Intersectionality is the idea that the way one’s oppression manifests is dependent on your intersection of identities, rather than the sum of each identity’s “oppression vector”. It was a response to emancipatory movements that had a tendency of focusing on a single axis, and focusing on those who are discriminated along that axis but otherwise privileged.
For example, while all women are oppressed by both patriarchy and capitalism, the nature of how that oppression manifests will differ across socioeconomic status, race, etc. This is the core of a intersectionalist critique of the second wave of feminism, which fought for things like women’s acceptance in the workplace without sufficiently acknowledging that it was mainly well off white women who weren’t already in the workplace. Rather than liberating women, this just changed the nature of some women’s oppression. Going from being forced into the kitchen into being forced into the workplace, with cost of living and other factors over time making single income households infeasible for most people. In fact, that trend leads me to believe something like destigmatizing polyamory would likely lead to a similar response in rent and cost of living. Or at least, it would further delay that contradiction. Needless to say, intersectionality is not suggesting it's not worth destigmatizing polyamory or breaking down other normativities.
Intersectionality argues that these unique intersections complicate the process of liberation, and challenge the idea that liberation can happen along a single axis at a time. It argues that that “liberation” will likely just change the nature of oppression along the other intersections, rather than truly liberate those people. Instead, liberation must come from attacking all forms of oppression. There is still a lot of anti-intersectionality sentiments amongst the left, unfortunately. I personally see it coming a lot from the centrist, liberal, and classically liberal crowds. In particular, you'll see those groups throw trans people to the side believing they can achieve and maintain progress on other axes of oppression by sacrificing trans issues, which they may see as less politically feasible. In practice, this has been a needless concession that has not been winning liberals any more elections and has only shifted the Overton window and essentially gave the right permission to go after even more groups.
Another victim of the lack of intersectionality, once again one I personally relate to, is the reinforcement of neuronormativity. This video essay talks about one such trend where a perverse consumerist approach to "supporting women" led to a hate campaign against someone who didn't want to talk to a stranger about where they got their boots. From my perspective, supporting women should entail supporting their agency to say no and not continuing to bother and harass them afterwards. Other parts of the video also go over how women are attacked for expressing jealousy or not having many friends, which similarly contradict the stated goal of supporting women. The point being, it's only supporting a small number of intersections of identities, at the expense of worsening the oppression of others.
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