Study: Social Justice Activism Circles Are ‘Rife’ with Internal Discrimination

A study published Monday in the Journal of Homosexuality claims that social justice activism circles are “rife” with internal discrimination.

Dr. Whitney Hagen of Florida Atlantic University writes that social justice activist communities are hostile towards gay and transgender populations in a study published this week in the Journal of Homosexuality.  Persons with “multiple oppressed statuses and identities” are “especially prone to oppression-based experiences,” Hagen writes, “even within minority activist communities.”

Hagen’s study was conducted through 20 in-depth interviews with social justice activists, most of whom were “queer or bisexual, white middle class women with advanced degrees.”

One of the individuals surveyed claimed that she had experienced a lot of “fat oppression” in her activist circles. “There’s a lot of fat oppression that I’ve dealt with,” she said, adding that she has “definitely been heckled for being queer, been discriminated against on a job for being queer, and for being female.”

The study claims that social justice activism communities are “rife with experiences of oppression” that are mainly directed at individuals with “multiple-oppressed identities.”

“Many individuals in these subpopulations are not easily placed in the gender or sexuality binary that is commonly accepted in dominant Western cultures,” the study explains, adding that a strict gender binary creates “personal consequences of activism.

At least half of those surveyed felt a sense of struggle over the decision to participate in activism or not, due to the negative feelings developed from other activists.

It might seem logical to believe that social justice warriors committed to activism would be the best suited towards making transgender people, feminists, and healthy at any size activists comfortable, but based on anecdotal evidence and now survey data, they seem to be a negative force on their own community members.

Especially if universities begin to stand up to the outlandish demands of progressive students, it seems likely that these communities will turn on each other, as their fragile alliances crumble.