I’ve submitted a post to the More ^Than Men project, run by Sasha Pixlee for the Women Thinking Free Foundation. A teaser:
I am engaged actively in a number of struggles with which even some of my more adversarial readers at my blog, Lousy Canuck, must sympathize. I cater specifically to a few niche audiences by virtue of who I am — I am an atheist, and feel that public policy should be made only with regard to real science rather than personal beliefs. I am a skeptic, and feel that people who sell anti-scientific nonsense should be chastised for stealing money from the underprivileged who fall for their chicanery. I am a feminist, and part of my feminist leanings involves understanding that all women are fully human, and that almost all objections to reproductive rights stem from religious or pseudoscientific beliefs and are in direct contradiction with the scientific facts at hand. I am a humanist, where I believe each human being has the same net inherent worth and their caste in society matters less than the merit of their opinions. I am a science-booster, in that I believe wholeheartedly that empirical, testable, reproducible studies of how this universe actually works is the only way to model our decisions, and that any view that is held in contradiction with the established facts that come from said study should be excised from the public discourse. The running theme here is that if you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t make any decisions by it.
I am also a white male. That’s right, I’m swinging pale pipe.
This means I have at least two major positions of privilege over many of my compatriots in all of these various fights, and that my privilege causes my words to be amplified while others’ meritorious positions are muted. In addition, I am cisgender, where my societally-expected gender comports with the physical sex I was born with; and my heterosexuality is likewise considered “the norm” in society, and I am therefore privileged by virtue of happening to be part of a majority where the minorities are often silenced, excluded or ignored, whether purposefully or not. I often don’t realize I have these privileges — the fact slides neatly into the shadows behind my thoughts, and it’s simply forgotten. As a result, sometimes in trying to help on one front, I’m unintentionally doing damage on another.
