[giraffe_lady]

People who talk about "intersectionality" really should go read the original Crenshaw paper, published in the stanford law review.

It is criticizing a legal decision where a judge found that a company that had fired all of the black women working there had not discriminated against them on the basis of their race, because it had not fired black men, nor on the basis of their sex, because it had not fired white women. Thus the judge decided that their civil rights had not been violated, and used the word "intersection" in the formal decision, that's why Crenshaw chose it.

She then extrapolates into some other situations where people are afforded less protection due to being at an "intersection" of legal categories in this way. But the way people use "intersectional" now, either in support or against, is almost completely different from what was originally meant and in fact is often exactly what she wrote the paper in criticism of.