Here's the quote from Tourniquet in context. I'll add it to the diary as well.

I'm frontpaging this response because "minorities" were only an issue in terms of political status, and because issues involving "minorities" are actually cleared up when one talks of political status.

Indeed if you are not poor you might not see yourself as oppressed. Mies is clearly referring to some women as being subordinated in the continuation of the capitalist model -- namely the ones in the colonies and sweatshops and patriarchal households and so on, women who escape traditional patriarchy only to discover themselves working for long hours at low wages or doing housework in patriarchal families. Mies highlights the senses in which patriarchy aligns itself with capitalism.

The elite neoMalthusian obsession with "population" also points to a complaint about a symptom of traditional patriarchy within a modern context. Effective birth control becomes a social force when women have effective reproductive rights. Not making women into objects of gendered exploitation would be "going all the way" in that regard.

One of the things which science fiction and fantasy incite us to imagine is a world in which individuals may change genders (along with, to be sure, actual physical sex characteristics) at the drop of a hat. Such power is, of course, the dream of the transgendered, and Robyn writes about that topic well. The technology, of course, is still at present too primitive to make gender irrelevant by itself, and so present-day society has transgendered people -- men who wish to be regarded as women and women who wish to be regarded as men. The idea of being transgendered, however, appears upon first glance to have within it the idea of a long transition between genders, which is indeed a limitation. But even the notion of "transgendered" allows for an imaginative context in which the public social concept (the "social imaginary," as one sees in Cornelius Castoriadis or Charles Taylor) of gender can be transformed.

Now of course the fictional door was perhaps opened toward gender transformation by some rather mediocre "sci-fi": so, for instance, you can read Robert A. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, basically the story of a dying man whose brain is transplanted into his lovely female secretary's body, as taking place in a dystopian future. Or perhaps you can count the rather sexist episode of Star Trek that concluded the third season of the old series. More interestingly there were John Varley's "Eight Worlds" tales, or Tanith Lee's Don't Bite The Sun and its sequel which I do not have.

At any rate, (relatively) quick and convenient gender-changing (I know this is a fantasy) would also quickly make traditional patriarchy irrelevant. Perhaps the inhabitants of traditional patriarchies would at first all choose to be men, even the women, given the preexisting order, but they would no doubt soon thereafter discover what a society without gender difference was like. Perhaps they would also soon thereafter discover the narcissism of exploitation: you can't be an exploiter unless someone or something is also there to play the role of the exploited.

So to the point of my redirection of that thread from what was in my opinion a rather humdrum conversation. Whether or not you are a "minority" is, in itself, irrelevant -- what matters are the contexts of power and exploitation which today make fools of us all.