Ah. I expected better from you.

Something with your forthright, unique viewpoint, which I've been enjoying, instead of this lazy, pandering, superficial piece of "common sense" catering to whatever passes for the old boys' club these days.

It's very very easy, depending on who you are, where and when you were born, to come up with anodyne advice about self-defeating behaviors, "just develop a thick skin," "just suck it up." I'm not going to state any thoughts I might have around your gender or any other characteristic, but, generally, advice like that is given by people who rarely experience any significant oppression on a daily basis.

"The world as a collection of individuals." Have you been having a séance with the ghost of Maggie Thatcher? She was a big proponent of that. "There is no such thing as society." But she was wrong. Society wields a completely different kind of power and applies a different pressure than individuals. (dateline: Jan 6 for an example).

As a 66-year-old gay man I can attest to the power of society that made me feel, from earliest childhood, often in very subtle yet powerful ways, that I was contemptible, worthless, disgusting, even deserving to die. Individuals made the cuts, as it were, but society put the knife in their hands and pushed them through the door.

Those feelings are still with me, and you can easily evoke them. Please do not say to me that I should just deal with it.

Are you kidding me? What do you think I've been doing for 66 years? I know how to deal with it, honey, I'm just no longer concerned about the moral comfort of the people who give me the "it" to deal with.

There is a reason why sociologists are comfortable with "generalizations" (also known as "statistics") about different demographics: because they predict outcomes very accurately. Oppression can be measured, and I'm afraid that, although you of course are as free as anyone else to say that you "don't hold with identity politics," one can, in fact, belong to a group that is marginalized by dominant groups and experience this marginalization on a daily indeed lifetime basis.

News flash: It's not my imagination, I don't need to "prove it," it's not trivial, nor am I going to suck it up. When I stop feeling that I deserve my oppression and speak up about it is when I'll feel "psychologically healthier," whether or not you hold with it.

Not wanting to get into an even more lengthy response, I'll just say that you remind me here of people who've barely experienced even a headache saying to a migraine sufferer, "why don't you just take a couple of aspirin?"

Sometimes we just need to dig a little deeper into our subject—become genuinely curious rather than working backwards from a foregone conclusion and maybe, I dunno? Ask some women/POC/LGBTQT2 about their experiences - and actually listen to them.

DR