Dissecting ‘speciesism and sexism’

Living as a queer person outside rigid normative structures has profoundly shaped my understanding of bodily autonomy and self-sovereignty. This lived reality connects deeply to the experiences of (trans) women. Navigating a society that routinely seeks to categorize, restrict, and exploit vulnerable bodies makes the systemic violence inflicted upon non-human females intimately and acutely personal to you and me. This shared logic of regulation calls on feminists and queer activists to recognize our common cause and rise together in radical solidarity.

The patriarchal mechanisms that monitor and restrict human gender, sexuality, and bodily agency spring from the exact same foundational ideology as the industrial exploitation of female animals: both frameworks view sentient bodies not as autonomous, self-sovereign beings, but as instruments to be owned, harvested, and subjugated for power and profit.

In opening with the line, "From the steel-barred stall where the dairy-mother weeps," the poem places the continuous suffering of the non-human female directly at the center of systemic violence. Across species, female bodies bear an immense and unique burden under these oppressive frameworks. By dissecting this line, we expose how the subjugation of female animals in industrialized food production is inextricably bound to the very same apparatus of control that patriarchy employs to govern human bodies.

Consider the life of a cow reduced to a "dairy-mother" - a designation born entirely of human engineering and commercial demand. In nature, no such animal exists, nor does any other species consume another's milk into adulthood. She is systematically bred, subjected to repeated artificial insemination, and forced into continuous cycles of gestation, only to endure the traumatic, immediate loss of her newborn calves. Sustaining this artificial market requires a violent machinery of reproductive coercion and physical confinement. For anyone who has felt their physical selfhood or reproductive freedom weaponized by normative systems, this forced extraction of body and labor echoes as a terrifyingly familiar parallel.

This systematic violation of a living being’s reproductive cycles, offspring, and physical integrity illustrates the foundational logic uniting patriarchy and factory farming: stripping a sentient being of agency. However, the exact nature of this subjugation manifests with distinct nuances across species. For women and queer people under patriarchy, control operates through socio-legal regulation, bodily surveillance, and societal ownership. For non-human animals, this logic is pushed to its absolute extreme - reducing their very existence to industrial economic utility, commodity status, and raw material like flesh, wool, milk, and skin.

Widespread detachment from agricultural realities enables the dairy industry to operate largely unchallenged. In many modern societies, over half the population remains unaware that cows, like human mothers, must give birth to produce milk. This ignorance fosters the misconception that dairy farming is benign or necessary for animal welfare, much like the myth that sheep must be shorn because of artificial overproduction. In truth, these animals have been selectively bred into fragile, hyper-productive bodies solely for human consumption - a system of genetic manipulation and exploitation that must be stopped and dismantled.

In my poem, I confront this economic violence directly in the second stanza: "To the high-speed line where the weary worker sleeps." Here, I target the relentless speed of modern processing lines - a pace designed strictly to maximize profits at the expense of safety, human dignity, and life itself. Henry Ford famously noted that the assembly line was inspired by the trolley systems of Chicago slaughterhouses. When I evoke the image of the "weary worker" collapsing in sleep beside the line, I am describing the profound physical and mental exhaustion forced on workers when capitalism pushes human bodies far past their limit.

I want to show that the core operational mechanism uniting speciesism and classism is disposability. Under a profit-driven engine, both the non-human animal and the low-wage worker are reduced to interchangeable parts. The animal's body is commodified into meat, while the worker's body is consumed by dangerous, high-stress labor. When a worker is broken or injured by the line's pace, or when an animal is slaughtered, the system simply replaces them. Neither is recognized for their inherent worth; both are treated as expendable fuel for market expansion.

Furthermore, I expose how industrial agriculture relies on deliberate concealment to maintain consumer compliance. High-speed slaughterhouses are hidden from public view, and corporate marketing sanitizes the reality of the killing floor. By actively insulating consumers from the violence inflicted on both animals and workers, the system ensures that society remains complicit in this cycle of exploitation without ever having to confront its true human and non-human cost.

Does this absolve individual slaughterhouse workers who commit extreme acts of violence? Absolutely not. But when you subject people to relentless line speeds in high-stress, desensitizing environments, it creates a volatile dynamic where confusion and fear lead to cruel attempts at control - whether over one another or over the non-human animals in their hands. Beyond the slaughterhouse floor, studies consistently show that this severe, daily psychological trauma spills over into local communities, correlating with higher rates of violent crime and domestic abuse. It is a sobering reminder of how labor exploitation and speciesist violence jointly degrade human and non-human lives alike.

Dissecting ‘speciesism and racism’

In the third stanza, I move to unweave another deeply entrenched dimension of structural power: "A single, vast white canvas is spread." Here, I address how speciesism intersects with the stark mechanics of systemic racism. At their root, both systems rely on a shared ideology of domination: the belief that certain bodies exist merely to be owned, controlled, and extracted as resources for a dominant group. Just as racial oppression historically devalues human lives by reducing them to economic instruments, speciesism treats non-human animals as mere commodities stripped of selfhood and intrinsic worth.

The "white canvas" speaks directly to this dominating worldview - a structural framework imposed onto society that dictates whose lives hold value and whose are treated as disposable. When Peter Singer popularized the term speciesism, he highlighted its alignment with racism and sexism, showing how each framework privileges the dominant group while marginalizing all others. But for me, this connection is not just a theoretical model. As I look at the meat processing industry today, I see how racialized economic precarity is actively weaponized to sustain the industrial slaughter of non-human animals.

While corporate entities maintain control over land and profits, the most dangerous, traumatizing, and physically degrading labor is systematically shifted onto vulnerable migrant and immigrant communities. Across slaughterhouses in Europe and beyond, an estimated 70% of the workforce consists of migrant workers, many funneled through predatory agencies, paid sub-minimum wages, and denied basic social protections or healthcare. They are forced to work at punishing line speeds under unsafe conditions, handling thousands of animal bodies every day. This is how the system operates: it leverages the vulnerability of racialized labor to keep the slaughter line moving while shielding corporate power from accountability.

Unweaving this stanza forces us to confront the fact that environmental hazards, exploitative labor, and animal slaughter are concentrated within the same system of racialized disposability. By treating both non-human animals and marginalized human laborers as expendable inputs, industrial animal agriculture sustains a shared architecture of violence. Recognizing this connection demands that our fight against speciesism also be a fight against systemic racism and corporate exploitation.

Colonialism historically justified the violent conquest of lands, the brutal subjugation of Indigenous peoples, and the theft of natural resources under the banner of ownership and dominion. Speciesism applies this exact same oppressive template to non-human life, reducing sentient animals and vital ecosystems to disposable commodities stripped of intrinsic value.

When we examine these twin forces, we see that the modern industrialized food system is not simply a commercial enterprise, but a direct, continuous extension of colonial conquest. Crucially, this system enforces a dangerous separation between 'us' and 'the environment,' a foundational myth we must reject: we are not separate from nature, we are nature. The fight for the land is, therefore, the fight for ourselves. Today, global animal agriculture perpetuates this ongoing colonial violence through several destructive mechanisms:

• Global land grabs: Driving massive deforestation and land theft to cultivate monocultures for feed for farmed animals, forcibly displacing Indigenous communities and severing their sacred relationships with ancestral soil.

• Exporting violence: Establishing polluting, high-stress slaughterhouses and mega-farms in vulnerable communities, offloading the ecological devastation and trauma onto those with the least political power.

• Enforcing Western dominance: Imposing a Western, meat-heavy diet and a dairy- or milk-oriented society as the global standard of prosperity, which actively erases and marginalizes sustainable, plant-centered Indigenous food traditions.

By unweaving this stanza, we uncover how our global food system serves as an uninterrupted engine of colonial power. It treats the land, non-human animals, and marginalized peoples as expendable fuel for corporate profit. To break these chains, we must dismantle the myth of human separation from the natural world and recognize that liberation for the land, the animal, and the human are indivisible.

I hold firmly to the belief that most people strive to live ethically, and that conviction is what fuels my activism. But seeing the loom means accepting the responsibility to unweave it. We can no longer afford the luxury of ranking our struggles or treating human and non-human liberation as competing causes. Our shared liberation is forged in the fight, and dismantling this architecture requires an uncompromising, radical solidarity across every movement for justice.