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EP217 · Society · first published 2023-10-23

A critique of intersectional feminism | Binga Tupamäki | Negotiator 217

Lawyer Binga Tupamäki joins Sami Miettinen in October 2023, during the leadership contest of the National Coalition Youth. The episode is strongly opinionated and is marked as such. The most durable part is the critique of identity classification, which grows out of the guest's own position as an international adoptee: the categories break down at the edges, and the people at those edges are the ones who have to explain themselves. The other half is the claim that intersectionality descends from Marxism and that critical theory abandons objectivity — a genuine but contested argument, presented here as one. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society + AI and the Economy

A critique of intersectional feminism | Binga Tupamäki | Negotiator 217

Summary: Lawyer Binga Tupamäki joins Sami Miettinen in October 2023, during the leadership contest of the National Coalition Youth. The episode is strongly opinionated and is marked as such. The most durable part is the critique of identity classification, which grows out of the guest’s own position as an international adoptee: the categories break down at the edges, and the people at those edges are the ones who have to explain themselves. The other half is the claim that intersectionality descends from Marxism and that critical theory abandons objectivity — a genuine but contested argument, presented here as one. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.

How to read this, and the disclosures

Binga Tupamäki is a lawyer and a long-standing activist in the National Coalition Party. The recording is 23 October 2023, and the leadership contest of the National Coalition Youth was under way at the time — she is a candidate in the episode. This article does not deal with the outcome of that contest.

Four disclosures, better made in advance:

1. The identity test, and why it is the right place to start

The episode opens with the same battery of identity questions the channel has used before (in episode 51). The answers are interesting because they are not clean:

This is the right place to begin, because the episode’s whole argument rests on the observation that people do not fit the boxes offered to them. Tupamäki is a Finn adopted internationally, and she is herself the case in which the classification fails.

She adds one factual background note: international adoption into Finland is declining, because conditions in the countries children were previously adopted from have improved to the point where children are no longer given abroad.

2. The episode’s strongest section: the category breaks at the edge

This is the most valuable content in the episode for an article, because it is a structural argument derived from experience rather than a political position. It works regardless of what a reader thinks of the episode’s politics.

The starting point: a London university form. Applying to study philosophy, Tupamäki had to fill in a form asking her ethnicity and sexual orientation — information that is unusually private by Finnish standards and whose connection to a study place and student housing was not obvious. Her point is not that the information is offensive, but that decisions start being made on the basis of identity the moment it is collected.

First problem: the categories are imported. The classes used in Britain — “Caucasian”, “African American” — come from another country’s population history. African American is an incoherent concept in Britain. Tupamäki connects this to Blumenbach’s eighteenth-century racial taxonomy, the ancestor of modern ethnic classification, whose scientific basis was dismantled long ago.

Second problem: a category carries assumptions with it. Her example is direct: if she says she is ethnically Chinese, the assumption follows that she speaks Chinese. She does not; her language is Finnish. The category does not describe her — it asserts things about her that are untrue, and she is the one who has to explain.

Third problem, and the subtlest. Asked about the terms brown girl and racialised, Tupamäki’s answer is not that they are offensive. It is that they are othering: their effect is to mark her as something other than an ordinary Finn.

This is worth noting, because it is structurally the same argument the terms’ defenders make — that words make visible something that would otherwise go unnoticed. Tupamäki’s claim is that making visible and marking as outside are here the same operation. That is a genuine disagreement, not a misunderstanding.

The structural point that remains: when a person is classified on the basis of their partner’s or their family’s identity, the classification has already drifted from what it was meant to describe.

3. Otherness — and the point where the guest agrees with feminism

The episode’s most balanced section, and it surprises because it comes from the middle of the critique.

Sami raises the otherness treated by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: womanhood defined as a deviation from a male default. Tupamäki’s answer is direct: that is a perfectly valid critique.

She gives two examples:

And then she turns it around: expectations bind both sexes. A woman is expected to behave in certain ways; a man is expected to be strong and decisive. Her critique is therefore not aimed at the observation that gender roles constrain, but at what should be done about it.

At this point the episode refers to a column by Tuija Siltamäki whose governing idea is that the world has to be convinced that women can be as crap as men. Tupamäki agrees, and her addition is that a stereotype is a problem even when it is favourable — a woman is not free if she is presumed to be better.

Her objection to corrective efforts is micromanagement: pursuing statistical equality of outcome means steering individual choices in the name of a group average.

4. Intersectionality: the definition, and a claim about its origins

Here the episode moves from a structural argument to a political claim, and the move is worth marking.

The definition Tupamäki accepts: several identities intersect in a person, and those intersections affect how they fare in society. She notes herself that in this form the concept is hard to define precisely, and prefers to speak of “intersections” without the feminism attached.

She also concedes the principle: it is good to identify when an external characteristic affects a person’s success, and to correct it in society’s structures.

And then comes the episode’s most contested claim: intersectionality is Marxism. Tupamäki’s reasoning has three parts:

  1. Oppressor and oppressed. In Marx the parties to class struggle are the working class and the capitalists; in the intersectional frame the axes of oppression are identities, but the structure — the privileged and the oppressed — is the same.
  2. A hierarchy of victimhood. She refers to a “circle of privilege” graphic published by Helsingin Sanomat and notes that it includes, for instance, physical fitness and fatness. Her point is that as axes are added you get a scoring system, and from a scoring system comes a ranking.
  3. Ally logic. Your ally’s ally is your enemy’s enemy — groups from different axes coalesce because they seek change in the same direction, not because their content is the same.

The counter-argument the episode does not make, and which belongs here: the concept of intersectionality was formulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 for a very narrow and practical purpose — to describe why Black women lost discrimination cases in the United States when a court considered race and sex separately but not together. It began as a question of legal proof, not as social doctrine. Its kinship with critical theory is real, but deriving it directly from Marx is an interpretation, not a fact of conceptual history. A reader can judge which is stronger; the episode presents only one side.

5. Critical theory and objectivity — the episode’s most important philosophical dispute

This is the episode’s strongest purely intellectual argument, and also the one where an opposing voice is most missed.

Tupamäki’s claim: critical theory abandons objectivity. If the premise is that there is no objectivity, only subjective experience, then science is done on criteria chosen politically — and appeals to facts no longer settle anything.

She compares this to the Finnish Stalinist student movement of the 1970s and “scientific socialism”: when you demonstrated that communism did not work, the answer was that it had not been real communism. The claim is structurally unfalsifiable — and that is her actual critique.

The evidence she invokes is checkable, and should be stated correctly here:

These happened and are documented. What they prove is a separate question. Peer review has failed just as visibly in medicine and physics, and a single hoax does not refute a field. Tupamäki’s claim is stronger than the hoaxes alone will carry — but the fact that the hoaxes went through in this field and in this way is a genuine observation not worth dismissing from either direction.

A Fukuyama aside. Sami brings in Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History predicted good times for liberal democracy and whose later work deals with identity. Fukuyama’s position is that identity politics must be answered with universalism at the national level — a broadened civic identity rather than a sum of group identities. That is a constructive answer, and a rarity in this episode.

Israel and Palestine. The episode was recorded a couple of weeks after 7 October 2023, and the case comes up as an example of the frame’s limits rather than as a position on the conflict. Tupamäki’s argument is that if the oppressor–oppressed alignment is fixed in advance on the basis of identity, the frame cannot handle events that do not fit it and requires continual additional explanation. This article takes no position on the conflict and does not describe it; the passage is here because it is part of the guest’s argument about how the frame performs.

6. “A feminist globally, a supporter of equality in Finland”

This is the episode’s clearest single position and at the same time its most honest, because it is explicitly two-level.

At the global level Tupamäki says she is a feminist. The reasoning is direct and concrete: there are hundreds of millions of women in a permanently subordinate position. Her example is Afghanistan — a case where the oppression is, in her words, real and chauvinist, and where the situation after the Western withdrawal is straightforwardly worse for women.

She says she donates to Plan, specifically for girls’ education, because she regards it as the first route to a more equal society. She connects this to effective altruism and says she has listened to Sam Harris on the subject. Sam Bankman-Fried — the movement’s best-known scandal — is mentioned but not discussed.

In Finland she prefers to call herself a supporter of equality. And here she names what she would support in Finland: boys’ performance at school and boys’ mental health — subjects she says get too little attention.

This matters for the article, because it makes the position coherent rather than merely critical: the claim is not that there are no problems between the sexes, but that Finland’s problems are different problems from Afghanistan’s.

And from this follows her actual charge, the episode’s headline claim: intersectionality has ruined feminism. The argument is that when attention moves to intersecting identities in the West, it moves away from places where women’s rights are restricted by law and by violence. It is a checkable claim about emphasis — and its counter-argument is equally obvious: two things can be pursued at once. The episode does not make it.

7. A meme, an accusation of racism, and what is left of it

A short but revealing passage, compressed here to what generalises.

Tupamäki says she published on social media a meme containing AI-generated images, criticising the salary levels of managers in Finland’s health and social services reform. The feedback included an accusation of racism on account of the images used. Her own reading is that there was nothing racist in the meme.

This is her own account of feedback she received, and it is recorded here as such. Both sides would be needed to say more about the case, and the episode has only one.

What generalises from it is Tupamäki’s broader claim: in the debate about racism, whoever shouts loudest wins, because the threshold for saying out loud that you disagree is high. That is a position, not an observation, and it is marked as one here.

She does, however, draw a distinction in the same breath that is useful regardless of what one makes of the above: genuinely believing in a racial hierarchy — that some group of people is inherently better or more intelligent than another — is a different thing from being misread. The first is the actual content of racism. If the word is stretched to cover every offence taken, it loses its ability to describe the first.

8. Marx without the caricature

The episode’s most surprising section is where the guest says what she thinks Marx got right. It is short and it is done carefully.

What holds:

What does not hold, on her account:

Lenin. Tupamäki’s assessment is unusual and deserves recording precisely: she considers Lenin analytical and thinks he built coherent further theory within a communist frame. She does not offer this as praise but as an explanation of why there are still so many Leninists — the theory holds together internally. And from that follows her critique: if liberal society is defined as corrupt in its entirety, the only remaining solution is to cut it off completely. That is a property of the frame, not a trait of Lenin’s.

9. Capitalism and a market economy are not the same thing

The episode’s most useful conceptual distinction, and it is presented with unusual fairness, because the guest introduces it by referring to a conversation with a political opponent — Tiina Sandberg of the Communist Party — and sends her regards.

The distinction:

Her cheese example is good, because it makes the distinction concrete: if consumers choose one maker’s cheese, under capitalism that maker takes the profit and accumulates capital. In a socialist market economy the market still gets to choose, but the profits are levelled — at which point the winner loses the reason to make a better product.

The distinction is useful regardless of political position, because most debate about capitalism conflates the two, and the parties then argue about different things.

The host’s position. Sami states his own view here, flagged in the episode as a rant and marked here as a position: he holds it inconsistent to pursue a reduction in Finns’ wealth when taxation is already high and household wealth internationally low. He has made several episodes on the low level of Finnish household wealth; that is the checkable part of the claim, unlike the reading of anyone’s motives.

10. The welfare state as a commons problem

The episode’s last structural argument, and the most interesting of them, because it is not the usual public-finance talk.

The claim: the welfare state’s problem is the same as the tragedy of the commons — when a resource is shared and nobody bears ultimate responsibility for it, everyone has an incentive to take more than a sustainable share. In practice this shows up as borrowing: the debt is everyone’s and therefore nobody’s.

The second claim is sharper and therefore more interesting: transfers do not run from the rich to the poor but from middle-income to middle-income. Tupamäki’s phrasing is pointed — the beneficiaries are “middle-income social democrats” — but the observation itself is well known in research on the Nordic welfare state: when both taxation and benefits are broad, a large share of the money flow is the same household’s money circulating through the system rather than redistribution between income groups. The claim is therefore stronger than its presentation suggests.

Acemoglu’s narrow corridor. Tupamäki applies the model of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (The Narrow Corridor, 2019): on one axis the power of the state, on the other civil society’s capacity to hold it in check. Liberty survives only in the narrow corridor where both grow together. Her conclusion about Finland is that the state apparatus is enormous and liberal civil society thin — that is, we sit at the Leviathan edge of the corridor.

This is her application of the model, not the model’s own result. It can be contested in several ways — for instance by noting that in the Nordic system trade unions, associations and a strong press are precisely the civil society she regards as thin. The episode does not engage that counter-argument.

Laffer. She further claims that Finland is on the right-hand side of the Laffer curve, taxing at higher rates than revenue maximisation would require. This is a contested empirical claim. The existence of the Laffer curve is trivially true (at a zero rate and at a hundred per cent rate the revenue is zero); where the peak lies is open in the research literature and estimates vary widely by tax type. The episode presents no calculation.

11. Finally: what is left of the episode

The episode closes on a question about role models, and Tupamäki’s answer says more than any other passage about what she values in politics. She names Ben Zyskowicz, and the reasoning is not ideological: an ability to work with people, to behave decently, and to be helpful to anyone. She attaches exactly those qualities to why Zyskowicz has stayed in parliament for decades.

That is a good place to assess the episode as a whole.

What holds up:

What is a position rather than an observation:

These are all defensible positions, and they are marked here as positions, because the episode presents them as observations and no opposing voice is present.

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