It comes from the latin.

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1416472]

Kinda busy right now - anyone care to drop in an example of each of them?

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Was this one of your links? http://www.derailingfordummies.com/

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

You forgot class privilege, the lack of which is often the #1 reason for white, straight, cisgendered men to deny the existance of any of the privileges they possess: the most vehement denier of privilege is the white, straight, cismale who was born lower-class or underclass, who has raised himself to lower-middle or middle class through his own efforts, and who will loudly yell at every opportunity that his white-straight-cismale privilege didn't get him anything and he worked like a dog for everything he's ever gotten, so clearly the whole theory is bunk.

To which one points out: okay, now imagine that the person born into your exact same situation is a black transwoman lesbian, and imagine how much harder her struggle to get to the exact same place would have been...

Intersectionality is a bitch.

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

Only didn't tick cisgender as I don't know what it is hehe.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure if I ever had it, but the topic has certainly popped up on my journal a few times.

[andrewducker]

Time to go googling...

[nameandnature]

I'm not sure arguing about who has privilege in the abstract is useful. It's a bit like arguing about whether "Islam is a religion of peace" in Yvain's example. So I didn't tick that I believe in its existence. Privilege is often treated as a sort of gas that attaches to a person (like Pullman's Dust) and provides a theory of justified dismissal for stuff they say.

That said, I do believe that, say, "women experience more street harassment than men", because the evidence I've seen here on LJ is very convincing. But it seems to me that the concept of privilege isn't just the sum of empirical statements like that one.

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

but it's my day off hehehe

[communicator.livejournal.com]

And the other way round - people who would never make a racially offensive remark are quite happy to say 'Working class people are genetically inferior'. Genetically inferior! In 2009.

[andrewducker]

Well there must be _some_ explanation for their wilful refusal to engage in all the wonderful opportunities that middle-class people take advantage of!

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I feel stupid!

[andrewducker]

You're not stupid, you just haven't encountered some stuff before!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, well said. I may steal this, do you mind?

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

By all means!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Not chosen to be proportional. I know less about white privilege than the others, so my example isn't as good.

White Privilege: The vast majority of heroes depicted in stories look like you.

Male Privilege: You can take a walk in the evening without having to take careful inventory of what you're wearing. If you're assaulted, you can expect not to be blamed for the assault.

Heterosexual Privilege: When talking about your partner, you don't have to choose between carefully watching your words, and risking being treated weirdly by your coworkers.

Cisgender Privilege: You are likely to be able to walk down the street in the daytime without being openly mocked.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Cisgender Privilege: You are likely to be able to walk down the street in the daytime without being openly mocked.
That's a rubbish choice of cisgender privilege example, might I say. Women, POC and homosexuals are openly mocked in the street all the time. Why I was openly mocked yesteryday. Try again.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

And it's not even that you haven't encountered or understood the privilege itself, you just don't have that frame of reference for it. ________ privilege (in case you haven't looked it up yet) is the term used when a majority/'norm'/culturally dominant section of society have a set of basic, in-built advantages just due to being born white/male/middle class/heterosexual/cisgendered (cisgendered means that you have an unambiguous, societally-approved gender identity, ie: not trans).

The idea of ________ privilege goes hand-in-hand with the idea that you probably don't know you're privileged, or at least probably don't understand the full extent of it. It's often used hand-in-hand with "You're blinded by ..." and is short-hand for (the sometimes-true but always-obnoxious): "You don't get it, you can't get it, and even if I tried to explain you wouldn't get it, so I'm not even going to bother."

*Grins*

[marrog.livejournal.com]

How about...

Cisgender Privilege: On forms, you never have a problem with the often mandatory 'male' or 'female' choice you are presented with. You will never have to tick a box that you are not. You will never want or need an 'other/not specified' box.

It's wordier, but then, cisgender privilege is easily the most consistently complex and subtle of all of these options.

The thing that strikes me as most hideously unacceptable about cisgender privilege is those who have the personal belief that whatever gender (or lack thereof) a person has chosen/found to identify themselves with, they reserve the "right" to call them by their "true gender" or their "biological gender" or whatever because otherwise you're stepping on their taxonomical rights somehow. But then, that one gets imposed on homosexuals as well, and bisexuals in particular.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

My previous reply was badly put. Can you suggest a better example, instead? I can easily see a big difference between amount of mockery-on-the-street between cisgender and non-cisgender as I have presented as both in the past, and that's the biggest difference between the two I experienced. I have no experience moving across the other axes, so I don't know to what extent that experience is intersectional with womens' experiences, etc.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Well, this is from the viewpoint of an Asian guy living in one of the most conservative states in America...

White privilege: I've often heard the Supreme Court is an example of this.
Male privilege: Augusta National, the private golf club for the prestigious Masters tournament, still won't let women in (though they did let non-whites in after Tiger Woods won back in 1997). There was that whole hoopla with that woman protesting during the tournament a couple of years ago.
Heterosexual privilege: In my home state of Arkansas, they just passed a law that banned unmarried couples from adopting children. Obviously, this hurts heterosexual couples some but it hits homosexual couples even harder because same-sex marriages are banned in this Bible Belt state.
Cisgender privilege: It would be very, very difficult for a transgender person to win a public election here in Arkansas.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

*nods* Good example, I rail against this quite a bit. I find it hard to explain to people why it's such a big deal, though. It's about being told, all the time, "People like you don't exist."

[marrog.livejournal.com]

*Nods* Every single time I check the 'female' box in forms I think how lucky I am not to have to look for an 'other'. I have some issues with some aspects of trans politics, but there can be nothing more horrible than constantly having to say that you're something you're not, or choose the 'closest' option. By the time I was extensively filling in forms there was a sexuality option that included me, and I was glad about that - although the absence of an option (since before they'd just assume straight and not ask) is very different from having to choose the wrong one. I look forward to the day when both options can just be removed (again, in the case of sexual orientation) because we no longer need to keep track for 'diversity' figures.

Regarding your other comment, women and gays still get mocked on the street plenty. I imagine transfolk (who are visibly so that is, plenty who aren't) get mocked more than, say, a woman in a teeshirt and jeans, but not necessarily more than two guys hand-in-hand, or a fat woman with glasses, or a woman in a short skirt, or (cue realm I have no knowledge of) a South Asian woman in a sari. I say 'women' mostly because guys do generally get the least abuse, even within their subsets (with the exception of openly gay men vs lesbians, where I think in couples guys probably get the most serious abuse - I've never felt in physical danger walking hand in hand with a girl).

I guess the test would be to send a guy in a short skirt and a woman in a short skirt past a mob of chavs and see which one got the most abuse, *wry grin*.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

(for the purposes of anyone reading along, answer to this here)

[andrewducker]

Yup. It's simple politeness to refer to people by whatever terms they would like to be referred to.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

the sometimes-true but always-obnoxious

And thus begins the inexorable slide to arguments about tone... :/

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

in know someone who would say that you aren't middle class if your wife has to work to afford to send the kids to private school.

I can see what he is getting at - definitions of middle class have slipped a lot over the past 50 years...