Envisioning #womenstrong for ‘my people’

A few years ago I started casually referring to women as “my people.”

As in, “Where’s Sara? I haven’t seen her in forever.”

“Yeah, she had a baby and is stuck at home in the suburbs — as often happens to my people.”

I felt weird about it at first — partially because the term has biblical overtones, but mostly because it seemed a bit presumptuous to claim kinship with over half the world’s population, most of whom have struggles I can’t begin to comprehend.

But after a little while I realized that what I was trying to convey was an awareness of women as a type of historical community — one that, no matter our other differences, has been tied together by similar threats and barriers.

The common thread of the ties that bind us through our divergent lives and experiences is one of violence, fear and silence — a thread of enforced and embodied vulnerability.

The racialized and queer and poor among us must deal with an intensified version of it, of course. Sexism and misogyny are much more severe and threatening for women of colour, trans and queer women, and the economically disadvantaged.

But all women face a type of oppression that is entwined with our sexuality and threatens our physical safety. We have all been patronized at work, harassed on the street, undervalued at home. Most of us have been followed, threatened, groped; a whole lot of us have been assaulted and abused.

We are not quite sisters. Our experiences and lives are too various for the sibling metaphor — a real flaw of the “sisterhood” concept. As a straight, white cis woman, for example, what do I know of the immediate realities of being a trans woman of colour?

No, our kinship ties are much broader and more various than that of immediate family. In anthropological terms, we are more analogous to a clan — the world’s largest.

Sisterhood, woman-clan, “a people” … why on Earth does it matter?

In one sense of course it doesn’t really. But if I’ve learned one thing from studying language it’s that thinking about words can help us think about bigger problems. Proposing new words or ways to use existing words differently can open up new perspectives on a tricky issue.

In the aftermath of the Toronto van attack and the killer’s associations with the misogynistic “incel” community, we as a society have begun to have conversations about one of those tricky issues: how hatred of women is often seen as less serious and threatening than racial, ethnic, or religious hate — like misogyny is somehow Hate-Lite.

There are many things we can and should do to grapple with why our society tends to minimize misogyny. Keeping that conversation alive and produc- tive even while the immediacy of the Yonge St. horror fades in the face of more recent news is a task we all must shoulder.

But for me there is also another task, a more personal one: remembering that we are not isolated or alone. Women, girls, ladies of all experiences and bodies, no matter how different our lives, and for whatever it’s worth, I see you as my people. I hope that you might see me as yours.

For the more privileged, myself included, there is also remembering our duty to raise the voices of the most persecuted among us — to learn the stories of trans women and fight to break down the barriers faced by women of colour, accepting that at times we will certainly fail and will need to be called to account.

Because, even though our big cultural stories tend to involve men protecting women, we know that it is usually women protecting other women — from the anger, violence and domination of men who feel entitled to power.

That is something I hope we can own and take as strength going forward — not just #TorontoStrong but #WomenStrong — enduringly strong, working to do better to fight for the safety of one another, working through our embodied vulnerability to make the world increasingly safe for our powerful bodies and bold minds and unique voices that have been kept down for too long, so that one day perhaps our daughters can be truly free of hate.

Mandy Pipher is a Torontobased writer and educator. She can be reached through her website at mandypipher.com.