An Observation

I mentioned this in comments earlier, but it really deserves a post of its own: It is a critical piece of ally work to acknowledge that being marginalized because one holds beliefs that are marginalized and/or is part of a movement whose identity is marginalized is fundamentally not the same as being marginalized because of one's intrinsic characteristics.

No matter how immutable these beliefs may be, it is different.

I'm never not going to be a feminist, for example. And feminism is a marginalized identity within a misogynist culture. But being a feminist is not the same, in many crucial ways, as being a woman.

It is a choice to be part of a movement built around an identity; it is not a choice to be a person born, by birth or circumstance, into a marginalized population.

A genuine ally knows this, and does not attempt to conflate the two.

[Related Reading: On Situational and Relative Privilege.]

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