Noah Teaches Many Things: How to Fight The Systematic Oppression of Women by Men isn't One of Them

photo of Women's Liberation activists is from here

There's currently a very virulent and endemic form of liberalism in queer and LGBTIA politics (the I and the A stand for Intergender and Intersex, and Asexual) that comes with refusing to engage on matters of ant-lesbian and anti-woman political practices as defined by radical lesbian feminists, and I hope, one day, Noah will also educate himself and other people about how men oppress women, and how LGBTIA and Queer culture oppresses lesbians, internationally and within the U.S, and how lesbian feminists and radical feminists are marginalised out of existence in dominant U.S. het media and in dominant queer media, including on their websites, unless to criticise them in deeply anti-feminist ways. Because those are human rights issues of significance and centrality to our respective struggles.

I write this because Noah has been writing to me even after I expressly asked him to stop doing so. Just below is the content of his two latest bits of correspondence, submitted as comments which I won't post to the places he wishes for them to go. I'm posting them here to make a few points about how to approach people you structurally oppress, and how not to. He seeks to defend his good name while continuing to posture himself above me, as my teacher, with me as his pupil. That I never signed up for any of his classes seems to not matter to him.

Before posting this, I have taken time to find out who is his and what his primary work is because I don't wish to "other" him or do that too-easy thing of just dismissing someone because in some ways we disagree on some issues. But on he goes...

Noah has left a new comment on your post "The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stereotypes, Transs...": 

I'm not "posturing" or "pretending"--I really am angry at your oppressive anti-transsexualism and transmisogyny.

If you can't take being called out on your privilege from the people you are oppressing, then keep your oppressive thoughts to yourself and stop trying to analyze other people's experiences when you have no clue what you are talking about.

Something else for your reading list: http://summerofourlorde.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/lordeusesofanger.pdf

Note from Julian to my readers about these two comments:
In my view Noah is behaving hurtfully and harmfully. I feel hurt and harmed by him personally and politically. This is my blog. I get to speak here. It's one of the few places where I do get to speak, actually, without my words being edited or deleted. Noah's suggestion that I should be silent, here, on my own blog, is very obnoxious, among other things like inappropriate and controlling. And his view that I should listen to him when he demonstrates no willingness to genuinely engage, but instead to preach to me and duck out, is not acceptable as a means of engagement, to me. I don't hold myself accountable to people who are privileged as he is and who are also so determinedly anti-feminist and anti-lesbian.

He recommends I read a chapter from Sister Outsider, a book I have promoted here more than he knows. He chooses to know very little, it appears. What Noah can't know, however, is that I'd read and reread all of Sister Outsider likely before he was born. I met and spoke with Audre Lorde and corresponded with her. I don't need some white guy telling me what I need to read by Audre Lorde. She and many other radical feminists have made recommendations to me. I don't really care what white males recommend to me--I've learned white males exist to exploit others and promote ourselves. So why would I care to listen to a white male when I have so many human beings to listen to who speak from positions of oppression Noah will never know, structurally? Why would I be accountable to him for anything, when I hold myself accountable to radical feminist women of many colors, globally? Who does he think he is? That's what I'm wondering. And who does he think he speaks for and represents?

To be very clear: I don't hold myself accountable to any white male supremacists who promote misogynistic and antifeminist anti-lesbians politics.

In my view, Noah, below, expresses faux respect. The most privileged people believe they can pass this off as authentic respect and regard for someone's humanity, but he can't fool me because I've seen this CRAP so much in the past that it is glaringly obvious to me when it shows up uninvited. His ways of being and engaging aren't a useful tool for engagement or coalition-building unless he understands that he needs to apologise for behaving like a big white male jerk to the person or people he has been a dick to.

As long as someone with his pedigree of privileges and entitlements continues to posture himself as superior, he isn't likely to garner much respect from me, beyond me respecting him as someone who is human as a living being. I can't respect his focus as an activist or an educator because his focus on me and his style of educating me has been dick-tutorial. And while dickhood has it's privileges, it isn't receiving my blessings. 

Below he mentions how I haven't yet explored "the difference between sex and gender".

As someone who has endured a great deal of what white het male supremacist boys and men do that destructively and exploitively displayed racist heteropatriarchal sex and gender against my body and being, some of these differences are things I know in very deep ways, beyond the bounds of intellect and essays.

Any writing anywhere that is informed by a radical lesbian feminist viewpoint, that is grounded in radical feminist experience, analyses, theories, or practices of sex or gender, is apparently anathema to him. This selective, privileged refusal of insight, tethered as it is to his rejection of radical lesbian feminisms, leaves his own understandings of sex and gender rather liberal and superficial. He also won't care or be able to learn much about either because he's already positioned himself as "the expert". Self-appointed "experts" like Noah-the-super-white-guy, ought to learn to be accountable to radical lesbian feminists of all colors who know, from positions he and I will never occupy structurally and socially, exactly what those differences are and how they manifest against women globally.

The living radical women of color I know comprehend more about these differences than Noah ever will. And so those are the people I turn to as knowledgeable. Their work over the last twenty years has advanced and deepened Audre's work, built on it, enriched it. Will he contact these women who have done this work since her passing, and be accountable to them? I suspect his ego and his commitment to liberal-to-progressive politics will not let him do that. He shows no signs of caring at all what any living radical lesbian feminists have to say about anything.

I say this based on what I have read that Noah has done with his life as well as what he has written on these subjects: I do not see Noah as someone who can help anyone radically understand much about gender and sex as long as he refuses to know how each are white and male supremacist, anti-lesbian, and anti-woman to the ground and below. To put a liberal queer political frame around each is to be woefully and willfully ignorant about each. And as long as he refuses to learn about and speak out publicly against this--how white male supremacy shapes and contorts both sex and gender into racist, heterosexist, and misogynist practices and identities--queer and not queer, and as long as he believes his perspective is above reproach or challenge from radical lesbian feminists, he's not going to learn very much about either beyond what he thinks he already knows with a form of certainty commonly found in the most arrogant of white males.

Noah has left a new comment on your post "The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Stereotypes, Transs...":

Dear Julian,

I am writing to respectfully let you know that you are oppressing transsexual people. I get the sense that you are not aware of the fact that you have cissexual privilege and have not explored the difference between sex and gender.

Cheers,
Noah

Because Noah is refusing to respect my wish for him to no longer post comments here, and has refused to engage with me privately by email, I'll post what I hope is my last post about him. To spend any more time discussing him would be to engage in something I don't much like: a form of lateral or horizontal hostility named by Florynce Kennedy four decades ago.

I could offer up a lot of information about him, including, for example, his last name and his image. I don't care to do that because he has not, himself, presented that information to me. He's presented himself here as "Noah" with a bit more info linked to that name, such as an email address. While I know his last name and what he does for work, and where he has lived, it's not for me to make that information public. Outting people's private information isn't cool in cyber- and non-cyber social environments where many of us are getting death threats, as I have, from men who probably would despise Noah too, if his work detailed their abuses of women of all colors, including queer people.

There's enough terrorism going on against feminists and lesbians and their allies in struggle. I want Noah to be safe as he pursues the work he does for anti-racist transgender rights. What I object to is people with more structural privilege than I have--not easy, let me tell you--coming to my blog to "educate me" about oppression. Noah has repeatedly demonstrated a kind of class-privileged white male arrogance and emotional aloofness, and an inability to reach out across difference respectfully and meaningfully, that is terribly typical of white men with class privilege.

He speaks to me as if I have the structural power to oppress the likes of him--or those he pretends he represents. I'm not sure what he's referring to, given that he's positioned structurally to oppress me in several ways. I'm a person with class privileges who comes out of a background of mixed class experience, whose family of origin was immigrant poor and also non-immigrant poor and working class, not middle class wealthy. He comes from a solid middle class U.S. non-immigrant background a graduate of prestigious colleges and universities, a professional with far more education-status and profession-status than I will likely ever have.

He comes here speaking obnoxiously or patronisingly to someone who is disabled, gay, asexual, intergender, radical, pro-lesbian, profeminist, anti-transbigotry, Jewish, anti-racist, white, male (who doesn't personally identify as a man but accepts women politically identifying me as such because my subjectivity ought not trump women's experiences). He shows up at my door with things to lecture me about. He comes to the door of someone who has survived a great deal, including incest, child molestation, sexual assault, and sexual exploitation, bullying, emotional abuse and neglect, mental illness in my family, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and this ability-privileged blond, light-eyed, gentile-appearing white guy with lots of liberal arts education, lectures me about what I need to read, without even knowing much about me. He jumps to conclusions because he can't be bothered to understand my perspective. He calls me an oppressor.

He is presumptuous, arrogant, and has no clue how to approach me with any kind of kindness, dignity, or regard, except, perhaps, when he realises his other approaches were unkind and oppressive. He comes here not to ask me questions, to engage with me, but instead seeks repeatedly to condescendingly lecture me about what I need to know with his "World of Gender and Sexual Oppression According to Noah" textbook in hand.

Noah is not positioning himself as an ally of mine. And I'm not likely to consider him "feminist" or "profeminist" until such time has he prioritises publicly speak out against men's oppression of women and against anti-lesbian politics and practices within LGBTIA community. As I've written on another post, here, he's also not an enemy of mine, even while he's hurtful to me. He's not "other" than me and I don't view him that way. I initially welcomed him in as a potential ally, although he'd really have had to shake loose of his academic snobbery, and his uber-white male supremacist posturing. We're very much alike in some regards, but also quite different in others. Whether he cares to notice it or not, he is significantly more privileged than I am. So I hope he'll learn how to engage respectfully with those who he believes he can teach, as long as he learned not to arrive acting like such a dick.

He's solidly against discrimination and defamation, on legal levels. Does that include defamation, degradation, and invisibilisation of lesbian feminists, radical feminists, and radical lesbians? Aside from tokenistically teaching a few bits of writing by the radical feminist Andrea Smith, Noah refuses to utilise the wisdom and learning of forty-plus years of radical lesbian feminist writings (by women of all colors) and activist campaigns against racist heteropatriarchy. Why is that? He's not indicated much or any knowledge of the work of any contemporary radical feminist activists. Is it because when he was a student those people weren't (and aren't) taught. (I suspect that may well be the case, which isn't his fault; it's the fault of the programs and institutions where he's studied.)

How does a white male avoid taking on the issue of how to end rape? He says his work includes challenging "sex and gender". How do you section out and ignore racist and misogynistic rape as part of what constitutes gendered and sexed atrocity? In what ways does he speak out against gynocide at all? The only forms of sexism and misogyny he seems to notice and go after are those displayed by feminists and profeminists. I'd say that's specious.

I realise we all can only do so much, only study so much, only read so much, and only advocate for so much. But as someone who does deal with racism, speciesism, and anti-transgender/transsexual oppression, how do you not encounter as a human rights issue to address, "the oppression of men by women", and also not incorporate into your political work. I'm just wondering. To me, you'd have to really work at ignoring it.

Again, any one person can only do so much. While I'm for animal liberation from white het male supremacist civilisations' human consumption and abuse, it's not a focus here on my blog, not because I don't care about the issues, but because there's only so much one person can do: taking on genocide, racism, heterosexism, misogyny, patriarchy, rape, battery, Men's Rights Activists, capitalism, and globalisation, homophobic violence, anti-lesbian politics, and white het male supremacy is what this blog focuses on.

Is Noah against the gynocidal and genocidal practices which inhere in Western Civilisation? Does he support ending male supremacist violence against women? Is he pro-lesbian rights, and pro-Women's Liberation, as lesbian feminists and radical feminists of all colors define those agendas? Or does he get to pick and choose to whom he is accountable, just like all the other pro-queer (and anti-queer) white males with class privilege? It's not clear from what he teaches and addresses in his work.

This would represent a rather significant consciousness gap is his work, if it is indeed missing. It sure appears to be missing to me.

Below, readers, you can see more about the many solidly liberal-to-progressive issues Noah focuses on in his activist efforts. I wish him well with all of those. You can decide for yourself whether he is concerned about lesbians and women's liberation from heteropatriarchal societies. I see no evidence that concern whatsoever. And teaching a bit about radical feminism by promoting a small amount of Andrea Smith's work and a single essay of Audre Lorde's isn't supportive of radical transformation, it's self-promoting and liberally tokenistic.

What follows is from *here*. He is also a dedicated animal rights activist.

Animal Rights Study Group

The Animal Rights Study Group explores the intersections of animal rights and other social justice movements.

Whites Challenging Racism Study Group

Whites Challenging Racism is 10-week facilitated study group for white folks who want explore their role in bringing about racial justice.

Transgender Study Group

The Transgender Study Group examines issues facing transgender people in the context of interconnected social justice movements.