This will be a familiar start to a sentence for every vegan. It is generally followed by a set of questions about why. Sometimes these are sincere attempts to understand and other times it is just an attempt to get under your skin and get a rise. I tend to fob it off; I have zero interest in educating others — I don’t have the inclination nor the skill. My answer is always to ask why the questioner isn’t a vegan.
But anyhoo….I got asked it again recently so this is an attempt to try and answer it….
Things I am pro:
- Trans rights
- Queerness
- Sexworkers
- Learning from black feminist thinking
Angela Y Davis
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Audre Lorde
… et al
- Animal rights
- More funding for mental health services
- Trying to do better
Son of Baldwin is someone I read a lot. He uses language very deliberately and challenges me to think very hard about my ideas and what I think I believe in and why.
- Minimising my personal impact on the environment
- Being mindful of my language and getting rid of language that is ableist, sexist, racist
- Using my privilege to help those with less
- Taking up less space
Believe it or not this list is an exercise in this. I’m a middle class cis white male. You won’t find many of those in my list of references.
- Listening harder
- Getting angry
- Individual learning / educating
It was pointed out to me that readers wouldn’t understand how these different things on this list link to veganism. I’m going to try to help by giving some links. These links aren’t the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They aren’t the end point. You’ll find stuff you totally disagree with, but if you then go poke around you may find something else that really chimes with you. And thats my point. To really understand you’re have to go away, reflect and self-learn. I rely on others to do the hard yards and I do my best to learn from them. If you have a look at some of the content here you’ll probably notice that really it avoids neat categorisation. I’ve put stuff where I felt it made most sense but you may think I’ve put it in entirely the wrong place
- Sex positivity
- Kink
- Commonalities of oppression
- Radical veganism
- Food justice
Things I am anti:
- Whiteness
- TERFs
- Fragile masculinity
- Toxic masculinity
- Use of privilege to exert power, control and to oppress
- Western concepts of respectability
- Western concepts of beauty
- The tendency of GAY to overpower all other aspects of queerness
- Individual ignorance
- The belief that humans couldn’t live without monetary based systems of control
- The belief that humans aren’t utterly, supremely destructive, harmful and toxic to every environment that exists on this planet
- The belief that one species of animal has dominion over all others
- Religion
- ‘Veganism is a moral baseline’
- The appropriation of Intersectionality
I guess that you can answer your own question now? And why aren’t you a vegan? I know my Anti list is challenging, but the Pro list surely isn’t?
<2020 Veganuary edit: I originally wrote this back in 2017 and I wanted to add this about Radical Veganism. I’m still engaging with Radical Veganism and this is a lecture that Christopher Sebastian (who features heavily in my approach to veganism!) did a while ago to explain it a little more:
Also, he’s been doing a lot of talks recently about the relationship between the Alt-Right and meat. This is something that really is quite the rabbit hole of a topic to fall down!
Ways to find out some more about Christopher Sebastian are through his blog https://www.christophersebastian.info/blog, twitter @ThotsandPrayers, his facebook https://www.facebook.com/christopher.mcjetters, his patreon is https://www.patreon.com/ChristopherSebastian/overview and his insta https://www.instagram.com/the_christopher_sebastian/.
