Cool post about strategy, tactics, activism, and inclusion from Ily of asexy beast

It got me thinking, yet again, about how crucial it is that minorities stick together. Much better to all be queer together than to be separate, adversarial groups. I know that, for example, to be a gay person rejecting trans people in your movement is epically stupid in terms of not only human decency, but overall strategy. If it was just about rights alone (which some would argue), there would be no qualms about actively including queer groups who aren’t fighting for their own legislation. Apparently, asexuals have tons of free time to devote to causes, what with all the sex we’re not having. However, this idea of inclusion, which to me is intuitive, is Martian to some other folks. I realized today how exactly this idea got drummed into my head.

In the 7th and 8th grades, I attended the world’s most grueling middle school. Every class (or year, or grade, for those in other countries) had only 20 kids. This created a perpetual hothouse of drama. There was a group of “popular kids”, a group of female outcasts (including myself), and a group of male outcasts. The dominion of the popular kids was maintained by one thing: The fact that both groups of outcasts thought the other group was untouchable. If we girls had collaborated with the male outcasts instead of making fun of them, we would have had the numbers to achieve equality with the popular kids. Combined, we could have had the strength to fight back— or to just ignore them. My one regret from that time in my life is not trying to make friends with those boys. Looking back, I’m sure they would have been truer friends to me than the girls were in the end. But of course, I didn’t realize this until years later. I can only imagine how much better my 7th and 8th grade years would have been, had I known all this at the time.

This is a true story. But it’s also an allegory. The stautus quo depends on the infighting of minorities. And queer people who reject other queer people are playing right into the staus quo’s hands. They’re doing the very thing their oppressors want them to do. I guess their middle school experiences were better than mine, and that must be nice for them. They might have better memories, but I think I got a better lesson. Although I wouldn’t wish my experience on any child, I did learn something valuable.

She said it here.

I can’t really speak to specific strategy and tactics, and I’m kind of committed to the whole idea that there’s no such thing as a unitary movement whether it’s LGBT, gender, ethnic, or political. But I really can speak to Ily’s point about 7th and 8th graders. Even at my children’s school, an alternative public school with a team-learning focus where you’re just not going to make it if you can’t work outside your “in” group, it’s pretty clear that most of the kids don’t get that they’d often have more in common with larger cross-gender groups than within their own. I try to encourage my children to see the benefits, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Having watched cohorts of kids moving up for six years now it’s pretty clear that the ones who get the point early or else slip easily from one group to another seem to do really well in the later grades.

So. Would it be a good idea for activist groups to be more inclusive? Well… not exclusively… but yeah, mostly. But Ily’s story is a useful allegory for almost any mixed-social context, not activism.