Tumblr @doberbutts
I had the cops called on me once (on TDoV lmao) because I was in a field with Creed offleash tweaking our heeling. The woman who reported us said that there was a “black man with an aggressive dog” and that we were scaring her. There was no one in the field with us and we were at the very back corner so even if she had come in it would have been more than an acre of space between us.

Thankfully, the cop that showed up had some sense, and watched us train alone in that field for a while before making his presence known to me. I told him we had been alone in that field for more than an hour and if anyone had asked I would have put him on the long line I had along for their comfort, and that many people use that field for running their dogs as there was no leash law in that particular area. He agreed that the report was stupid and that he wished more people placed so much emphasis on training their dogs. He told me there was really nothing illegal happening except that technically that particular field is still labeled a public park and thus you should have dogs on leash, but there was no signage and no longer anything in writing online or off that says that, so there would be no way to know before getting reported. It was just a big empty field with a singular picnic table and one of those iron grills in it.

What if I’d been fined for breaking the leash ordinance no one could prove existed?

What if I’d been arrested?

What if I’d been shot?

That’s how easy it would be to get my hypothetical license taken and my ability to train dogs as a job revoked.
…
And because I talk about intersectionality-

This is why trans men are repeatedly saying we do not have male privilege in the way that is being assumed of us. Especially not trans men of color, and especially especially not black trans men.

Sometimes, in some situations, I am regarded as a man.

But I am always black.

It is not safer to be a black man.

A white woman tried to get me killed or arrested so she could run her aggressive pit bull in the field next to both of our houses. She knew who I was. She was our neighbor. I passed her several times walking Creed. Her dog was always offleash in that field and out of control when on leash walking on the street.

Don’t tell me she has any right to fear me because “well you’re a man” when I have every right to fear how she is going to wield her whiteness as a weapon against me.

That could have been my name on the next tagline for a week.

Source [1][2]

One of the huge shortcoming of RadFem ideology as developed throughout the 1970s, but still with us today, is the sort of Manichean dualism separating the world into “bad/abuser” men and “good/victim” women.

It certainly doesn’t survive any sort of rejection of binary sex or gender; that’s true. But it also doesn’t survive any other sort of analysis, like how to consider abusive homosexual relationships or disability and ableism or class distinctions…

But Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality in 1989 specifically about race and gender intersect for a Black woman. That shift in feminism was necessary, and no longer thinking about white women as the norm of femininity but rather a femininity with great power under white supremacy is absolutely critical.

White women are victims under patriarchy but capable of being a great threat to non-white and particularly Black men in terms of the violence justified under the excuse of “protecting white women”. So even a reformist RadFem-style analysis of trans men having “male privilege” falls apart when race is considered as well; even before getting into questions of “passing,” a Black masc person is treated as giving every white person around them cause to “fear for their lives” and possibly justify a violent “pre-emptive retaliation”.

The particular person telling this story ended up being OK, but the point is one white woman is capable of calling down all of the violence of white supremacy on a Black man. So altho you often hear “where was his male privilege then?” or “not all men”, and the people who tend to say it don’t actually have anything useful to follow up those statements with, it’s worth actually keeping those things in mind in an analysis of patriarchy and feminism.

(To avoid being misconstrued, obviously men who are racial or ethnic minorities are also capable of hurting women, including white women, in ways that are systemically enabled under patriarchy, but this seems already well-understood in ways that essentialist critiques of “men” is not understood.)