I’d like to draw your attention to this essay by Janet Mock on the subject of claiming her place in feminism. As a androphilic trans woman of color and former sex worker, Janet is four times excluded from the sort of feminism the RadFems would like to enforce. I’m only doubly excluded, but still just about every day I find myself and my life under attack from people who assume the right to tell everyone else how to be a feminist. It would be so easy for me, for Janet, for #GirlsLikeUs as the hashtag goes, to turn our backs on a feminism that loudly brays about how we are not wanted.

And yet, where are we to go? We are still women. If we can’t be feminists, we’d only have to invent a new word for the same thing. (Many women of color have — you may have seen the term Womanism bandied about, and that’s just a different name for feminism adopted by women of color who feel they have been excluded by white feminists.)

For me the key statement in Janet’s essay is this one:

I believe we waste much of our efforts policing one another — one of the many workings of patriarchy is to busy us with policing each other’s choices rather than protecting them.

So yeah, enough with the policing. I call myself a feminist because I refuse to be excluded from a worthwhile and necessary cause simply because some rich, white, cis women have decided that I’m not acceptable for admission to sisterhood.