Jane Clare Jones is amazing.  This is from her annotation of a discussion presented on BBC 4’s Woman Hour:

Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities at the University of Leeds, and our very own Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, very ably adjudicated by Jane Garvey.

 

[SH]…y’know, and we’ve seen this before, it’s very very dangerous, we’ve seen this before in feminism, in relation to the position of Black women, and in relation to the position of working class women, y’know, I think we absolutely as feminists have got to move away from a politics which is based around perceptions of realness, and that white, cis women such as myself, such as Kathleen, have got to give up some privilege here…

[JCJ] Let’s unpack some intersectionality burble then shall we Sally? First, the imputation that Black women and working-class women are a subset of women whose womanhood is ‘less real’ that white women’s womanhood is bullshit, and politically motivated and offensive bullshit. There have always been and remain tensions within feminism along race and class lines, and there probably will always be, because these intersections are massively important political and social differences that cut though the body of women. We will, I hope, always continue to wrestle with these issues, to give them space, and to endeavour to work with them in order to best articulate our shared interests as women, and to allow for the expression of our differences. As I have said before, it is not easy, and it shouldn’t be. None of this translates into an idea that Black women or working-class women are somehow not women, and Crenshaw never intended intersectionality to be used to fracture the class of female people in order to include male people. The fact that Black females are female does not mean that male people are female, and you really need to stop and have a long hard look at yourself and what the fuck you’re saying. Frankly, this makes my blood boil. And I know from listening to many Black women that they find it enraging – both because their womanhood is being undermined, and they’re being used as a political prop in an argument, and maybe even more so, because it’s being done with a veneer of woke anti-racism, while being fucking racist, and the women doing it won’t listen to them when they call it out.

Secondly, can you imagine anything more white and middle class and privileged than thinking you can avoid sex-based oppression by identifying out of it? What kind of life have you lived, that you respond to a well-grounded observation about the distribution of care-work (let alone femicide, or poverty, or lack of education, or FGM, or forced marriage, or sexual slavery, or any other of the number of sex-based violences that disproportionately affect women with less economic and racial power, or from cultures with more rigid patriarchal practices than our own), and turn around, and say that you are fighting for the interests of working class and women of colour by denying the analysis of the basis of their exploitation????? This whole towering pile of bullshit is precisely an artefact of privilege. Walk into any Gender Studies class in the country if you have any doubts. Over to Kathleen…

KS: I am exactly here to fight on behalf of the interests of Black and working-class female women, it is them that bear the disproportionate brunt of inequality in our society, and if we lose the ability to name those people as such, and to talk about the causal factors that lead to their predicament, then we won’t be able to fight for them, so it’s precisely dangerous, the kind of rhetoric that’s coming out of the new gender identity doctrine…

JG: Sally, can I just, I mean, if it were a level playing field, why do we not hear as much from trans men as we do from trans women?

BOOM. Answer that question while avoiding granting recognition to the political importance of sex if you will Sally?

 

In the future I’ll be quoting other parts of JCJ’s post, as her clarity of thought and argumentation is unrivalled on these topics that important to women.