Hi Kat,
I appreciate so much what it takes to take a response to the experience of being oppressed public. My response to the evidence of your suffering: I love you. I am late to this arena of debate. I am informed by your writing. Thank you. Its challenging to adequately say how much I appreciate being informed by your taking a personal risk with revealing your perspective.
As I leave your writing, feeling more informed, more akin, something has affected me deeply. And here I share with you, a harm. I feel eerily anihilated by the phrase, “…and while you cry out that our rights as women are under (at this point largely hypothetical) attack, ….” I won’t get into what that does to me or why, except to say that it causes me to take a step back. It makes me cautious in relationship to your writing, and in relationship to you. It leaves me feeling that I must place your experience of harm above my own somehow, at personal expense. This feels politically awkward and personally unwise. Contractually, this is tough.
I don’t know if I’ve felt well enough about my own female status for long enough (regardless of whether I adhere to beliefs that my identity rises from nature or nurture) to experience this phrase, no matter what the context for it may be, as mere opinion. I don’t know if I will ever have that ability. More importantly, I’m not sure I want to have that ability. It would numb me in relationship to your own lived experience. That is not the direction I hope to turn.
To be fully open to your experience and accept it, I must be open, allow myself to be vulnerable. I’m trying to figure out at what expense- given that at the end of it all you assert the experience of others may be wholly imaginary.
So far, I think the range of harm experienced in this arena is not attributable to one valid/invalid feature, or another. It is easy to find an untruth, and use it to generalize, weaponize, against truths. You describe being on the receiving end of this beautifully. I think we could have a long and lovely conversation about this.
I want you to know that I am working hard to stay in a space of not knowing why you see this statement as a necessary part of your piece. Do you feel this perspective legitimizes something? I can’t control the tone a reader may apply to my writing, so I add this: my question is asked in earnest.
