Hello and welcome. Now, before I get started, I just want to preface this: I’m not a teacher. Lord knows I probably shouldn’t be one. But I’m gonna take this opportunity today to act as if I am, and you’ll learn very quickly that my way of education is different from anything you’ve been given. So here we are. Strap in and let’s get this fucking started. I bring you [NEXT SLIDE]: The Pussy Hat and Why People Were so Quick to Throw it the Fuck Out Their Windows.

[NEXT SLIDE] January 21, 2017. One day after Donald Trump’s Presidential inauguration. In cities across the United States, millions of women gathered to protest against Trump’s presidency, thus the protest was dubbed, The Women’s March. The main point of this march was to register more women to vote and to elect women and progressive candidates to public office, while the sentiments made were that women are people too, they should have the right to their own bodies, and to express solidarity among all women. [NEXT SLIDE] Historically, protests of this volume and determination usually provide a sort of symbol to unionize those who participate and are fighting for such a cause. For anti-war and counterculture protests in the late ’50s and ’60s, it was the peace sign. For the AIDS crisis, it was the poster Silence = Death. For the Hong Kong Occupy Movement, it was umbrellas. For this movement, enter [NEXT SLIDE]: the Pink Pussy Hat.

Creators of the Pussy Hat™, Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman wanted to make a strong unifying statement representing protestors in this march. They say that the color pink was chosen because of its association with femininity and the name was chosen because of Trump’s locker room conversation where he openly says to the Access Hollywood reporter while still fully mic’d, “Grab them by the Pussy'' while referring to getting women because of his “star prowess”. Sir, your enterprise is failing and your skin is the shade of musty ass cheetos left under a frat bro’s couch, I don’t think sexually assaulting women should be on your priorities list.

So all is good, women solidarity, making a difference right? Well, not completely. You see, some people took issue with the Pussy Hat because of the sentiment that the hat is exclusionary to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don’t have typical female genitalia, and to women of color, because their genitals are likely to not be pink which. This erupted into a much larger conversation about feminist movements and how they mostly encompass white women. Rarely do you see such large events led by Black women and transgender and nonbinary people. Why are they erased from the narrative, and why are these events mostly advertised to white women? [NEXT SLIDE] I now present to you, a history lesson.

So, what is white feminism? Honey, if we’re gonna talk about this we need to

take frame by frame. White feminism is a set of actions that center white women when combating sexism and misogyny or feminism that ignores intersectionality. In the context that I’ll be talking about, intersectional identities include: race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religion. Right off the bat I’m gonna tell you, these aren’t the women you should be looking for to defend you in a crowd. They’re looking out for themselves and themselves only. You might know that the Women’s Rights movement began a couple decades before the Civil War because women wanted their own identities, but did you know that they did so off of the backs of slaves? [NEXT SLIDE] White female abolitionists essentially compared their oppression to those of slaves, arguing that they could empathize with enslaved peoples because they experienced a “similar” oppression due to their sex.

    This is where it starts, and it’s definitely not where it ends. [NEXT SLIDE] In terms of voting rights, when it appeared that Black men were about to gain the right to vote before women, white suffragists said, “Black men getting to vote before us? Absolutely not,” and demanded that they deserved the right to vote instead. They were furious that white men would even dare to change racial hierarchies before sexual hierarchies. By the way, none of these events included Black women or other women of color in the slightest, but we'll get to that. So white women were granted the right to vote in 1921 while Black people were granted the right to vote after the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Let’s fast forward to the housewife narrative. [NEXT SLIDE] Women in the kitchen, household accessories, you know the story. These women wanted the same social equity as men such as equal pay or a nonhousewife lifestyle, their own living hell, or more specifically, their “oppression”. Let’s get this straight, “oppression” is defined as the absence of choices. The women during this time that didn’t have any choices were mostly Black women and other women of color who had no choice but to stay home and take care of children or work back-breaking or foot blistering jobs in order to receive enough pay to take care of their families. These are the women who had no options, and there was no one to fight for them since they didn’t have the time or energy to fight for themselves. Even the ones that did were pushed aside in order for the more important movement of women’s rights that were for white women’s rights. A lot of white women found the women's movement a solution to personal problems. They were the ones to benefit from this movement, and rather than encompassing a greater variety of the human experience and taking the effort to overcome the barriers that separate all women by confronting the reality of racism, they kept the movement to themselves. Having directly benefited from the movement, they are less inclined to criticize it or to engage in the rigorous examination of its structure than those who feel it has not had a revolutionary impact on their lives or the lives of masses of women in our society. “Feminism in the United States have never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually- women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority” (bell hooks).

By the way, this presentation isn’t over yet, far from it. [NEXT SLIDE] Gender. [NEXT SLIDE] In a binary construct, gender is defined as the culturally-appropriate behaviors and attitudes that are associated with one’s sex. Gender stratification is men and women’s unequal access to property, power, and prestige. Now enough with that. Gender conflict theory is the theory that gender is a structural system that distributes power and privilege to some and disadvantage to others. These institutions are socially constructed, agreed? Agreed. In the early 20th century, eugenicists attempted to naturalize cultural racism and homophobia as “scientifically valid and politically viable.” They reinforced the idea that it was individual people’s bodies that led to inequality, not systems of oppression. Thus, gender non-conformity was deemed as criminal behavior, and they sought to “cure” these people of their thought process that they were not the gender that they were assigned. This thought process is still very prevalent in some groups of people.

[NEXT SLIDE] Radical feminism: opposes existing political and social organizations and views the patriarchy as dividing societal rights, privileges, and power primarily along the lines of sex, and must dismantle such in order to reach gender equality. Because of their drive to eliminate the patriarchy, Radical Feminists tend to heavily clash with the movement towards transgender rights. [NEXT SLIDE] They refuse to acknowledge the gender identities of trans people and have accused the transgender movement of perpetuating patriarchal gender norms. [NEXT SLIDE] These women deny that trans women are really women, or that they’re dangerous, this being in the terms of a man all willy nilly taking on the identity or appearance of a woman in order to take control of other women. You know what they mean by that? They mean that if a man simply claims that he is a woman, he then has access to women’s spaces therefore empowering himself and having the ability to sexually assault women. Did you hear that right? Trans women sexually assaulting other women? Hearing such sentiments makes my blood boil, and here’s why:

[NEXT SLIDE] Studies show that half of transgender people will experience sexual violence at some point in their lifetimes. 50%. 1 in 2 trans people will experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, and I dare you to think that these percentages aren’t higher for people of color. And going back, what is their lifetime? Transgender people have a life expectancy from about 33-35. In 2017, the year of the Women’s March, 29 transgender people were killed by violent means. 26 in 2018, 27 in 2019, 44 in 2020, and one again, most of them being BIPOC. And haven’t even brought out the statistics of hate crimes! In 2019, there were 227 hate crime incidents that were motivated by gender-identity bias. Also, I don’t know if you know this, but the FBI and other organizations fail to report these incidents, and you wanna know how I know that? It’s because the statistics have been decreasing, which is inaccurate to what’s happening. So I don’t want to hear anyone saying that a trans woman entering a woman’s bathroom is there to assault women. She’s. There. To. Pee. Transwomen and literally all trans and gender-non binary people have made the decision to live their lives being unapologetically themselves, and that should be a threat to no one. End of story.

[NEXT SLIDE] Let’s rewind. January 21st, 2017. The Women’s March. The Pussy Hat. Kristina Suh and Jayna Zweiman, who if you were paying attention are the creators of this hat, after being questioned about the exclusivity implication of the hat said, “We did not choose the color pink as a representation of some people’s anatomy. Anyone who supports women’s rights is welcome to wear a Pussyhat. It does not matter if you have a vulva or what color your vulva may be. If a participant wants to create a Pussyhat that reflects the color of her vulva, we support her choice.” While these women probably had no ill intent when making this hat, we need to dissect that statement. The issue is that calling them pussy hats can cause an association with them to the female anatomy, or specifically what is the issue, the cis white female anatomy. There are institutionalized biases that come to fruition when one is thinking or acting based on their own personal experiences; however, when you realize this mistake, you must take accountability for it and educate yourself, which they did. However, the one issue I find with this statement was that by saying “anyone’s welcome to it,” it contradicts the existence of the product she made, as well as excluding those that the hat doesn’t anatomically represent. It insinuates that this thing is only meant for certain people, but it’s ok if others wear it. The otherment of women of color and transgender and non bianry people is historical practice that needs to be broken immediately. What should be said that it’s meant for everyone.

[sigh] So what’s the solution to all of this? What the fuck do we do? Well I thought about it, and here are some designs that I made that include additional versions of the Pussy Hat. [NEXT SLIDE] The point of the hat was that they felt exclusionary to different groups of people, so this is to help represent them a little better. There’s the Pan-African flag, the trans flag, non binary flag, and the Black and Brown pride flag. They’re also reversible, so you could either have the original Pussy Hat pink, or one of these options. Additional designs are encouraged.

Now, even though I’ve just presented this alternative to you, there’s actually another solution. You wanna know what it is? [NEXT SLIDE] Fuckin nothing. It’s a pink beanie with cat ears on it, I’m surprised Hot Topic didn’t do it first. If you want to wear it, you can, I personally couldn’t care less. What I actually care about was the catalyst that it created, allowing for more focused attention on the topic that we just had. [NEXT SLIDE] Exclusivity at a degree that actively denies rights to individuals for just living as themselves, especially when it comes to womanhood and just flat out existence, is cancerous. The hate against women of color and trans/non-binary people is alarming, and when a group of individuals claiming to be fighting for the rights of women but choose to ostracize a large portion of people that are in dire need of protection and an increase in human rights, it is a war on womanhood. This discussion was necessary, and I, in fact, want to thank Krista and Jayna, because without that goddamn hat, I don’t think as much attention would have been drawn to these issues, because it’s important and those who won’t acknowledge that are the real dangers to this society.