#passing privilege

I totally get that there's something simultaneously inevitable and revolting about the idea of a character, canonically extremely oppressed in a world in which everyone whose skin color is described is more or less brown, being played by a member of the least oppressed population demographic with which most of us are familiar. My initial reaction was not great, either.

But every time I see someone say: "Murderbot is not a cis white man!" I can't help thinking: "No, it's not. But in the TV show, it looks like one."

Look, I'm bisexual. And cis. And monogamous. The person I married happened to also be bisexual and cis. We didn't stop being bisexual when we married each other, but when we're together, we don't look queer. We look heterosexual. Which means, we get a lot of heteronormative privilege we don't ask for and I can see why more visibly queer people might resent that. But you know what happens when we try to reject that privilege? People both straight and queer look us dead in the eye and tell us that we're not really queer.

And that sucks.

Ask any light-skinned black person capable of passing for white, any Jew being told that it's okay to commit terrorist acts toward them because they're really white, any queer in any closet, any SecUnit getting a job as security consultant believing that if its soft, grateful clients didn't think it was an augmented human they wouldn't like it so much.

It's not a good idea to rate things hierarchically. Particularly not oppressions. Every person's oppression is unique, and some are more fatal than others but they're all uniquely awful. Knowing that you're not what you're passing as and that the only way to gain access to certain things that should be available to anybody is to deny part of yourself is pretty bad; especially if failure to pass properly is likely to get you lynched. Or stripped for parts and recycled.

Murderbot doesn't want to be a cis white augmented human male. It doesn't like how it feels to be treated as one. It wants to be itself. Even though being treated as itself has always meant being treated badly, and it doesn't like that either. It isolates itself a lot in environments where it has to pass as an augmented human, to minimize the time it spends maintaining its false face.

Consider what it says when contemplating what name to put in the FeedID that Senior Indah insists upon, in Fugitive Telemetry:

I could use the local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces. it wasn't my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot. Or I could use the name Rin. I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn't have to think about what I was...I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

It could have an easier life and make the people around it more comfortable if it compromised on presenting itself as itself, whole entire. But it doesn't want to claim that easier life. It's not worth it.

Maybe that'll come across in the show and maybe it won't and maybe whether it comes across or not will depend as much on the viewer as on what appears on the screen. We won't know till we see it.

i don’t talk about this enough because i’m always afraid someone’s gonna try to fact-check my existence. that someone’s gonna look at me and decide, again, that i’m not enough. not native enough. not métis enough. not oppressed enough. not traumatized enough. not legit enough. and i’m tired. i’m so fucking tired.

i’m métis. my dad is blackfoot and ojibwe. his dad—my pa—literally went to a residential school. he had our language beaten out of him. had culture stripped from him like it was dirt that needed cleaning. and guess what? he survived. and then he passed down whatever scraps colonialism didn’t steal to my dad, who passed it down to me. stories. pride. grief. resilience. memory. and you know what the world says to that?

“oh. you don’t look native.”

i want to scream every time i hear that. like indigeneity is a costume i forgot to put on that morning. like you get to look at my skin, my face, my paleness, and just erase everything else. like the blood in my veins doesn’t matter because it doesn’t match your textbook idea of what native is “supposed” to look like. as if colonization didn’t literally breed people like me into existence. as if passing privilege means absence. as if my culture disappears the second you decide it’s inconvenient.

white-passing isn’t some kind of golden ticket. it’s a complicated-ass identity crisis you never get a break from. it means i don’t get followed around stores, but i do get erased. it means i don’t get some forms of direct violence, but i get silence. silence when i speak about my people. silence when i try to grieve what was taken from us. silence when i say, “my pa was in a residential school,” and someone replies with “oh… but you’re basically white, right?”

no. i’m not basically anything. i’m métis. and yes, my mum’s french. colonizer blood, settler ancestry. that shit lives in my family tree like rot and roots at the same time. and i don’t ignore it. i can’t. it’s part of me, and it makes things more complicated than i ever asked for. it means i’m constantly reconciling the fact that i carry both the colonized and the colonizer inside me. it’s guilt. it’s shame. it’s discomfort. and it’s mine to live with. and yet people act like that’s the part that makes me more “valid.” like proximity to whiteness is some kind of credibility. like i should be grateful.

i’m not fucking grateful. i’m angry.

i’m angry that i have to “prove” anything. i’m angry that my culture is something i have to perform in order for people to believe it’s real. i’m angry that i have to talk about residential schools—literal generational trauma—as some kind of evidence that i belong. why do i need trauma receipts for you to listen? why do i have to list blood quantum and history and geography like this is a test?

you wanna talk about passing privilege? fine. it’s real. i’ll say it myself. i know i can walk into places and not be immediately marked as “other.” that’s safety i didn’t earn, and i don’t deny it. but it doesn’t mean i’m not indigenous. it doesn’t mean my ancestors didn’t bleed. it doesn’t mean my culture is a costume i’m borrowing.

i’m not borrowing anything. this is mine. this grief, this pride, this confusion, this rage—it’s all mine. my identity isn’t a checklist. it’s a constant push and pull between what i feel, what i know, and what the world tries to take from me.

sometimes i feel like i’m stuck in the middle. not native enough for some people, not white enough for others. and i get it—métis identity has always been complicated. we’ve always existed in the margins, the in-betweens, the places where people refuse to look. and still—we exist. we survive.

so yeah, i’m white-passing. and i’m métis. and i’m pissed off. and i’m proud. and i’m still here.

This speaker in particular was a political activist. She studied communications and actively works on campaign trails for purposes of candidates with a stunning success rate. She’s a lesbian and did a lot of LGBT activism. A few years ago her entire talk focused on the importance of voting and creating lasting generational change by building coalitions across age groups. She spoke about the difficulties in leading a movement with leaders who did not want to step down and those who were rising up not wanting to listen to the experience of those who came before them. I was unsure at what to say, what to ask during the Q&A portion, but eventually I did come up with a question.

So bi+ spaces are in the state of, I like to call it, moriviví. Okay, so moriviví, to give some short amount of context, is a plant that grew around my hometown and the second that you touch its leaves it’ll just kind of shrivel up as if it’s dying, and then when you leave it alone for a while it’ll come back to life. So bi+ spaces tend to burn and rise with a fire, a passion that moves us to do these amazing things, and shortly after, because of lack of funding or volunteers or resources, they disappear. So real, that’s so real. And it breaks my heart, and someone who wants to find bi+ community finds a trail of whatever organization was before and they restart the organization. It begins again. You know, we light up, we go, and then something happens. We don’t have the funding, we don’t have the leadership, we die.

So I explained this to the speaker and I asked what should we do to maintain leadership, any tips to make sure that we can keep this bi+ movement going forward? I didn’t really get the answer I was looking for. There were a few sentences of her explaining the importance of current leaders taking current emerging activists under their wing, and then her response took a sharp turn.

She spoke about how bisexual people, especially bisexual women, directly benefit from straight-passing privilege, that I needed to understand that it was lesbians who did all the heavy lifting in queer history. Bisexual people can’t be queer activists because we reap all the benefits from, quote unquote, “straight-passing” privilege, that we can quote ‘blend in.’ She said that that was why lesbians and gay men were the ones at the forefront, especially when lesbians were the ones caring for gay men during the AIDS crisis. Bisexuals needed to “make space”, she said, for those who have been there from the very beginning.

As I’m telling this story, I want to tell you and I want to tell all of our listeners that I spoke up, that I told her the story of how bisexual people were actively nursing and helping her fellow LG folks during the AIDS crisis. I want to tell you that I called her out for actively and violently reading me and my gender without ever bothering to ask me what my pronouns were.

That wouldn’t really be the truth. The truth is that as she said all of this, I froze. I grew stiff as she related how bisexual people can’t be activists because we directly benefit from straight privilege, whatever that means. I dissociated as she read me as a woman who didn’t know enough LGBT history to understand what lesbians went through.

It was only in the discussion portion of the class a few days after, when a student recounted the event for me as a viewer, that I was actually able to remember what happened in some detail. And it was only when she asked me how I felt that I was actually given the chance to check in with myself and say the truth, you know, like I had never been actively and violently read like that.

Bailey: I think it’s really funny when activists discredit parts of their own community for not being OG when they themselves are not OG. I assume that this person was not old enough to be at Stonewall. Oh well, perhaps she’s aged very well.

But I mean if we really want to talk about the AIDS crisis, then let’s talk about the thousands of bisexual men who died from the virus. And if you write us and hit me with that smarty pants emoji and say, ‘Well actually according to the data very few bisexual—’ I’m going to respectfully tell you to shut the fuck up because the data does not exist because no one was counting the bisexuals in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They were lumped into the gay men populations, and much like the tree that falls in the forest, just because you’re not asking someone if they’re bi doesn’t mean that they aren’t. At any rate, lesbians weren’t the only people in the AIDS wards and in the ACT UP demonstrations. There were plenty of allies in those spaces and I assure you plenty of them were bisexual. Statistically speaking, probably a lot of them were bi.

For someone, particularly a person with power, to disregard bisexuals and tell them to sit the fuck down because they can blend in is so blasé and frankly dangerous. How ironic for her to tell you to be quiet when silence equals death, huh? You know, I swear the people who wear those fucking shirts are the ones who are hoarding power, the ones that want to gatekeep power and don’t actually want to help the other younger activists behind them rise up, and meanwhile disregarding as many vulnerable groups and populations as they possibly can.

Unfortunately a lot of the work we do as bi+ advocates is just starting from square one, convincing people or trying to convince people that we exist. You as a bi person who has been out for a decade but only has recently gotten involved in LGBTQ+ spaces, I’ve been mostly surprised by the poor treatment I received from queer people themselves. And the thing I bump up against the most is this myth of passing privilege.

Jace: It’s a hard myth to bump against because in some ways it feels true. It feels like monosexuals have a point. It feels like the LGs have a right to resent us, that maybe we shouldn’t step into their spaces after all. Monogamous bisexual people are far more likely to end up with someone who doesn’t share their gender identity. This kind of imposter syndrome is tough, but you’re not alone.

I know that I didn’t fail the cause that day when I froze up. I was faced with a kind of violence that I didn’t know how to handle at the time, and it’s okay if there are moments when you don’t know how or have the strength to be a bisexual killjoy because the movement is all of us, the collective. You can take a sick day. You can take a ‘what the fuck just happened’ day because everyone is here to help you out and pick up the slack on those days

Bailey: And that’s exactly how you push back against the burnout that you were talking about and trying to find bi community. They’re constantly falling apart because there are so many of us that do too much too quickly because there are so many holes in the wall that we’re trying to plug, right? And that’s exhausting.

As bisexual people we occupy this liminal space that’s easily dismissed, but our fluid experiences encompass more than just desires. Bisexuality isn’t just about sexuality, isn’t about sexual desire, and the bisexual agenda demands more. More than just the awareness that bisexuality exists. We demand—our list of demands in our bisexual agenda—is to be recognized as a state of being, as an option, a whole fluid sexuality with a multiplicity of experiences and manifestations, and we need our allies to take action and donate to bi-specific groups, organizations, literature reviews, research studies, etc.

Transandrophobia is real and denying its existence because "xyz oppression is worse" is fed talk meant to divide the trans community.

Transmisogynoir is real and denying its existence because "intersectionality doesn't work like that" is fed talk meant to divide the trans community.

Exorsexism is real and denying its existence because "it's just misdirected transphobia" is fed talk meant to divide the trans community.

...as a faggot or a queer, and i get yelled at and stared at and shoved and harassed and cornered in bathrooms and followed down streets and insulted.

i'm considered well-passing by so many people, expected to have some sort of magical privilege that stops me from violence, yet somehow the sacrifices in self-expression and presentation that i make only convince people that i'm another form of unacceptable.

if a trans woman is 100% cis passing, yeah, she's afforded the same privilege as a cis woman socially. until she isn't, and someone gets a glimpse at a 5 o'clock shadow, and her privilege is revoked. that's not privilege, that's surviving. she is surviving, not thriving.

if a trans man is 100% cis passing, yeah, he's afforded the same privilege as a cis man socially. until he isn't, and someone gets a glimpse of a gynecology appointment on his calendar, and his privilege is revoked. that's not privilege, that's surviving. he is surviving, not thriving.

if a gay man is 100% straight passing, yeah, he's afforded the same privilege as a straight man socially. until he isn't, and someone gets a glimpse of his boyfriend/husband, and his privilege is revoked. that's not privilege, that's surviving. he is surviving, not thriving.

is it that hard to understand that even if a person is 100% cishet passing, that doesn't mean they have privilege systemically? a trans woman will be unable to change her birth certificate and have an M gender marker on her passport, which cis women do not have. a trans man will be unable to access reproductive care or take off his shirt without fear, which cis men do not worry about. a gay man will be unable to talk about his life and his partner without fear, which straight men do not do.

sure. social privilege exists. a trans man who passes will be treated better by society in a social setting. a trans woman who passes will be treated better by society in a social setting. an intersex person who passes will be treated better by society in a social setting. but passing privilege falls apart when you take it one step back.