i see a lot of men who want to be feminist allies talking about rejecting or overcoming their privilege. i feel it is important to point out that literally the only way for you to do this is to live as a woman 24/7/365 for the rest of your life, which is not a project i expect any of you are capable of undertaking (unless you’re already a trans woman, in which case i’d just be calling you a feminist and would never insult the shit out of you by calling you a male ally)
trans women are socially threatened in a way that few other people are because patriarchy absolutely cannot tolerate their existence. it literally attempts to destroy them, like an adaptive immune response to the presence of a pathogen. and with good reason — trans women really do represent an existential threat to patriarchy because a society that accepts trans women as women qua women is fundamentally incompatible with patriarchy. this is why you should make every effort to practice that acceptance
this is also why, if you call yourself a feminist or ally but can’t accept trans women as women even on the internet, or if you think it’s okay to joke about them or to tolerate harassment of them anywhere, it’s pretty clear to me that you’re a reactionary fuckunit and any feminist views you may have expressed were just due to your learning which arguments to parrot in order to camouflage your real nature, and so you can go fuck yourself with a chainsaw imo. and by that i mean you need go get enlightened by someone else who has the saintly patience to put up with your toxic bullshit, because personally, i just want to hurt you
anyway: tangent. the point is, as long as you’re male, you will have privilege, and there is nothing you can do to reject that or overcome that. it’s not something you have any control over — your privilege is granted by other people’s responses and reactions to the fact of your maleness, not because of anything you do, and is therefore a birthright which you as a man cannot refuse
what you can do, and what you must do if you want to call yourself an ally, is examine your privilege as thoroughly as possible, and commit to never abusing it. this is probably impossible since you have been socialized literally from birth to abuse it in a variety of quiet, petty, everyday ways, but the decision to actively oppose patriarchy must begin there
the cool thing about opposing patriarchy is that it’s not nearly as depressing as opposing capitalism can sometimes be, because educating and enlightening people actually has an immediate effect. a social structure like patriarchy exists only because of the largely unconscious cooperation of the people who comprise that structure, and every single act of education and enlightenment chips away at it by elevating that unconscious cooperation to a conscious level. (this is also why a lot of people who were politicized by engaging with feminism are perennially naive liberals: they assume that undermining capitalism can work in the same way)
