A Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities

I've been thinking about privilege lately. Not exactly a surprise, there.

One thing I've been pondering is this idea: that privilege is rights without responsibilities.

That's not completely accurate: another important definition of privilege--at least , you know, the oppressive kind--is that it is unearned. But they both point to important features of privilege.

That is, to accept something as given without any responsibility to pay for it is a privilege.

You can see this in action in one of the more pervasive defences of white privilege: "I'm not a racist, I never owned slaves, I didn't vote for Jim Crow laws, so why should I have to accept affirmative action/learn about African-American culture/give up one iota of what I have?"

The answer is, because you were robbed.

You were robbed, because your ancestors stole from other people and passed the bill along to you. You were robbed, because they got to have something without paying for it, and now the bill is come due. And you'll keep getting robbed, as long as people like Pat Buchanan still insist that great American experiment involved only hard-working, superior white folks--as if the very temple of democracy in this country itself, the U.S. Capitol, wasn't built with slave labor.

My post today at Shakesville has me thinking about another side of this question: when does a person have the right to claim membership in a group? Or more specifically, just who's a woman, anyway?

For me, the answer is simple: if you claim to be a woman, I'll respect that claim. It's not because I believe in some mystical gender essentialism and can recognize a "spiritual sister" because of my super-special Trannyvision^TM. I believe that there are about 6.75 billion genders in the world: that is, each of us has a gender unique to ourselves. That doesn't mean there aren't classifications that can be made, anymore than believing in human individuality means there aren't Buddhists or Frenchpeople or...women.

Rather, my feeling is that if someone wants to claim the title of "woman," I'm perfectly happy to agree. But then it is my feeling that I will apply to them the same standards I apply to other women (and myself.) Is she a feminist? Does she help break down oppression, or support it? Does she support other women, does she support sexist stereotypes, is she, in short, helping?

Just as I would never question the gender of a woman whose politics and personality I loathe--say, Sarah Palin--I wouldn't question the gender of a trans person. (That is, I wouldn't use bad woman to mean bad at being a woman. Heck, I wouldn't use bad woman at all, I think.) Or to put it another way, judge my claim for a right on how well I live up to its responsibilities: look at what I do and what I believe, what I fight against and what I stand for. And I'll do the same.

It's the only human thing to do.