Intersectionality: The Coalition That Critical Theory Built

people. Which is why some people refer to them as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), a term which they themselves do not accept. Another branch of this kind of radical feminism has less of an emphasis on the 'material' difference of having a womb or not. They are instead inclusive of trans women because they believe that both genetic women and trans women are oppressed by the system of patriarchy.

While radical feminists are divided on many fundamental issues (including, for example, their attitude towards trans people), they generally believe that gender, which encompasses all the cultural norms and understandings around the differences between the sexes, is entirely a social construct, and needs to be deconstructed and abolished for the sake of women's liberation. This idea would also find its way into the discourse surrounding the LGBT community, promoted by more 'radical' elements of the LGBT community, to the dismay of its more 'moderate' members.

Intersectionality: The Coalition That Critical Theory Built

One recent trend in radical feminism, which has also been embraced by radical LGBT activism, is the dominance of the idea of 'intersectionality'. Intersectionality was originally invented in the late 1980s to describe the situation where individuals with two disadvantaged identities (e.g. black and

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female) may experience discrimination even when individuals with either identity alone would not experience discrimination (e.g. a company which hires men regardless of race for physical labor, but only hires white people for clerical jobs). It was a good description for an important problem. However, the way 'intersectionality' is used today is only tangentially related to the aforementioned concept. Instead, contemporary calls for 'intersectionality' is essentially a call for coalition building, where an LGBT activist must also support radical feminism and race-based identity politics movements, and vice versa. Critical theory is the glue that holds this 'coalition' together. With radical activists from these groups all heavily influenced by critical theory thinking, they tend to have the same worldview and use similar language anyway, therefore this coalition could be easily built and maintained.

The problem with the new 'intersectionality' is that, by its implications, members of the groups covered by the coalition must not only support the radical ideas of their own activists, they must also support every radical identity politics movement under the sun, or else they could be seen as 'traitors' to their own group. Hence, LGBT individuals are not only pressured to adopt the oppositional attitude to mainstream society their radical activists champion, they are also pressured to accept ideas like how gender is an oppressive social construct, that countries like America are inherently racist, or how white supremacy is everywhere in Western society, all ideas that are characteristic of critical theory thinking. In recent years, arguing against these ideas

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