This piece was originally written for and published on the With Love Lenny blog, and can be found here.

Happy Women’s History Month, y’all! While we haven’t worked out all our feelings on designating a single month to delineate and “celebrate” certain groups, we at With Love Lenny will always jump at the opportunity to uplift those who reshape our world towards beauty, justice, growth, and love. And seeing as it is literally International Women’s Day, we thought we’d begin by taking a journey into the past.

Let us say outright that any celebration of IWD needs to be intersectional (1). As Dr. Jasmine Syedullah says, “accountability is a contemplative practice,” (2) one that requires us to look at the intersections of identity and how they produce unique experiences and expertise, engaging honestly with the ways in which our systems categorize and subjugate folks into discriminatory hierarchies. This isn’t about shame, guilt, or punishment. This is about collective contemplation and accountability, and looking through lenses that will allow us to acknowledge truth, and move beyond these limitations and oppressive systems together.

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