Jane Ussher was quoted in an ABC News article about sexual harassment and violence against transwomen saying: “[It’s] because they are women, because they are trans, because they are a woman of colour and many of whom were bisexual, queer or lesbian so these different multiple identities put them at high risk of sexual violence”. She’s describing someone born male as a ‘woman’, ‘woman of colour’, and ‘bisexual’/’queer’/’lesbian’, in addition to being ‘trans’.

This is a great example of ‘multiple oppressions for the price of one’: identifying as trans secures a number of further marginalised identities and catapaults a person to the ‘bottom of the pile’ when it comes to intersectional oppression. In this video, I explain a more useful way to think about axes of social group advantage/disadvantage, and argue that gender identity ideology distorts facts about how people are located on different axes.