For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

I’ve read a lot of hospital memoirs lately: anecdotes featuring shit and piss—stories that detail the bloody mess of having a body. I can see myself in them. It’s soothing to witness your own physical pain and trauma (and moments of hilarious bodily fluid explosions) mirrored back. As a disabled woman, I ache for community that normalizes my “abnormal” body.

At the same time, I often cringe. It’s a complicated cringe. I’m not grossed out. It’s more a cringe of fear. When I read about other sick and disabled people who stipulate that their bodies be respected and their truths be heard, I feel admiration, respect, and a certain kind of panic. It’s a (perhaps irrational)worry that good health care provision is a finite resource that will be taxed by too many of us asking, asking, asking.

Over the years my strained relationship with the Canadian health care complex has achieved a fine balance: I don’t ask for a lot but I firmly demand what I need. My strategy for self-advocacy when navigating the doctor’s office: wear a nice blouse. Speak calmly and know how to describe your pain. Don’t complain when they touch your body without asking first. My strategy is significantly bolstered by my white skin. My tactics are assisted by my expensive clothes. It matters that I am a cisgender woman. All the ways that I pass make it easier.

In Canada we are lucky to have access to health care and I am grateful. But still I long for more—for better. I dream of a future where our Canadian health care system is radically restructured. I want for health care to be truly accessible. I imagine a world where patients are recognized and trusted as holding expert knowledge concerning their own bodies.

In this dream world hospitals would be better funded. In this dream world health care practitioners would work less and have more space and time for each patient. Medical school would not only teach students how to care for the sick but also learn empathy. The medical understanding of the human experience would be intersectional. Imagine a world where your health care practitioner could acknowledge the physical implications of living in a white supremacist patriarchy, as well as understand the functionality of your liver. Imagine a tiered system where hospitals involved social service workers, counsellors, and peer support workers as well as nurses and doctors.

Imagine a world where disability or physical difference was not a problem to be solved, rectified, and rendered normal, but where we instead honoured our individual resilience. I want for a doctor’s office that can offer me relief, but still see me as strong. I want to take a page from all of those memoirs and confidently ask, ask, and ask. I want for my body to leak, sway, and take up space, and to demand no less for all of that.

A cartoon by Ronnie Ritchie explains this nicely, with the example of feminism. The heading is, “What they mean when they say they’re not a feminist.” One example shows a white girl saying, “I don’t need feminism. Women aren’t oppressed anymore.” The next panel shows what she means: “I don’t realize how privileged I am that my race/nationality/sexuality/assigned sex/gender identity/size/ability minimizes the effects of the Patriarchy to the point I don’t think it exists.”

It can be easy to deny privilege when it is invisible. We are used to a set of defaults. White people can easily walk through city streets without noticing the sea of white faces on billboards. bell hooks writes about this in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination. She writes that white people are able to think their whiteness is invisible, and that whiteness can exist without knowledge of blackness, while still asserting control. hooks also writes out that white students in her classroom often erupt with rage when their whiteness is looked at, “they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal conviction that it is the assertion of universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that will make racism disappear.”

Excerpt from Ronnie Ritchie’s comic. Read the whole piece here.

Heteronormativity is everywhere and not questioned. We’re presented with only one seemingly acceptable variation, which is if a queer couple acts heteronormative: gets married, buys a house, practices monogamy (this product of heteronormativity is defined as homonormativity). Heteronormativity is still the dominant narrative; it pins down people, labels them, and fits them into heteronormative roles.

On the same note of default settings and Othering people:

An all-male movie cast is normal, an all-female cast gets an automatic “chick flick” label (or worse, a feminist label!) Western culture is “normal” and everything else is “exotic” and “barbaric.”

Pretty much, #capitalism.

It can be hard to realize one’s own privilege, and even harder to accept it. A white person living in poverty, or a male person of colour, for example, still face oppression despite the colour of their skin or performed gender, so how can they be privileged? This is where intersectionality comes into play. Factors like those mentioned in Ritchie’s comic determine certain privileges and oppression. Yes, Patricia Arquette was right when she said sexism needs to be addressed. No, she was not right in alluding that sexism only oppresses white, hetero women.

At risk of showing my keener attitude as a first year undergrad, I’ll link to Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Starting with, “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” She then lists privileges she has a white person, that she may not have noticed before. Privileges like: being able to challenge a situation without being called a credit to her race; knowing her voice will be heard in a group of white people; and knowing her children will learn about their race’s existence in school. These privileges can apply to other privileged and oppressed groups, too.

So, what if you understand that oppression exists, but as a person in a certain place of privilege, you want to be an ally? This can be tricky at times, but there is a solution: shut up and listen. Certainly, stand in solidarity and show your support. But, realize that there are times where those you’re being an ally to do not have the same chances to speak as you, so let them have their chance. This can be hard when you want to show you care or are passionate about equity among people. Remember, in these situations, where you are a member of the dominant group, it isn’t about you. The best thing you can do is listen. That is more important than feel goodism.

But, but, it just doesn’t seem fair! What about men’s day, white history month, a straight pride parade? Well, a straight pride parade is any time a passing heterosexual couple can walk into the store without being harassed. White history is what we are taught right away in school. And since we live in a patriarchy, every day is men’s day. Again, if we are already in the dominant group, we may not notice these things in our lives. And if we are oppressed in other ways, it can be hard to understand that we have any upper hands in life at all.

Excerpt from a comic by Jamie Knapp.

Read the whole comic here.

When we do notice our privilege, it can get pretty yucky feeling. This doesn’t mean we get to run from it, we need to face it and deal with all the nastiness so we can properly understand. Recognizing our own privileges doesn’t demonize us; it doesn’t mean we exploit our privilege purposely. It does mean that we benefit from privilege. It is up to us what we do with it and how we can build an equitable world.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

If the part about having already fought for everybody else’s equal rights part leaves you a little confused, the actress clarifies what she means later in the press room: “So the truth is, even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women. And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

There are now questions circulating about. Did nerves leave the actress rambling and unguarded? Was she not really thinking? Or does she actually believe that gay and civil rights are segregated from feminism? It all sounds very second wave feminism, void of any thought regarding intersectional oppressions. And though it may be frustrating to hear privileged, rich, white women talk about oppression, actresses like Arquette and Emma Watson are celebrities who many look up to—whose words are taken to heart. Their words can lead others to take baby steps to feminism. Even fumbles like  Arquette’s pressroom comments can be a jumping off point for discussions on gender equity and intersectionality.

When talking about injustice, the word “equality” is often used in defining justice. Emma Watson used the term in her speech to the UN last September, and many other well-meaning folks do as well. But, equality operates on the idea that everyone is starting from the same place. That’s just not the case when it comes to gender discrimination and pay. Women of colour, Indigenous women and women with disabilities, for example, face barriers white able women do not—there is still a mainstream default ideal, which is based on whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class status and having an able body.

It is well documented that women in higher-up positions, such as CEOs, make less than their male counterparts. It is also known that women are hired more for part-time work. Since the dominant gender norms dictate that women are the caregivers, mothers take the pay hit, whether it be in daycare fees or part-time work, as well as low maternity leave pay. Even for women without children, the mere possibility that they could get pregnant lessens their chances of being hired, among a list of other tired and sexist excuses. Equity would first create fairness for all people. Access to the same opportunities needs to be made before moving on to equality as the ideal. But there are so many overlapping factors regarding oppression. Race, class, religion, sexuality, ability, language, family, gender, and on and on.

White, heterosexual, rich women do not own feminism. Looking at Arquette’s comments, she seems to have forgotten that there are women of colour and gay women, or the fact that civil and gay rights have not yet been achieved.

I want to give the actress the benefit of the doubt; I want to be happy that feminism is being brought into the mainstream. Earlier today she Tweeted, “The working poor women of this country have been asking for help for decades. If I have “privilege”* or a voice I will shine light on them.” Hopefully those who were enlightened to feminism through Arquette’s speech will join the discussions about intersectionality so that these same mistakes won’t be made again.

*The reluctance of those with any privilege admitting that they have privilege is a whole other post.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.