Discussion Thread
Have you ever found yourself questioning something you once strongly believed? Maybe it’s an idea, a principle, or even a paradigm that shaped how you saw yourself and the world.
What sparked your doubts, and how has the process of questioning felt for you?
If you’re not sure what to share, consider this:
What’s helped you navigate moments of doubt or change in the past?
How do you stay open to new perspectives while holding on to what matters most?
I’ll be reading and responding over the next couple of hours—looking forward to engaging with your thoughts!
Read through the comments and find one that resonates with you or challenges your perspective. Reply with your thoughts, a follow-up question, or a related experience to keep the conversation going.
I used to be really involved in a reproductive justice organization that primarily focused on abortion rights but also on many queer rights issues. One of the biggest beliefs the organization had was to "center the most marginalized people." The idea was to find the most marginalized group, focus on addressing their problems, and that will solve everyone else's problems because all oppressions are linked together. It seemed like an obvious idea at the time and a way to counteract the history of reproductive rights as mainly focused on issues relevant to wealthy white women. But over time, I realized that this approach is a bastardization of intersectional theory that does more to alienate people than it does to help anyone.
The biggest problem is that finding the "most marginalized" forces you to rank oppressions. Everyone would say that it doesn't force people to play the oppression olympics but it absolutely does when you're claiming that you can easily say who is more marginalized. But life is more complicated than that. Not all types of discrimination and stigma easily fit together. Addressing the problems of a homeless Black trans woman doesn't necessarily help a pregnant refugee. In addition, focusing too much on labels makes it difficult to talk about people with more ambiguous identities and can feel dehumanizing when so much of the conversation focuses on being x, y, z. They wanted us to start every meeting saying who were are people, which meant listing out all of the marginalized identities we could lay claim to. I always hated doing it. I'm unabashedly queer but I was resentful of how performative it felt.
What changed my mind was a combo of feeling uncomfortable as someone who doesn't fit easily into certain labels/groups and seeing how the concept was used to stop conversations rather than propose any solutions. "Centering the most marginalized" was mainly just brought up when someone felt a solution didn't address whatever group they had in mind even though no solution could help everyone. It just became so exhausting and it really felt like no good work was being done since most our time was spent discussing theory as conservative Christians rapidly tore down our reproductive rights.
So, so many. The existence of God was the first huge one. It started with realizing hell couldn't be real, and went from there. Bertrand Russell nailed the coffin on that topic. It took about ten years before the emotional ramifications of losing faith caught up to me. I think that's how I bought into progressive politics so fervently. I needed a new faith system. Untangling from progressivism has been much slower, and in some ways, more painful. Not so much the conclusions, but certainly the tone, black and white thinking, and tendency towards group think. I'm no better at avoiding that than anyone else. October 7 made it clear to me that we're all still susceptible to hive mind thinking, even in spaces where not being a hive mind is the stated goal.
We keep trying to get it right. It's all we can do.