that harm and who they harm and why and fighting them.

If a trans man is white, a cis WOC still has cis privilege, but he still has white privilege. There will be elements of oppression that one person doesn't experience and the other does, and it makes neither 'more oppressed' or 'less oppressed' than the other.

(I'm assuming you meant a cis WOC because you didn't call her trans, but if they were both trans he would have white privilege but not anything gender/sex based due to being trans and the Oppression Olympics would still be cancelled).

You see what I'm saying here? You see what I'm actually saying here? And not something you think I'm saying which you then quoted into my inbox?

Trans men do not have privilege over cis women on the basis of the cis/trans dynamic is a true statement. It obviously becomes more nuanced as you add other factors.

I'm not 'in an MRA sphere'. Do you even know what MRAs believe? What they say about trans men even?

They quite literally don't work like that. It would only —and this "only" is very, very specific to the circumstances of this discourse— work if you're treating either transfeminism or anti-transandrophobia as having a meaning of being a special kind of discrimination, not because of its own kind of intersectionality (like Misogynoir, intertransexism, etc), but because it means it's the one that's "more oppressed".

For fuck sake, neither of the two is more oppressed than the other by itself. If there's an intersection of intersexuality/race/class/disabilities/etc, then that's another complete different story. But Trans Fems and Trans Mascs are quite literally just oppressed differently —the ones on the non-binary spectrum of those are going to go through another layer of oppression, the binary guys— but talking about the binary of it all, Trans Women have hypervisibility (which means almost everything will be published somewhere but it will all be very transmisogynistic, treating them as predators and danger to justify any kind of taking out their right) and Trans Men have invisibility (which means almost nothing will ever be reported, and any rights taken away from them will be done completely silently/already be done). And both are extremely oppressive in their own fucked up ways.

But you can only see one as inherently anti the other if you think yours is the most oppressed and that your term is used for that. Because if then the others say they make the same but for themselves, it will feel like a direct attack to yours. Because you won't see it as intersectionality and each specific oppression being expressed, but as yours existing to say it's the worst, therefore any other coinage similar will be seen as dangerous to you to be able to express your oppression.

And if when you make your own terminology to coin your oppression and some people start telling you that your oppression doesn't exist and even if it did it's not even close to theirs, it's normal to then feel like they are an oppressive force against you.

But this infighting? Is just TERF ideology behind a filter. Stop it for fuck sake. The actual enemy and oppressors are literally the cis TERFS.

Y'all are trying to win the oppression Olympics while we're being actively victims of genocide in a lot of countries worldwide.

So stop falling for this TERF ideologies and do something about it. Learn about the other side and what they live through, that isn't in any way taking what you live through out of existence.

Also, please for the love of god, remember non-binary/neogender/xenogender people. We are quite literally the majority of the trans community if you see studies that actually include us and don't have us forcefully put in binaries. Learn about our experiences, defend us, and learn about exorsexism please. The same way a lot of us do regarding transmisogyny and transandrophobia.

And you need to include intersex people. Not as a footnote, not as a gotcha, and not as a quick shout-out. Learn about the origin of AGAB and why intersex people are trying to stop how it's being used and abolishing it —and actually stop using it. Learn about intersexism, it's history, the slurs that should not be used,... Educate yourselves on people other than you and spread it like you're doing for yours.