1) We call upon progressives to acknowledge that all politics are identity politics.

That sexism and racism exist cannot seriously be in doubt for any progressive person in the year 2016. Everyone has an identity; every identity is political, whether because it is marginalized or because it benefits from the marginalization of others. It is not “enlightening” or fresh or radical to ignore identity-based oppressions, or minimize them, or demand marginalized people stop talking about them. Oppression is not a “debate” or a “discussion.” It’s a fact. You can “debate” gravity all day, but that won’t change what happens when you drop a bowling ball on your foot. You can “debate” sexism all day, too. The outcome of sexist behaviors remains the same.

Viewpoints which attack “identity politics” directly attack marginalized people. Viewpoints which do not take racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, whorephobia or transphobia into account are not “universal” or “pure” — they are biased in favor of white, male, straight, Christian or cisgender people.

The incidents of direct violence and harassment we have reported are facilitated by an environment in which our political concerns are marginalized, trivialized and mocked. One reproductive rights advocate found herself on a panel with a man who boasted about registering pro-life voters, so that he could push a “true progressive agenda.” When she confronted him about the implication — that a “true” progressive agenda included denying women and trans people life-saving healthcare and forcing them to carry unwanted pregnancies — he responded with anger, dismissiveness, and gaslighting. In another, a woman simply told a man, in the middle of a conversation about drone warfare, that she specialized in reproductive rights and hadn’t done much work on drones. She was told that “abortions are drone strikes for babies.” Subsequently, men joked that “if it doesn’t have to do with her vagina, she doesn’t care about it.” None of this is disconnected from the fact that, in a year of Democratic presidential debates, many of which hinged on the definition of “progressive,” neither candidate was asked a single question about abortion. When our concerns are minimized, and written out of the political narrative, our lives and safety are written out as well.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to any one issue. Biphobia and sizeism are consistently written out of the list of identity-based oppressions.* There are cases where outright exclusion occurs. People with disabilities are constantly erased from identity politics — events are hosted in venues with no accessibility or appropriate resources, which literally exclude them from participating. Their experiences are erased when ableism is presented solely as a mental health issue (ignoring many who face different issues). But mostly, they are not considered in the realm of identity politics at all despite the overwhelming rate of physical, sexual, emotional and financial abuse, discrimination, incarceration and social marginalization.

Oppression consists, not only of brute force and resource inequality, but of the hierarchy of speech: The ability of those in power to decide whose voices are heard, whose experiences matter, whose concerns or goals are “serious” and “political” and whose are merely “personal” and should be ignored. To overturn this hierarchy, it is essential that marginalized people speak to their own concerns, define the agenda, lead movements, and continually complicate the white, male picture of the world with their own perspectives. You cannot “purify” us out of the Left by re-imposing the old hierarchies of speech. You cannot get a “better” or “truer” left by eliminating the truths we bring you. You cannot simplify us out of the Left, because when you do so, you stop being the Left: You become the status quo, upholding and celebrating the exact hierarchy you say you exist to oppose.

Which is to say: Attacks on “identity politics” are not progressive. They are identity politics — an openly conservative identity politics, aimed at delegitimizing marginalized people’s concerns, and centering white, straight men in perpetuity. And, because they explicitly reinforce the oppression of those most harmed by capitalism, they effectively undermine any chance the left has of reaching its goals.

2) We call upon our fellow progressives to recognize that abuse is not dissent.

This statement is not being put together by people who unilaterally agree with each other. Some of us have criticized each other in the past — thoroughly. Though the recent incidents seem to have corresponded to the Democratic primary, the people actually harmed include enthusiastic supporters of Senator Sanders, Secretary Clinton, and possibly even Jill Stein. We disagree on tactics. We disagree on issues. Some are socialist, some are not. Some call themselves “progressives,” some “leftists,” some simply “liberal.” Each of us has a slightly different idea of what an ideal “progressive” agenda would look like in practice; each of us has developed our own priorities and threshold for compromise in the name of that agenda; each of us has disagreed with other progressives on these things.

What we do not do, however, is send each other sexually explicit or violent images, inveigh against each other with slurs, make claims about each other that we know to be untrue and inflammatory, respond to any discussion of oppression with personal insults, follow each other around the Internet leaving nasty comments on each other’s pieces, set up fake social media accounts to harass each other, monitor each other’s communications, coordinate pile-ons, send explicit or implicit threats, dox, defame, discredit, or degrade each other.

None of this is “disagreement.” It is abuse. It is oppression. It is disproportionately aimed at and disproportionately harmful for those of us living with intersectional oppressions: Trans and non-binary people, disabled women, women of color, poor women, queer women, for whom the lack of safety and support in progressive spaces is potentially disastrous, given that they already live in a world where there is precious little support for their survival. It does not promote healthy and illuminating discussion or disagreement — it actively makes that disagreement impossible, by making the penalties for discussion so severe and frightening that people become unable or unwilling to speak. If you care about maintaining the right to dissent, you should set your sights on stopping the abuse, not the complaints about being abused.

3) We call upon each and every one of our fellow progressives to clean up their own house.

Abuse has been actively facilitated by the silence and cooperation of our communities. We have seen people go quiet around this issue, and in the space provided by that silence, abusers have been legitimized, condoned, and given free rein to escalate their abusive behavior indefinitely.

“Identity politics” is not free of these patterns, either. White women have been silent about the harassment of women of color, or have facilitated it, or enacted it. Cisgender women have doxxed, threatened, excluded, or otherwise targeted transgender women and non-binary people. In each case, the problem was the same: The abuse existed, either because no-one outside of the targeted groups knew it was happening, or because people who did know did not address it openly.

In one case, a white man, Hugo Schwyzer, targeted women of color for years. Hugo, too, was an “open secret.” Some white women stayed quiet in the hopes of avoiding him — he had a very real tendency to fixate on women who confronted him — and some stayed quiet in the hopes that ignoring the problem would make it go away. Some stayed quiet because they did not take the problem seriously. But that silence was exactly what Schwyzer relied on to escalate his abuse and escape consequences. One of our writers, a white woman, only realized how severe the problem was when a woman of color wrote a post critical of Schwyzer on the blog they shared, and Schwyzer contacted her about taking the post down. But by that time, the problem was so severe, and white women’s silence was so hurtful, that the trust between feminists of color and white feminists had completely disintegrated. We will never know how much stronger or healthier our movements might be, had white women been more willing to listen to women of color, and more willing to speak out against their oppressions.*

If we see people being harmed, it is our duty to help them. If we see bigoted behavior in our communities, it is our duty to call it what it is. We call upon men to address sexist behavior, white people to address racist behavior, cisgender and straight people to address transphobic, biphobic and homophobic behavior, and everyone to say what they see, when they see it. And we ask that each of us be self-reflective and willing to admit when they may be wrong, or when their own behavior may be causing harm. No-one can clean up all of the garbage, but we can each pick up whatever pieces we see in front of us throughout the day. This only works if we have each other’s backs.