Intersectionality 101 THE KIDS ARE ALL FIGHT.

• Author: Soave, Robby

THE WOMEN'S MARCH came to Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Its purpose was to call attention to the incoming president's history of appalling behavior toward women--behavior to which Trump had all but admitted in the infamous hot-mic moment during an Access Hollywood taping. "When you're a star, they let you do it," Trump had said. "You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy."

This was a statement that rightly offended millions of Americans of all political stripes--Trump's electoral fortunes were never lower than immediately after the tape's release--and thus the march held the promise of uniting the country around a universal, positive message: It's not OK to abuse women.

More than half a million people descended on D.C. for the march, making it the largest protest in the United States since the Vietnam War era. It was a fairly awe-inspiring spectacle. Walking just a few blocks from my apartment, I was greeted by a sea of pink hats. Many of the protesters had chosen to reclaim Trump's own vulgar language, and I saw dozens of signs bearing some variant of the slogan "This pussy grabs back." Others were less confrontational: A young woman with pinkstreaks in her brown hair held a sign that said, "To love, we must survive; to survive, we must fight; to fight, we must love." Her friend stood next to her, waving a sign that featured a hand-drawn Donald Trump with the universally recognized emoji for excrement atop his head and the words Dump Trump.

All in all, the Women's March was a success for the nascent anti-Trump movement informally known as the #Resistance. More people showed up to protest than to attend the inauguration--something that seemed to infuriate the president, forcing several Trump staffers to make false statements about the relative sizes of the crowds. (This was the genesis of presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway's now infamous line about "alternative facts.")

Yet many of the young leftists I interviewed told me they thought the protest was a disgrace. According to them, it became too inclusive.

"That's actually fucking right," said Laila, a 26-year-old Muslim woman and political activist, when I asked if that was why she did not attend the march. Although she lives in Washington, D.C, Laila skipped town that weekend. "I'm tired of being a poster child for someone else's attempt at inclusivity," she explained.

In her view, by including so many different perspectives, organizers had watered down the message and ended up marginalizing the people who should have been the focus. They took "an approach that co-opted the narratives of many who have already been fighting in this space, specifically, black women." Laila was hardly the only young activist who felt that way about the Women's March. Juniper, a 19-year-old trans woman, castigated the event as "super white" and "super cisgender-centric." (Cisgender, the opposite of transgender, describes people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth.) She was skeptical of it at best, she said. And others were even harsher.

"I hated it," said Ma'at, a student of color at American University. "It was super cis-centric. It was exclusive of trans identities. It was whitewashed. It just in general was very co-opting and ineffective."

"I just felt like it wasn't very sincere," said Yanet, a student of color at the University of Maryland. "It just felt like a moment for people who aren't as involved or didn't care before to feel like, 'Oh, I did something.'"

"INSINCERE" AND "INEFFECTIVE" will strike many readers as surprising ways for leftist activists to describe the most well-attended mass march in four decades. But it makes perfect sense when one considers the priorities of the new activist culture, which prefers quality--intellectual purity--over quantity. A protest is successful only if it highlights the correct issues, includes the right people--people who check all the appropriate boxes--and is organized by a ruling coalition of the most oppressed. This is what intersectionality dictates.

Though the words intersectionality and inclusion sound like synonyms, they are actually in conflict with each other--a conflict perfectly encapsulated by the Women's March and activists' dissatisfaction with it. In case there was any confusion, Roxane Gay, a celebrated feminist author and voice of the left, tweeted this in response to the idea of people who oppose abortion participating in the event: "Intersectional feminism does not include a pro-life agenda. That's not how it works!"

Intersectionality is the operating system for the modern left. Understanding what it means and where it comes from is essential for comprehending the current state of activism on college campuses, at protests in major cities, and elsewhere.

Put simply, the idea is that various kinds of oppression--racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic inequality, and others--are simultaneously distinct from each other and inherently linked. They are distinct in the sense that they stack: A black woman suffers from two kinds of oppression (racism and sexism), whereas a white woman suffers from just one (sexism). But they are also interrelated, in that they are all forms of oppression that should be opposed with equal fervor. For instance, a feminist who isn't sufficiently worked up about the rights of the gay community is at odds with the tenets of intersectionality. She is a feminist, but she is not an intersectional feminist.

Holly, a 23-year-old Berkeley student whom I met at the April 2017 People's Climate March in Washington, D.C, told me that for her, intersectionality means all issues are "connected and tie in with each other, like indigenous rights, Black Lives Matter, and climate change."

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and Columbia University, coined the term intersectionality in her 1989 paper "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex." She needed a word to describe the lives of black women who were discriminated against because of both their race and their sex. Their experiences were fundamentally different from those of black men, who were privileged to the extent that they were men, and from those of white women, who were privileged to the extent that they were white.

"Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another," wrote Crenshaw. "If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the...