people confuse “shouldn’t matter” with “doesn’t matter” and it annoys me
race Shouldn’t matter. it should be a neutral characteristic that changes nothing about people’s treatment or placement in society. gender Shouldn’t matter, it’s just a collection of traits we’ve assigned vague aesthetics to in society. in a vacuum, these things are made up constructs with no scientific basis. you might be more genetically related to someone of another race than someone in your own. you might meet someone of another gender who you share more in common with over someone of your own
they do matter, though, don’t they. misogyny is institutionalized across every facet of our society to benefit men at the expense of women. racism is institutionalized across every facet of society to benefit white people at the expense of everyone else. these things go so deep into the roots of everything that simply plucking out the bad apples doesn’t do shit, ten more bad apples will be born tomorrow. this shit is SYSTEMIC
this is why “i don’t see color” and “i’m not a feminist i’m an egalitarian” don’t work. you’re confusing “this shouldn’t matter and we need to fight to make it not anymore” with “it already doesn’t matter! i will just passively opt out of the entire concept.” like. the latter is contributing to oppression. you’re plugging your ears and going lalala. bringing these things into a conversation is not saying “these things are immutable qualities that are unchanging facts of reality and we should be ok with it,” we’re saying “these things do in fact affect us, and if we want to get rid of it, we need to acknowledge that yes, some people are treated worse than us and we need to put in effort to fix that, even if it is at no benefit to us, or even takes away some of our privileges.” and god forbid people bring up intersectionality in these discussions. nobody on here knows what that term means unless it is specifically and exclusively to absolve them of feeling responsible for their own biases and privilege