We begin with those who bear the greatest burdens of our current reality – those who remain violated, exploited, marginalized and powerless – and the systems of oppression – patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism (to invoke the unholy trinity) – that generate and sustain these burdens.

Gender theorist Paisley Currah argues that prison abolition, the adoption of free universal healthcare, and a large-scale assault on income inequality “would make the most difference to the most trans people”. To riff on Simone de Beauvoir, no oppressed population can be free until all oppressed populations are free. As I write, however, feminists remain divided over the status of trans people, while white working-class Americans continue to accept the psychological “wages of whiteness” rather than unify their interests with those of poor Black Americans.

After a long, overlooked history, the theory of intersectionality finally broke onto the global stage in the late 1980s.

Through emphasizing the intersections between different dimensions of oppression, it opened up the possibility of challenging the idea of a single axis of oppression, showing that all axes of oppression are inextricably linked. But how many axes are there, and how far do they reach not just into human life, but into animal and vegetal life?

In the midst of all this, certain oppressed populations continue to be overlooked. Psychiatric populations, for example, experience some of the most appalling and inhumane treatment imaginable, and yet Mad activism remains a movement that few activists engage with – or even know about. How widely can the reach of human compassion and solidarity be extended?

“In oppression, the oppressor oppresses himself ”. The most dangerous populations are those who are oppressed but fail to recognize their own oppression; reaffirming their identity at the expense of others is their legacy to the world.

To paraphrase Lewis R. Gordon, the biggest enemy of oppression is the realization of its irrelevance; the result is individual oppressors without the structures of oppression. What, then, are the conditions of possibility for the irrelevance of oppression?