Thread by @djnavarro, Privilege in academia is being a white cis woman making Harry Potter [...]

Privilege in academia is being a white cis woman making Harry Potter jokes and then ignoring trans women pointing out how exhausting it is to listen to that and then getting thousands of people retweeting you when you talk about your academic privilege

Privilege is also being a white woman devoting a lengthy thread describing how much you used to hate trans women and then saying you've now realised that maybe that was bad and getting thousands of people expressing their sympathy for you

Privilege is also being a white man who gets to decide you don't want to be bothered moderating transphobic comments on your blog, delegating the task of dealing with that to LGBT members of the community for whom that task is much more painful

Privilege is being a white cis woman who studies trans and nonbinary people, says transphobic things and then gets to play the victim claim to be unfairly targeted when transgender people, sex workers and other marginalised people point out the problems in your actions

Privilege is being a man who has been spared the pain of sexual assault who turns up in a painful twitter discussion among rape survivors and wants to have an abstract discussion of the "principle of the thing"

Privilege is not having to fear being murdered by the police

There are a lot of things that make up privilege. In my own case: I'm white, cis-passing and middle class. That buys me a lot of leverage that the vast majority of transgender women do not have.

The thing I want to say though - leveraging what privilege I do have - is that each of the examples is something I've seen on academic social media, most of them within the last week. We do ourselves a disservice if we pretend that these things do not create a hostile environment

Marginalisation is the sinking suspicion that this too will disappear without a trace, that not one of the people to whom this thread refers will change their behaviour, worrying that you have forgotten the struggles of another marginalised group, and wondering why you bother

Marginalisation is noticing that whenever you tweet about the misogyny cis women in face academia they enthusiastically embrace it (look, even the trans women agree!) but when you point out transphobia in academia those same women stay silent

Marginalisation is thinking that maybe it would be wiser to go off campus to use the bathroom just in case

Marginalisation is constantly worrying about your obligation to publicly support everyone else's liberation struggles in the hope that maybe they might one day publicly support yours

Marginalisation is taking care never to assert that you have a legitimate claim to being a woman, because to do so is to give your political enemies the leverage to oppose you on *their* chosen territory

Marginalisation is being a trans woman and having to email a TERF colleague to beg her not to retweet your academic work for fear that you will attract the attention of more TERFs

Marginalisation is having to smile politely in your own office as a colleague talks about her own desire to punch people like you, and to quietly and carefully talk her through her own transmisogyny

Marginalisation is hearing for the first time on international women's day that trans women matter, after writing the website celebrating cis women and leaving yourself off it out of fear, and then to have your employer tweet about men instead

Anyway, don't mind me. I'm not saying anything of importance.

might as well add this one: https://mobile.twitter.com/djnavarro/status/1286881603306708992