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hepatizon posted:What does it look like, policy-wise, to focus on issues faced by poor gay black trans women? I don't understand how that can be solved without breaking it down into single-axis problems. One example is that well-meaning policymakers will sometimes create womens-only homeless shelters, because in mixed shelters women will be harassed and abused. But Women-idenitified transfolk also face the threat of discrimination and physical violence from homeless men, so if those people are excluded from the womens-only shelter then they could be left even worse off then before. And there's also the issue of violence against queer homeless youth, who may not be women but who still might need special treatment... From a policymaker's perspective it just means keeping an ear out for the concerns of all community members- e.g. if you're building a women's shelter don't just get input from the white middle-class feminists who are its primary backers, but also reach out to other vulnerable communities to ensure everyone's needs are being met. From an activist's perspective it means making sure that a black woman doesn't have to choose between a white-dominated feminist movement and a male-dominated POC movement, neither of which will properly represent her interests. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Dec 10, 2014 |
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Dec 10, 2014 19:28
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:02 |
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That's totally standard for economics and public policy. We're taught that you can separate questions of efficiency and fairness- the job of policymakers is to find the most efficient solution, while voters and politicians worry about distributional equity. That's the whole reason Pareto optimality and the "fundamental theorems of welfare economics" are taught in undergrad econ. And it's not an entirely stupid idea. If *all* you want as a leftist is to make the poor richer and the rich poorer (that is, the distribution of wealth), then you can do that with income transfers while being a ruthless free-marketeer in every other respect. For the purposes of a civil servant (which is what I'm in school to be someday) this is a totally necessary distinction to make. Some things are for politicians to decide and some things are for experts to decide. You can't have bureaucrats sitting around a table trying to decide what's "fair" and what isn't, that's ultimately a value judgement. The problem is that a lot of the time policy ends up reproducing existing power structures...
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Dec 13, 2014 23:18
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