Tournament: D2 Districts | Round: 6 | Opponent: Fresno HT | Judge: Dunn
1NC

As a debate community, we believe that we should have respect for each person, regardless of the decisions they make.  Why do we debate with divide against each other based on our identity? We always poke on the weaknesses of others by defending a sex or race. We place labels on marginalized populations: tying the ballot to one’s identity. This methodology is flawed and is evidenced by the recent discussions on Facebook and CEDA Forums.
Emma Perez, a queer theorist, argues on CEDA Forums “that communities are as much constituted by the stories they leave out and erase as they are by the stories they include. In round, debaters are told their identities and experiences do not matter because of the competitive nature of debate. Whether or not that exclusion ought to occur, it must be acknowledged that it does indeed occur.” 

Focusing on one oppression reifies the domination because the oppression of multiple groups is inextricably linked. We need to understand the intersection between the racism, sexism, cissuppremacy and other manifestations of oppression in the debate community 

Frye 83(Marilyn, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, N.Y.,: The Crossing Press, 1983).
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped. Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.
Single-focused identity is solely self-advancement, which makes out-group engagement with the oppression impossible. The self-created distance between the self-identified group and the rest of society restricts the formation of a strong alliance from the rest of society to fight against the system. 

Mandle ‘10 (10/04/10. Joan D. Mandle Associate Professor of Sociology Colgate University. How Political is the Personal?: Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change. http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/identity_pol.html). 

Out of this situation there emerged what has been called identity politics, a politics that stresses strong collective group identities as the basis of political analysis and action. As political engagement with the society as a whole was increasingly perceived to have produced insufficient progress or solutions, and in the absence of a compelling model of a society worth struggling for, many progressives retreated into a focus on their own "self" and into specific cultural and ideological identity groups which made rights, status, and privilege claims on the basis of a victimized identity. These groups included ethnic minorities such as African-Americans, Asian- Americans, Native Americans, religious groups, lesbian women and gay men, deaf and other disabled people. The desire to gain sympathy on the basis of a tarnished identity was sometimes taken to absurd lengths, as for example when privileged white men pronounced themselves victims based on their alleged oppression by women and especially by feminists. Indeed in the last decade there has been an explosion of groups vying with one another for social recognition of their oppression and respect for it. This has been especially exaggerated on college campuses where young people have divided into any number of separate identity groups. Identity politics is centered on the idea that activism involves groups' turning inward and stressing separatism, strong collective identities, and political goals focused on psychological and personal self-esteem. Jeffrey Escofier, writing about the gay movement, defines identity politics in the following fashion: "The politics of identity is a kind of cultural politics. It relies on the development of a culture that is able to create new and affirmative conceptions of the self, to articulate collective identities, and to forge a sense of group loyalty. Identity politics - very much like nationalism - requires the development of rigid definitions of the boundaries between those who have particular collective identities and those who do not." Many progressive activists today have come to base their political analysis on collectively and often ideologically constructed identities which are seen as immutable and all-encompassing. These identities, for many, provide a retreat where they can feel "comfortable" and "safe" from the assaults and insults of the rest of the society. Today it is the case that many of those who profess a radical critique of society nonetheless do not feel able, as activists in the 60s and 70s did, to engage people outside their own self-defined group - either to press for improvement in their disadvantaged status or to join in coalition. Identity politics defines groups as so different from one another, with the gap dividing them so wide and unbridgeable, that interaction is purposeless. Not only is it assumed that working together will inevitably fail to bring progressive change that would benefit any particular group. In addition, identity groups discourage political contact because of their concern that the psychological injury and personal discomfort they believe such contact inevitably entails will harm individuals' self-esteem and erode their identity. Identity politics thus is zero-sum: what helps one group is thought inevitably to harm another; what benefits them must hurt me. It is a politics of despair. In the name of advancing the interests of one's own group, it rejects attempts to educate, pressure, or change the society as a whole, thus accepting the status quo and revealing its essentially conservative nature. Identity politics advocates a retreat into the protection of the self based on the celebration of group identity. It is a politics of defeat and demoralization, of pessimism and selfishness. By seizing as much as possible for one's self and group, it exposes its complete disregard for the whole from which it has separated - for the rest of the society. Identity politics thus rejects the search for a just and comprehensive solution to social problems.
This narrow methodology breeds intolerance and divides us rather than solving anything.

ELAINE STAVRO 07 -  Rethinking Identity and Coalitional Politics, Insights from Simone de Beauvoir. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 40:2 (June/juin 2007) 439–463)

The psychoanalytically inclined poststructuralists have similar concerns about the philosophical and political essentialism of identity politics. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, among others, understand identity as produced by a discourse which challenges its foundational status. Identity is imposed from outside, as an effect of power and as a deficiency; these critics, therefore, insist that all social identities be refused. More specifically, they see identity attachments as a symptom of an ego dysfunction. As Laclau writes, “the psychoanalytic category of identification” claims “there is a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with someone because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity” 1994: 3!. The inability to tolerate “lack” or deficiency, Jacques Lacan believes, underpins the need for strong group identification. Also, strong communities presume strong feelings of intolerance or hate for those outside the community. On a societal level one throws oneself into collective identities. Losing oneself in large political or social movements relieves the emptiness and loneliness within. Strong identities—both personal and collective—are symptoms of pathology, and must be refused.

Dehumanization makes human beings dispensable and justifies any and every atrocity— destroying the value of life makes extermination and genocide inevitable

Berube 97 (Berube, David. Professor. English. University of South Carolina. “Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side.” 1997. http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm)
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu and Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it.  Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.
Basing politics on identity prohibits questioning of their methodology and blinds us to the root cause of gender oppression--patriarchal socialization of gender identity according to biological identity.  

Ruby and Mantilla 2000 (Jennie and Karla, journalists for Off Our Backs, the longest surviving feminist newspaper in the U.S., “Men in ewe’s clothing: the stealth politics of the transgender movement,” Off Our Backs, 30.4)

Rather than accepting that a person just is transgender as a matter of identity, I believe it is imperative to examine the politics of being mtf. I maintain that there are politics inherent in the choice to be mtf, that is, there are ways of looking at the world, at gender, at identity, and at power relations in that choice. Yet identity politics disallows political analysis or criticism of identities which are profoundly political. The tactic of holding identity as separate from politics and above analysis is a politics in and of itself--and it is generally a politics of conservatism to hold areas as off limits for scrutiny. Leslie Feinberg, in Trans Liberation, admits s/he has heard transwomen being criticized for "taking up too much space or being overbearing because they were socialized as men," yet s/he says that it is "prejudiced" for nontrans people to make this observation (by the way, that is a misuse of the word prejudice; it is not pre-judging, it is simply making an observation). In this manner, the power implications of taking up too much space are ruled exempt from critique. One of the political problems that I see with the whole notion of transgender politics is the idea that by changing one's appearance, presentation, or body, one can change one's gender. 

Thus, our alternative is the implementation of the debate space as an arena to deploy alliance conscious-building. Alliance conscious-building is a large-scale transformational process. It values every member’s experience and provides a model for knowledge production in a collective manner. 

Keating 05(Cricket, “Building Coalitional Consciousness”, June 1, 2005, NWSA Journal. http://web.ebscohost.com.lib.pepperdine.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3andsid=09839e03-ee6e-4bbe-90b0-9a3cefac73e7%40sessionmgr12andhid=12)
Given that often experiments in radical democratic practice are discouraged as utopian or ineffective, it is important to remember the large-scale transformations generated, in part, by feminist consciousness-raising. Indeed, as an experiment in radical democracy, feminist consciousness raising was and is a very important methodological intervention in political praxis in several important ways. First, its emphasis on women’s day-to-day lives, thoughts, and experiences challenges the public/private divide by making explicit the political implications of women’s so-called
“personal lives.” Further, in a political culture dominated by divisions between “organizers” and “organized” and between “leaders” and “followers,” its stress on the value of each woman’s experience and knowledge serves to build nonhierarchical and transformative spaces for thinking about and acting upon one’s own and each other’s different situations. Finally, by challenging the divide between theory and practice, consciousness-raising provides a model for ways to create knowledge and theory in  a participatory and collective manner; as Catherine MacKinnon notes, the assumption at the root of the process is that “everyone is a theorist” (1989,
102)..
Alliance conscious-building is a response to the criticisms of the second wave feminist practice. This new coalition methodology unites the marginalized to resist multiple oppression. 

Keating 05(Cricket, “Building Coalitional Consciousness”, June 1, 2005, NWSA Journal. http://web.ebscohost.com.lib.pepperdine.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3andsid=09839e03-ee6e-4bbe-90b0-9a3cefac73e7%40sessionmgr12andhid=12)
In response to the above critiques of the model of feminist consciousness-raising that marked second-wave feminist practice, I recommend a model of explicitly coalitional consciousness-building that draws upon the insights of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, María Lugones, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, and of examples of approaches used by consciousness raising groups that had success in engendering awareness and solidarity across multiple lines of difference. By naming the practice “coalitional consciousness-building” instead of “coalitional consciousness-raising,” my intention is to echo the usage of the phrase “coalition-building” and to emphasize coalitional consciousness not as an entity lying dormant or hidden that needs to be elevated or brought to light but rather as a set of understandings, motivations, and ways of seeing that can be constructed, formed, and fostered together. Such a practice, I’ll argue, might incorporate the following three steps: Step One: Locating Experience In a small group that meets regularly, share experiences relating to a chosen theme, paying close attention to the national, racial, class, and other relevant contexts and histories in which the experiences being articulated are being  played out. Step Two: Seeing Resistance to Multiple Oppressions Examine the experiences with an eye for the multiple relations of oppression and resistance at play. Step Three: Coalitional Risk-Taking Explore the barriers to, and possibilities for, coalitional action with regards to the experience

Limitation to societal identification sustains inferiority and prevents progress- our methodology is the best way to achieve any change

ELAINE STAVRO 07 -  Rethinking Identity and Coalitional Politics, Insights from Simone de Beauvoir. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 40:2 (June/juin 2007) 439–463)

I will focus on the poststructuralist critiques of identity politics, inasmuch as in the current theoretical environment their arguments are more prevalent and influential. Poststructuralists see the identity model of recognition as philosophically unpersuasive and politically dangerous. Nancy Fraser, for example, addresses both the philosophical and political problems involved in identity models of recognition. Identity politics, she believes, were inspired by Hegel, who acknowledges the significance of recognition in overcoming power relations and respects the dialogic aspect of identity Fraser, 2000: 109!. For Hegel, one needs the recognition of an equal to become a subject and develop into a mature and confident self. Hence, the master is incapable of affirming himself as a self so long as there is a class of non-selves. Hegelianism challenges the belief that one’s agency is guaranteed by one’s class or is institutionally secure; one is not automatically a self, but must develop into one through a gradual process of intersubjective interaction culminating in mutual recognition. To be systematically misrecognized or not recognized by members of the dominant culture is an injury to the self and a harm that sustains inferiority. To counteract the effect of their marginality, minority groups called for the celebration and consolidation of their identity whether it is black, lesbian, Muslim, etc.!. Fraser argues that in doing so, group attributes and identities become fixed and essentialized, and since these identities bear marks of their subordinate status, they are unworthy of replication. Also, although they have been inspired by Hegel and his account of therelational self and dialogical relations, those who espouse the identity model of recognition, Fraser argues, depart from it in essentializing identity. Although identity politics have been inspired by Hegel, they forget their Hegelian roots and the dialogic nature of self and community

Case

Western feminists engage in speaking for the global community. 

Smith '01
http://labyrinth.iaf.ac.at/2001/Smith.html

These questions resonate with the phenomenon of Western liberal feminists’ preoccupation with liberating and helping the “poor oppressed” women who live in non western and so-called “Third World” cultures in order to bring justice to their lives.  According to some liberal feminists, most women in so-called non-western traditions are oppressed because they are denied liberty, justice and/or equality on the basis of their sex or qua being female. And in this light, they believe that it is possible to critique “other” cultures on the premise that these cultures victimize and hurt women by denying them their human rights or ability to decide for themselves how to lead their lives. They belief that these cultures ought to uphold and instill feminist liberal and democratic principles.  For they obtain that these principles are universally applicable and beneficial to all women and all persons.
The affirmative speaks from a place of western, privilege, which does not take into account the oppression that occurs outside of the U.S. This reifies oppression.

Smith '01
http://labyrinth.iaf.ac.at/2001/Smith.html

In her essay, “The Problem of Speaking for Others”, Linda Alcoff puts this point clear when she writes that, “… certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous.  In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in creasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for.”
Western methodology silences other women.

Smith '01
http://labyrinth.iaf.ac.at/2001/Smith.html

I question whether Okin’s method of speaking for women in the “Third World” and making vast generalizations over the entire “Third World” which I presume includes at least three continents, namely Africa, Asia and South America.   This method might actually serve to silence the women for whom she is speaking and in turn decrease the likelihood of establishing real democracy and liberal values throughout the world.  Often, non-Western cultures hold tight to certain value systems as part of their tradition in attempts to keep Western influences at bay, even if it might mean constructing relatively new values held as traditional or devaluing women and their work (See Narayan).  One could argue that the West is therefore partly responsible for the devaluation of women’s work in certain places, due to colonization and imperialism.