Thanksgiving is going to look different this year. Mostly it will look like tweets about conservative grandma-killers and leftists demanding a police state. It might also look like depressing screen shots of Zoom dinners, shared online to remind your followers that the world has officially become a sci-fi dystopia but no this is totally the same and just as good and really fun so cute!
Anyway. Guys! It’s a pandemic! Didn’t anyone tell you? We’re all gonna die! The thing is that this shouldn’t stop you from thinking about ways you can further isolate the few people left in your life. If we only have a few months left, we should make sure those few months are as lonely and as depressing as possible.
So, whether you are celebrating remotely or having Thanksgiving dinner with your family because it’s other people’s lives that are germy not yours plus your Biden vote gave you immunity, some of the same trials and tribulations that typically plague people who are so self-righteous they ruin pleasant times with their libtard politics are bound to come up.
At Feminist Current, we hope you’re able to safely enjoy the holiday away from people who love you, or maybe who just tolerate you because they aren’t hateful fascists who think diversity threatens their very existence. But sometimes these people still include you because they know you are a pathetic shell of a human being who can only tolerate praise despite having no admirable qualities or skills. These people come in many forms: it could be a family member who is different than you, who has different opinions than you, who votes differently than you, who has read different things than you, who is older than 23 years old, who sometimes leaves the couch to go outside, or who understands that mammals only come in two sexes — even if those mammals paint their nails or stick metal into their faces to distract from the fact their personalities are intolerable.
So what can you do if there’s a Material Realite at your Thanksgiving table (virtual or IRL)?
What Is A Material Realite?
Material Realites are people who understand that men can’t give birth no matter how perverted they are but that women can. They think it doesn’t matter how bad your hair cut is, you are still a human being with a biological sex.
Material Realites can be men or women. Like your garden variety human beings, they can be a mother or father themselves, who learned how babies are made the hard way. Or they can be a woman who thinks that her womanhood doesn’t depend on wearing hideous dresses and pantyhose. Some of these Material Realites are the scaremongering kind, who think that you aren’t really very special or interesting at all and that putting “she/her/theirs” in your Instagram bio makes you someone who actually should stay home and wear a mask because that means none of us have to look at your basic-ass face or listen to you try to fake your way through a riveting conversation about how you’re actually a pansexual introvert and just because you’re married to a skinny white dude whose parents bought your loft doesn’t mean you don’t suffer queerphobia every time you buy a latte and the barista looks at you like you’re straight.
What Can You Do?
So what can you do if there’s a Material Realite at your Thanksgiving table?
Throw a tantrum. This will demonstrate that you are a strong and resilient intersectional warrior ready to fight the fascists! If you don’t have the upper body strength to literally punch a Nazi because you had to stick to pilates so as to not show up your anemic boyfriend you can just tweet the full name and workplace of your Material Realite relative so he or she can be fired from his or her job on account of forcing colonial notions of biological sex on you with their minds. Hey! My vagina was male yesterday!
If you don’t want to destroy someone’s life for knowing that penises are male, ignoring them works and so does repeating everything they say back to them in a mocking tone just like a 10-year-old. I’ve always found that respect is earned through violence, tantrums, the silent treatment, or acting like spoiled child.
You need not try form a coherent sentence or god forbid an argument. No one cares what you think anyway.
TLDR
If you’ve got a Material Realist in your holiday midst, you’ve got a couple of options: leave and go post a selfie, captioned “Literally had to educate my cis-scum Aunt Karen about intersectionality on Thanksgiving my emotional labour is never compensated by these settlers (Venmo me);” or, take charge of your life you boss bitch, and start that OnlyFans account — guys will pay you mad cash to spout Judith Butler quotes at them and tell them they’re racist.