"But that applies to EVERYONE"

Every so often when I’m talking about some niche issue, such as how to consensually have sex with an asexual person or how straight women can be better to their queer women friends, someone who is not a member of the marginalized group under discussion chimes in with, “But everyone should do that” or “But you shouldn’t do that to anyone.” No joke, once on Twitter I saw some trans people talking about how you shouldn’t ask them about their genitals, and someone was like “And you shouldn’t ask cis people about their genitals either.”

Okay, I mean, yes. I’m happy to grant that many of these suggestions about how to treat people with particular identities should and do apply to pretty much all human interaction. Don’t touch white people’s hair without their permission either. Don’t ask cis people about their genitals either. Sure.

But the reason this type of comment always comes off as very All-Lives-Matter-ish is because there is a reason the original author has chosen to focus their remarks on a particular type of situation or person. What might that reason be? Some ideas:

  1. The issue is much more likely to affect the group under discussion.
  2. Cis people, how often has a stranger asked you which genitals you have? How often has a potential partner asked you which genitals you have?

    The world is an infinitely varied and complicated place, so I’m sure there exists a cis person somewhere who has had someone ask them, “So do you have a dick or a vagina?” I’m sure there are cis people who have, upon introducing themselves to someone, had that person suddenly ask if they have had surgery on their genitals. (How sure am I? Not actually that sure.)

    But if you ask trans people, they are much, much more likely to have had this experience, often multiple times. In fact, I suspect that any cis person who has had this experience, only had it because they were “read” as trans for whatever reason, and that plays into the exact same harmful ideas that impact trans people every day. There would be no such thing as reading a cis person as trans without the gender-essentialism that gives rise to anti-trans prejudice and discrimination. Just like a straight boy being bullied because he’s assumed to be gay, this can certainly hurt the cis person in question, and their feelings about that experience are valid. But when we’re talking about understanding and preventing the issue, we need to understand why it actually happened. More on that later.

  3. The issue is more harmful to the group under discussion.
  4. So, yes, it is pretty rude and inappropriate to touch people’s hair without their permission, because hair often feels like a part of one’s body and having it groped by random strangers can be rather violating. (Also, some people put a lot of work into getting their hair to look the way it does, so don’t put your greasy hands on it!) Some white people, especially those with curly or otherwise unusual/interesting hair, may indeed have had lots of negative experiences with strangers grabbing it.

    But not only are we much less likely to experience this sort of incident–which in itself means that it’s overall less harmful to us–but it would have an entirely different meaning to us, and that minimizes the harm, too. Touching Black women’s hair is an echo of the many other ways in which white people have historically treated their bodies and their selves as objects for their consumption. They also don’t have the same freedom white people do to set boundaries and ask the person to stop touching their hair, lest they activate the Angry Black Woman stereotype. Doing so can have dangers beyond social rejection.

  5. The dynamics of the issue are different for different groups.
  6. The principle of consensual sex is pretty much the same no matter who’s having sex with who. Sex almost always involves power dynamics (even when both/all people involved have the same gender, power imbalances may arise from other identities), and this can complicate consent when the person with more power is unaware that the person with less power is only saying “yes” because they feel on some level that they have to.

    Asexuality introduces another potential power imbalance into the mix, and brings along with it unique dynamics. For example, many people consider asexuality an “illness” that can be “cured” through good sex. Many people consider it “unethical” for an asexual person to date an allosexual person unless they agree to “give” them as much sex as they want. Different asexual people have different levels of interest in sex, different motivations for consenting to sex, different emotional responses to sex, etc.

    That makes articles like “How to Have Sex With an Asexual Person” absolutely crucial, because they dissect the dynamics that are unique to this situation (an asexual person and an allosexual person having sex) rather than broadly applicable across all sexual situations. Yes, at first glance it all sounds the same–get consent, check in during, etc–and so I can see why it’s tempting for people to brush it off with “Well everyone should do that.” But then you’d miss the nuances.

  7. The person leading the discussion is a member of the group in question and that’s the experience they can speak to.
  8. I don’t know what it’s like to be proselytized to as a religious person, to date as a straight person, to have sex as a cis man. So if I’m talking about various adverse experiences I’ve had with those things and how they might have been better, I can only speak to my experience as a Jewish atheist, as a queer person, as a woman. If religious people, straight people, and cis men can learn something from that and apply it to their own lives–if they feel validated by what I’ve said–that’s great, but that’s not who I’m writing for.

    So when I write about some negative experiences I’ve had with straight women as a queer woman and folks immediately rush to be like “well nobody should ever do that to anyone regardless of identity,” it feels very dismissive. Of course nobody should ever do that to anyone. But I’m not anyone, I’m me, and I’m situated at one particular intersection of identities. That location in part determines which sorts of experiences I have, and I don’t want that to be erased. I want you to see where on the map I am.

“But that applies to everyone” can obviously be a true statement. It’s pretty rare that we would want to treat people differently depending on their social identity. But the fact is, whether we mean to or not, we do treat them differently. That’s been scientifically proven over and over. Likewise, all lives should matter, but they demonstrably don’t, so activists focus on those that we do not treat as though they matter.

Many, many excellent ideas and practices emerge from communities of queer and trans people, people of color, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. Many of these ideas and practices would be very useful for dominant groups to adopt. Why don’t cis hetero couples ask each other which words they prefer to use for their genitals and other body parts? Why don’t neurotypical people use color-coded communication badges to make socializing at conferences easier? (I encourage them to, provided they don’t act like they came up with those awesome ideas on their own.)

But that doesn’t mean that marginalized people don’t get to talk about their own experiences and issues as they apply to them specifically, rather than to everyone universally. If you liked something one of us wrote about a niche issue and feel that it’s applicable more broadly, why don’t you write your own article rather than complaining that our writing wasn’t broad enough? Maybe it wasn’t for you.

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"But that applies to EVERYONE"
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