It Sucks, But It's True: LGBT People Can Be Oppressive

In the past few years, the oppression of the LGBT community has been a hot topic. We talk a lot about how we, as a community, are oppressed. And we are. People within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum are less likely to have access to resources, and are more likely to experience discrimination. But even as things get better thanks to small wins like the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage last year, we’ve clearly still got a long, long way to go. 

We aren’t the only people who are oppressed — and we also have the ability to be oppressive.

It’s hard to recognize your privilege, period. It’s especially hard to recognize privilege when you’re a member of a marginalized group. It’s easy to focus so much on seeing the ways that you and members of groups you identify with are oppressed, so much so that you become incapable of seeing how you’re oppressing others.

We see this often in the LGBT community. As soon as privilege is pointed out (if it is at all) it becomes the ever-mocked Oppression Olympics, with one group saying they’re less privileged than another because X, and then another saying they’re even less privileged because Y. But this often isn’t how privilege really manifests itself. In reality, we have intersecting, complicated, and often fluid identities.

Privilege makes people uncomfortable, but we’ve got to be willing to talk about it. When we act like LGBT folks are too oppressed to be oppressive, we are being silent about the very real issues that exist even within our community, like the whitewashing of the queer movement, the silence of cis, queer people on behalf of trans people, and the reduction of the LGBT community to a bunch of really loud allies and a handful of cis, white, gay men. We don't have privilege because we're queer, but we can have privilege for a heck of a lot of other reasons, like race, class, ability, gender, documentation status...(the list goes on and on).

If we don’t have our eyes open to our privilege, how will we ever see what’s really happening within our own communities?

It may be cozier to remain within the realm of “this is how I’m oppressed," but the reality is that most of us are, and it doesn’t free us from the obligation of looking at the ways that we’re responsible for the hurt and suffering of others.