---
title: "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."
datePublished: 2023-10-23
dateModified: 2023-10-23
originalLang: en
section: society
sections: ["society","economy"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Neuvottelija","EP217","Identiteettipolitiikka","Feminismi","Kriittinen teoria","Hyvinvointivaltio","Politiikan filosofia","Binga Tupamäki"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep217-intersektionaalinen-feminismi-binga-tupamaki/
---
# A critique of intersectional feminism | Binga Tupamäki | Negotiator 217

# 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:

- **The episode is strongly opinionated and political.** That is a genre, not a fault, but it
  changes how the claims should be read. This article separates **structural arguments** —
  those that can be checked or contested — from **positions taken**, and marks which is which.
- **Contested passages are presented as contested.** The guest makes claims about entire
  schools of thought and their adherents. These are recorded as her claims, and the central
  ones carry the counter-argument the episode does not make.
- **One anecdote from the episode is left out.** The guest describes the case of a named
  person who, she says, was judged on the basis of their spouse's identity. The claim cannot
  be verified here, so the structural point is kept and the name and the account of events
  removed.
- **There is no publisher caption track**, so this article is based on YouTube
  auto-captioning. No verbatim quotation is used.

## 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:

- **Equality:** she supports equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
- **Feminism:** *"this is a really difficult question"* — returned to later with a two-level
  answer (see section 6).
- **Chauvinism:** no.

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:

- **The default gender of a profession.** The word *philosopher* conjures a man. The same
  applies to roles traditionally taken to require rationality.
- **The Finnish *-tar* suffix.** *Laulajatar* (songstress), *kaunotar* (beauty) — femaleness
  is marked as an addition to the base form, whose default is male.

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:**

- **The Sokal affair (1996).** The physicist Alan Sokal got a deliberately meaningless
  article, arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct, published in *Social Text*.
- **"Sokal Squared" (2018).** James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian submitted
  a series of fabricated papers to journals in the field; several were accepted for
  publication, the best known being one on sexual behaviour in dog parks.

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:**

- **Alienation.** Tupamäki calls it a fine concept — the idea that work can separate a person
  from their own activity and from themselves.
- **The critique of capitalism.** Marx had a point here.

**What does not hold, on her account:**

- **The labour theory of value and the theory of surplus value** — her characterisation is
  blunt: fluff.
- **The transition through socialism to communism.** Marx's own account is that capitalism
  destroys itself through its contradictions; the later stage model — socialism first, then
  communism — requires a violent transition.

**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:**

- **A market economy** is a mechanism by which prices and production are determined. In
  practice socialists accept it too.
- **Capitalism** is what happens to the profits afterwards — whether capital accumulates to
  an owner or is levelled.

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:**

- **The critique of identity categories from the perspective of an edge case.** It is derived
  from experience and holds regardless of political position. Categories built to describe a
  majority create a burden of explanation for those who do not fit them.
- **The distinction between capitalism and a market economy.** It clarifies a debate in which
  the parties often discuss different things.
- **The direction of welfare-state redistribution.** Middle-income to middle-income is a
  known finding in the research literature and deserves treatment independent of party.
- **That the guest says what Marx got right.** That is rare in this genre.

**What is a position rather than an observation:**

- The claim that intersectionality derives directly from Marxism.
- The claim that whoever shouts loudest wins.
- The assessment of where Finland sits on the Laffer curve.
- The claim that intersectionality has ruined feminism.

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.