📹 Explaining My Feminist Rage

📹 Explaining My Feminist Rage

She is so angry? Such a nasty, foul, and difficult person. 

People love to point out that I am an angry person. And it’s true.  

I am well aware that my foul mouthed, blunt, and yes- sometimes ANGRY presence clashes against the western colonial racial fantasy of East Asian womanhood

East Asian women: docile, submissive, helpless, infantilized, and sexualized girlhood; or at another extreme, a Tiger Mother: devotes her life to motherhood, attaching her self-esteem to her children's success.

It is a specific type of people who can’t fathom that anger is a valid emotional response to oppression, violence and marginalization. 

I know how to play the respectability politics game: the model minority who is intelligent, academically-inclined, and professional; to be soft spoken, offer suggestions but never push for my own ideas, using passive language to cushion white and male fragility in the room. 

The thing is… I refuse to play. 

Did your fragility feel under attack despite your position of privilege and power? Are you incapable of comprehending words because you don’t understand the depth of the analysis? Or is it my tone, attitude, and delivery that caused you to feel discomfort and frustration?  

This social expectation that women must bend themselves over backwards to accommodate patriarchal norms is not going anywhere.

Tone policing, microaggression, and good ol’ exclusion all to isolate, diminish, and silence people talking about actual fucking wars, genocide, climate apocalypse… 

 We don’t need to look that deep- here in colonial Canada: 

  • Indigenous women make up 16% of all non-male homicide victims and 11% of missing women in the country

Indigenous people are only 4.3% of the population of Canada

  • Femicide in rural areas are 2.5 times higher than urban regions
  • 1 in 3 femicide cases reported were motivated by the murderer’s anger, frustration or despair

~ radical thought here ~ 

It is a privileged to feel discomfort, instead of being talked over, unfairly compensated, overlooked for promotions, sexually and physically abused, murdered, raped, our bodies be used as a human incubator because we don’t even have the right to our own reproductive organs. 

It must be so so uncomfortable that women, girls, femmes and gender non-conforming folks raised their voices to talk about their right to live with dignity. 

Feeling discomfort is necessary if you wish to unlearn colonial and patriarchal rhetorics long embedded into how the society perceives and treats racialized women. And if you can’t see why marginalized peoples are entitled to anger, that’s your problem. 


Some Statistics on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in Canada 🍁

  • All femincides from 2011 to 2022 (n=233), 21% of victims were Indigenous - despite only represented at 5% of non-men population in Canada (Statistics Canada 2023)
The true number of Indigenous victims of gender-related homicide may be underestimated due to the number of Indigenous women and girls who are missing, died under suspicious circumstances or whose homicide remains unsolved... - Danielle Sutton (Statistics Canada 2023).
  • In 2021, rate of femincide of Indigenous victims were 3x higher than overall feminicides (Statistics Canada 2023)
    • 1.72 Indigenous victims versus 0.54 non-Indigenous victims per 100,000
  • Indigenous women are 4x more likely than non-Indigenous women to be victims of violence (Assembly of First Nations)
  • Between 2011-2021, the largest proportion of attempted feminicide occured at residential locations, involved a weapon, and resulted in physical injuries (Statistics Canada 2023).
Approximately 4.6 million women, 30% of all women 15 years of age and older, report that they have experienced sexual assualt at least once since the age of 15. This is compared to 8% men. (Canadian Women's Foundation 2024).
  • 53% of respondents in a 2016 study said at least 1 type of abuse happened at or near their workplace; with almost 40% expressing difficulty getting to work (Canadian Women's Foundation 2024).


📝📝 Reference List 📝📝

Canadian Museum of Human Rights (2025). “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, 2SLGBTQI People.” Canadian Museum of Human Rights. https://humanrights.ca/resource-guide/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-girls-and-2slgbtqi-people

Canadian Women’s Foundation (2024). “Gender-Based Violence.” Canadian Women’s Foundation. https://canadianwomen.org/the-facts/gender-based-violence/

Canadian Women’s Foundation (2024). “The Gender Pay Gap.” Canadian Women’s Foundation. https://canadianwomen.org/the-facts/the-gender-pay-gap/

Carolyn Zola (2023). “Rethinking backlash: gendered bias within and across race”. Stanford University. https://gender.stanford.edu/news/rethinking-backlash-gendered-bias-within-and-across-race

Carter Sherman (2025). “Fetus of brain-dead Georgia woman kept alive due to abortion ban is growing, says family”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/20/pregnant-georgia-woman-brain-dead

Dalena Tran & Ksenija Hanaček (2023). “A global analysis of violence against women defenders in environmental conflict”. Nature Sustainability. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01126-4

Danielle Sutton (2023). “Gender-related homicide of women and girls in Canada”. Statics Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2023001/article/00003-eng.htm

Mike Corder (2023). “Greta Thunberg briefly interrupted by man on stage at climate protest in Amsterdam”. The Guardian. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/greta-thunberg-briefly-interrupted-by-man-on-stage-at-climate-protest-in-amsterdam

Naomi Clugston (2024). “GBV against Climate Change Activists.” Violence Against Women and Children Helpdesk. https://sddirect.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-04/VAWC%20Helpdesk%20Q100%20GBV%20against%20climate%20change%20activists.pdf

Tara Deschamps (2022). “Women still aren’t being promoted, even as entry-level hiring approaches parity.” CityNews Toronto. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/03/08/women-still-arent-being-promoted-even-as-entry-level-hiring-approaches-parity/

The Associated Press (2025). “Woman testifies about alleged sexual assault in Hockey Canada case.” ESPN. https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/45012991/woman-testifies-alleged-sexual-assault-members-canada-2018-world-junior-hockey-team

Wikipedia (2025). “Respectability Politics”. Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respectability_politics