I am uncomfortable claiming I’m well-informed, but I have a Master’s Degree in Social Work with a macro concentration, which is a very progressive arena, and I have known me some hard-core leftists. I see ‘‘intersectionality’’ play out in terms of practical professional application in providing services to individuals who have one or more marginalized identities, including but not limited to people of color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, etc. I see this primarily in the context of providing domestic violence and sexual assault services in a relatively diverse metropolitan area. I have been working in the DVSA field for ten years and I’ve been working in progressive nonprofit agencies for 15 years.
It is my opinion that this is the reason we even have the concept of intersectionality. It wasn’t invented for people to score oppression points or anything, though some people have certainly run with that interpretation. It was created to take into account, on a service provision, policy and research level, the specific needs that certain populations have.
For example, individuals who are LGBTQ who are in abusive relationships have experiences that are unique to that population. For trans people, there are higher rates of sex trafficking. Their abuser may threaten to or actually withhold their gender-affirming medication and medical care. If they show up to our medical clinic for a forensic exam after a sexual assault, it is critical that they receive gender-affirming care that takes into account their medical complexities and how the nature of their trauma may differ. They share some characteristics of rural populations as well, in the sense that they tend to be highly insular communities where everybody knows everybody and there is a lot of social pressure not to speak up about abuse. If such a person seeks therapy, the counselors should have regular, ongoing training about these dynamics and how they might manifest during therapy.
In short, it is the ethical responsibility of anyone who provides services to these populations to be well-versed in the ways this affects them.
When you have multiple marginalized identities, the picture gets even more complex, and the types of services and interventions do as well. I am not an expert on providing these services myself, but I write grants for the people who are. So, that’s the gist.
This would be my stance, as it has happened to me in my own circles, and ultimately drove me off social media. While I’ve been on the receiving end of, ''You’re not X, so what would you know?" I’ve also been attacked in feminist circles for having differing opinions about these issues and how to solve them, for having an evidence-based position, and the primary means of damaging my credibility was to assert that their trauma was worse than mine, or accuse me of tone policing when I spoke out against misandry.
At work, during staff trainings, I’ve seen people stand up and say the conversation, which is open to everyone, is centering white voices and experiences** because they obviously couldn’t deal with the fact that our discussion of identity included things like mental health limitations and being a religious minority, which both fall lower on the totem pole than race. In general, I’ve seen many forums on ‘‘intersectionality’’ default to discussions of race and LGBTQ issues to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
As a writer, I’ve seen it happen in publishing and author circles. As a parent, I’ve seen it very aggressively from high-functioning autistics against parents of severely disabled autistic children. I’ve seen support Level 1 autistics insist that they understand the parents’ children’s needs better, even though they never met the child or the parents, simply because they are on the same (extremely broad, extremely varied) autism spectrum. They have also discounted scientific research on autism because the researchers aren’t autistic. I saw this long before I had an autistic child and determined to stay the hell out of it, but ultimately I had to become what the internet loathes and make decisions that leave r/autism frothing at the mouth. (Fortunately I have stayed out of it online.)
In fact, it’s hard for me to think of any domain of any social issue where I haven’t seen the oppression pyramid somewhere. Mostly online.
None of these observations make me any less committed to serving marginalized populations, or any less liberal in my political orientation. But at the same time I find it really alienating.
**An interesting point about that is, the facilitator was reading aloud anonymous responses we had submitted on index cards, so the complainant had no way to determine the race or sexual orientation of the people making the responses