Language

Since many people reading this blog may not be familiar with some of the language and terminology we're using, we figured a page with explanations and definitions would be a helpful idea.

Women/woman: Anyone who identifies as a woman, regardless of genitals or how others perceive them.

Men/man: Anyone who identifies as a man, regardless of genitals or how others perceive them.

Transgender/trans: A transgender person is someone who was assigned a sex at birth that they do not identify with.  Example: someone who was assigned male at birth, but identifies as a woman.  Thus a trans woman was assigned male at birth, a trans man was assigned female at birth.

Cisgender/cis: A cisgender person is someone who identifies with the sex they were assigned at birth. Example: someone who was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman.

Genderqueer: Someone who identifies as a gender outside of the gender binary of male/female, as a combination of male and female, or fluctuates between identifying as male or female.

Gender binary/beyond the gender binary: The gender binary is the idea that there are only two genders: woman and man.  However, that leaves out an awful lot of people who identify as both male and female, or neither male nor female, or something else entirely.  The gender binary doesn't recognize how complicated and individual something like gender is, so it's important to move beyond the gender binary in the way we view and talk about gender (i.e. on this blog, when speaking of a general group, we try and say 'people' instead of 'men and women.'  We try and only say men and women when we're specifically talking about men and women).  It's also important to note that there can be quite a bit of overlap between trans and genderqueer identities.  In recognizing that gender can be complicated, you also have to recognize that finding labels that feel right can be difficult.

Privilege: The social, institutional, and systemic privileging of one group over another.  Thus we speak of male privilege, white privilege, straight privilege, class privilege, etc.  Those who are not privileged are marginalized, targeted by laws and policies, othered, and otherwise placed at a severe disadvantage compared to privileged groups.  Often we'll speak of it in terms of privilege versus oppression.  When it comes to privilege and oppression, it's important to recognize something that some people call "intersectionality": recognizing all the intersections of various privileges and oppressions and how they effect each other and impact how each person experiences life in this culture.  Most people have some ways in which they're privileged, and some ways in which they're oppressed.  Thus a white queer woman would have white privilege, but not benefit from straight or male privilege.  So in each interaction, the power and privilege balance would be different. 

Sexism: Prejudice or discrimination against women.

Racism: Prejudice or discrimination against anyone who is not white.

Classism: Prejudice or discrimination against people who are working class, poor, homeless, lower class, or similar.

Heterosexism (used instead of the more common 'homophobia,' which this author feels is insulting to people with actual phobias): Prejudice or discrimination against anyone who is not heterosexual.

Cissexism (used instead of transphobia. See above entry for why): Prejudice or discrimination against people who are transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, or otherwise not cisgender

Adultism: Prejudice or discrimination against children and teens.

Ableism: Prejudice or discrimination against people with disabilities.

An important note on "isms" and "ists": You might notice that for all of these 'isms,' we're defining them as isms only when power and privilege are brought to bear on someone with less power and privilege.  It's not sexism for a woman to say "men are stupid," though it may be prejudiced and/or mean, because when it comes to gender and privilege, men are privileged: women are not.  It then follows that an Indigenous person isn't being racist if they say white people are stupid, or if a trans person says the same about a cis person, etc. That might be prejudice, but it's not an 'ism.'  I also want to make it clear that by power and privilege, I mean someone coming from a group with power and privilege.  If you're a man and your boss is a woman, if she says something negative about men, she still isn't being sexist.  Because although between just the two of them, during work hours, she may have more power than him in certain ways, on a societal level the man still has more power and privilege.

We've definitely seen many people attempt to argue this, as many privileged people seem very insulted when people tell them some words just don't apply to them, but the authors of this blog have no intention of arguing the definition here.  The above is the way we understand and use words such as sexism and classism, and that's the important thing for you to know when reading this blog.

Slut-shaming: In short, policing the way women express their sexuality.  Women are called "sluts" for dressing in ways deemed "too sexual," having "too many" sexual partners, liking the "wrong" types of sex and sex acts, expressing sexual desire, and similarly simply being sexual beings.  Anyone expressing disapproval, anger, or similar sentiments against a woman because of the way she expresses herself sexually is slut-shaming.

Fat-shaming: Body policing and deriding, discriminating against, or otherwise targeting people because of their weight.  Often this prejudice is couched in faux-concern, along the lines of the "obesity epidemic," it's-for-their-own good type rhetoric, as in the recent case of a child who was taken from their parents for no reason other than that he was "obese."

Cultural appropriation:  "Cultural Appropriation - refers to the process by which members of relatively privileged groups 'raid' the culture of less powerful or marginalized groups, and removing [sic] cultural practices or artifacts from historically or culturally specific contexts."  From the Glossary of the Municipal Cultural Planning Project (Canada).  Alternately: "At its core, appropriation is nothing more than a dressed-up word for stealing. In fact, many victims of cultural appropriation have denounced the phrase, claiming that is de-emphasizes the true nature of what they consider a crime. Appropriation occurs when one party takes upon itself to uncover and absorb the practices of another culture without proper understanding, training, respect or permission." from "Interfaith Exchange and the Western Overculture." Source is "Cultural Appropriation."  You can fine several other good definitions there as well!

Queer: Umbrella term used instead of LGBT (which recognizes just a few different identities, instead of acknowledging the entire spectrum), which can basically be claimed by anyone who doesn't identify as straight/heterosexual. Often the term queer is used more in the non-mainstream or radical not-straight community (aka, the queer community), as opposed to the LGBT community which tends to be more mainstream and more focused on specifically the rights of lesbian and gay people (often at the exclusion of everyone else). Queer is also used as an identity in and of itself, in which case what exactly it means in terms of who you're attracted to depends entirely on the individual using it.

Kyriarchy instead of Patriarchy: To quote Arwyn from Raising My Boychick: "While 'patriarchy' places man (literally 'father') as the ruler/dominator, 'kyriarchy' emphasizes that it is the very concept of 'master' that rules us; it is the act of creating hierarchies on which we are all placed 'higher' or 'lower' that oppresses and damages us.

The schema of 'kyriarchy' succeeds where the schema of 'patriarchy' fails by acknowledging the wide variety of dominations/oppressions that humans suffer under: not just women-under-men, but queer-under-straight, trans-under-cis, people-with-disabilities-under-the-temporarily-able-bodied, people-of-color-under-white, poor-under-rich, fat-under-thin, and so on. The masculinity-femininity axis is but one among many ways that humans exist with either privilege or oppression, and most of us exist with a complex array of privilege in some areas and oppression in others."

Additionally, Wiktionary defines kyriarchy as: "A system of 'ruling and oppression' in which many people may interact and act as oppressor or oppressed."

Anarchy: Literally "without ruler." Emilie and Idzie see it as a natural step, if they're against kyriarchy, that they're for anarchy, also known as a world without rulers.