Intersectional feminism and privilege

Intersectional feminism and privilege emerge in the book not as abstract labels but as tests of attention: who recognizes the advantages they hold, whose needs are heard, and whether that awareness changes behavior. Amber can name her social position and the systems she opposes, yet her romantic choices repeatedly pull against her convictions. Elsewhere, Margo Fairchild and Eve Fletcher confront the limits of treating whole groups as unreachable or of making decisions for vulnerable people without painful consequences.

Amber’s politics and self-awareness

Amber understands herself as an intersectional feminist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and an ally of LGBT people. She also identifies the advantages attached to being straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, white, and middle class in a wealthy country. Her stated aim is to remain alert to those advantages and not use them to silence people with less social power. Her opposition extends to capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggressions. The breadth of that political vocabulary establishes a serious commitment, but the narrative does not present political knowledge as proof of personal consistency.

The sharpest contradiction appears in her attraction to men. Amber wishes she were drawn to partners who shared her politics, including activists and gender-nonconforming men, but repeatedly falls for athletes, usually white men whose privilege they do not appear to question. She sees a pattern in which these partners treat her as disposable and leave without apology, while retaining an uncomplicated sense of themselves as good people. Her analysis makes privilege more than a matter of individual identity: in her account, it can enable harmful conduct while insulating the person who benefits from it from self-criticism.

Amber recognizes that her own desires keep returning her to this pattern. Recalling her father’s maxim that repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome is irrational, she decides that her love life has become an example of that cycle. She considers choosing partners more carefully or giving up sex rather than continuing through empty encounters and self-directed sadness. The decision marks a wish to make political self-respect consequential in private life, not just something she can articulate.

Brendan and the return of an old pattern

Meeting Brendan at the Activities Fair on the first day of her sophomore year tests Amber’s resolution immediately. She reads him as attractive, self-confident, broad-shouldered, inarticulate, politically unaware, and a lacrosse player: in her view, a concentrated set of the warning signs she had promised herself to avoid. Her attraction arrives despite her judgment, and she likens her difficulty resisting it to a smoker who cannot sustain a decision to quit.

Amber responds differently than she had during her first year. Then, she might have texted a man to arrange a casual encounter, understanding that initiative as part of women’s sexual freedom. But previous experiences had left her waiting for acknowledgment that did not come, even in the form of a thank-you message. With Brendan she holds back, does not text him, arrange a supposedly accidental meeting in the Higg, or add him on Facebook. She does look at his posts and notices his shirtless photographs. Her restraint is therefore real but incomplete: she avoids initiating contact while continuing to feed her attraction from a distance.

For a time, the strategy keeps the two from hooking up, partly because Brendan makes no effort to contact her either. About a month into the semester, Amber enters the library with the newly formed Student Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality and finds him there reading about climate change. That encounter complicates her first impression without resolving the conflict between her politics and desire. The episode makes her self-awareness an ongoing struggle rather than a settled achievement: she can identify the pattern, try to interrupt it, and still find herself drawn toward the same kind of man.

Age, care, and exclusion

The book also places questions of whose perspective counts in encounters shaped by age and care. Margo Fairchild has often spoken to teenagers because she remembers the isolation of being a young trans person without visible adult role models. She believes those encounters matter even when some young listeners are hostile, because they may change or at least be deterred from open cruelty. Her experience leads her to see older people differently: after repeated painful encounters with older relatives and family acquaintances, she has come to doubt that many will reconsider their beliefs about gender and has decided that arguing with them is not worth the hurt.

That conclusion is challenged when Eve invites Margo to speak at the Senior Center. Eve points out that dismissing older people as incapable of change repeats a form of exclusion directed at LGBT people. She also stresses their vulnerability and their continuing power within families and at the ballot box. Margo accepts the invitation after this appeal, and during the talk she directs her attention to a woman whose age brings her to mind as someone shaped by the same social forces as Margo’s mother. The episode places Margo’s justified frustration beside the risk of turning painful experience into a judgment about an entire generation.

Eve’s work at the Senior Center presents a related tension in the practical language of care. George Rafferty arrives apprehensively with his eighty-two-year-old father, Roy, whose dementia has contributed to disruptive behavior. Eve tells Roy that he can no longer attend because the community center cannot meet his needs and that he requires a nursing home. The decision is presented as an institutional limit, not as evidence that Roy has ceased to be valued: Eve tells him that staff members have enjoyed his company and that he has been kind and considerate to others. Yet the decision still removes him from a community he had belonged to.

Roy’s death soon afterward makes the consequence of that exclusion painful for Eve. At his wake, she recalls that she had not known he had only a month to live when she banned him, and she does not conclude that she could have made a different decision with the information available. Instead, she is troubled by the human cost of carrying out a professional responsibility toward someone she cared about. His crowded wake, attended by people connected to his civic life and plumbing career, recalls the person he had been before dementia altered his behavior. Care here involves both a genuine wish to protect a shared space and the possibility that a necessary boundary will humiliate someone already vulnerable.

Access and the limits of recognition

The Senior Center’s accessible bathroom offers a concrete view of needs that ordinary arrangements can overlook. It serves people who need privacy to inject insulin or manage ostomy pouches, as well as people with digestive conditions and others who benefit from a single, lockable room. Its use is not confined to one narrowly defined group; accessibility supports varied and sometimes private needs across the community. The detail expands the book’s concern with inclusion beyond declared political commitments: a shared institution must account for bodies and circumstances that its default facilities may not serve.

Taken together, these episodes distinguish recognizing inequality from resolving it. Amber can identify privilege but struggles to align desire with judgment. Margo’s advocacy for trans people does not automatically prevent her from dismissing older people, while Eve’s attempt to protect the Senior Center’s community cannot spare Roy or herself from the hurt of exclusion. The book presents intersectional awareness as an imperfect practice: it requires attention to specific people and circumstances, including the moments when a person’s own habits, institutional duties, or past injuries make that attention difficult.