More Than One All At Once: Intersectionality Awareness Month and the Right to Belong Fully
Most people, if asked to describe themselves, will start with a single word. A job title. A role. A category. It's a natural place to start, but it's rarely where the truth actually lives.
The truth is usually closer to a list: A parent and a professional. Queer and person of faith. An immigrant and a citizen. An adoptee and a member of a culture they were never fully taught. Disabled and ambitious. Rural and progressive. White, working-class, and disabled. A person of color who also holds economic privilege. All of it, worn at once, every day, whether the people around them notice or not.
August is Intersectionality Awareness Month, and this year we want to spend some time on that list; on what it means to carry more than one identity, and why the right to be seen as a whole person, rather than a single trait, is not a small thing to ask for.
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What Intersectionality Actually Means
Intersectionality is one of those words that gets used loosely enough in everyday conversation that its original, precise meaning is worth returning to.
Where the Term Comes From
The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989)in a law review article examining how Black women's experiences of discrimination were consistently erased by antidiscrimination law. Crenshaw's central argument was that courts treated race discrimination and sex discrimination as separate, mutually exclusive categories. Meaning a Black woman who experienced discrimination specific to being both Black and a woman often had no legal framework that could recognize her claim at all and is/was expected to prove her experience fit either a race-based case or a sex-based case, when in reality, her experience was shaped by both simultaneously and inseparably.
Crenshaw expanded this framework further in a 1991 article examining how intersectionality shapes identity politics and violence against women of color, cementing intersectionality as a critical tool for understanding how systems of oppression compound rather than simply add together. In 2000, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000) built on this foundation with her concept of the Matrix of Domination; showing that power and oppression operate simultaneously across structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains, not just within a single identity category.
This is important grounding, foundational to this discussion, as intersectionality was born out of Black feminist thought, and it was developed specifically to name how multiply-marginalized people, particularly Black women, were/are being rendered invisible by systems built to address only one axis of oppression at a time. That origin matters, and it should not be flattened or forgotten as the term has entered broader cultural use.
Since Crenshaw's original framework, the concept of intersectionality has expanded well beyond the legal context in which it was born: into psychology, social work, education, medicine, and public discourse. August has come to be recognized as Intersectionality Awareness Month, dedicated to exploring how the different parts of who we are (race, gender, age, ability, and more) come together to shape our lived experience. The observance began in 2019 as a time to learn, listen, and reflect on how our identities overlap and shape how we move through the world.
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What This Month Is…and Isn't
Intersectionality Awareness Month is not simply a call to celebrate diversity in the abstract. It is a specific invitation to examine how systems of power and marginalization interact. An action call to notice that a person's experience of discrimination, access, safety, or belonging is rarely explained by a single category alone. It is also, importantly, not a framework that erases the specific histories it was built from. Race remains central to it. Gender remains central to it. The particular erasure of Black women in legal and social systems remains the reason this framework exists at all. Honoring Intersectionality Awareness Month means holding that history with respect, even as we apply the framework more broadly.
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Who Carries Intersecting Identities? And Why That Question Deserves an Honest Answer
Here is where we want to say something that sometimes gets left out of this conversation: intersectionality, as an analytical tool, describes something true about everyone's identity, not only people who are multiply marginalized.
A White man who is also disabled carries an intersectional identity. So does a White man who is also gay, or a veteran, or working-class, or neurodivergent, or a single father, or living in a rural community with limited access to care. None of that erases or minimizes the specific and distinct forms of marginalization faced by BIPOC individuals, women, LGBTQIA2S+ people, or immigrants; and it would be a distortion of Crenshaw's framework to suggest otherwise. But part of what makes intersectionality such a powerful clinical and analytical lens is precisely that it does not require a person to be maximally marginalized in order to be understood as layered.
Collins' Matrix of Domination is useful here (Collins, 2000). It reminds us that most people occupy positions of both relative privilege and relative marginalization simultaneously, depending on which axis of identity is in view. A White, heterosexual, cisgender man may hold significant structural privilege related to race, gender, and sexuality, and still carry a disability, a mental health condition, a class background, or a trauma history that shapes his access to care, his sense of belonging, and his willingness to seek support. Recognizing that reality is not a distraction from the framework's origins. It is, in fact, consistent with what Crenshaw and Collins were pointing to: identity is never singular, and power operates differently along every axis a person holds.
Intersectionality does not ask you to rank your identities or prove which one hurts the most. It asks you to be seen as the whole, layered person you actually are.
This matters clinically. A therapy client who presents as "just" one thing — "just" a working professional, "just" a parent, "just" someone managing anxiety — is very rarely just that. Good therapy makes room for the whole: the parts of a person's identity that carry privilege, the parts that carry marginalization, and the parts that carry both at once, often within the very same relationship or system.
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Where Adoption, Race, and LGBTQIA2S+ Identity Intersect
For many of the people I work with, intersectionality is not an academic concept. It is the daily experience of navigating more than one identity that the world has not always known what to do with.
Consider a transnational, transracial adoptee (TTA), someone adopted internationally into a family and culture different from their own racial or ethnic background. That person may be perceived by the world as an immigrant, despite having been raised entirely in the country they now call home. They may be seen as a representative of a culture they were never taught. They may navigate racial identity without the racial mirroring most people take for granted within their own families. If that same person is also LGBTQIA2S+, the layers compound further, navigating queer identity within an adoptive family and culture that may or may not have the framework to understand either piece of who they are, let alone both together.
This is precisely the kind of layered experience intersectionality was built to name. A transracial adoptee's experience of racial identity cannot be fully understood by looking only at race — it must also account for the specific context of adoption, the absence of generational cultural transmission, and the particular grief and complexity that comes with being raised outside of one's community of origin. Add LGBTQIA2S+ identity, disability, immigration status, or religious identity, and the picture becomes more specific still. Genuine understanding requires all of it.
A note on Transnational Transracial Adoptees (TTAs): TTAs occupy a particularly distinct position within intersectionality conversations. They are often visibly perceived as belonging to one racial or ethnic community while having been raised within the culture, family structure, and social context of another. This is not a contradiction to be resolved but a layered identity that deserves its own space, language, and clinical understanding, separate from both the adoptive and first cultures, and fully valid as its own experience.
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The Right to Belong Fully as Yourself
At the center of all of this is a simple but often denied right: the right to be understood as a whole person, rather than reduced to whichever single identity is most visible, most convenient, or most legible to the people around you. For BIPOC individuals, that might mean not having to set aside racial identity to be taken seriously in a conversation about gender. For LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, it might mean not having to leave part of their story out of a conversation about family or faith. For adoptees, it might mean not having to choose between the culture they were raised in and the one they were born into. For anyone carrying disability, class background, geography, or a less-visible identity, it might simply mean not being told that their experience doesn't count because it isn't the "primary" axis of marginalization in the room. Belonging fully as yourself does not require you to rank your identities. It requires the people around you, including your therapist, to be willing to hold all of them at once.
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For Practitioners: Bringing Intersectionality Into Your Own Practice
If you're a clinician, case manager, educator, or helping professional reading this and thinking, okay, but what does this actually look like in a session? Good question! It deserves more than a blog post can offer. It deserves a room, a whiteboard, and a few hours of real practice.
This coming fall, I'll be presenting a session on exactly that at the UND Social Work Fall CEU Event, hosted by the University of North Dakota Department of Social Work.
UND Social Work Fall CEU Event
Thursday, October 1, 2026 · 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, Henry Family Ballroom, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND — online attendance also available
My session will be held from 10:30-11:50 a.m. CST and is titled Intersectionality in Practice: Moving Beyond Single-Identity Frameworks. Our clients don't experience one identity at a time, so why do we still assess, diagnose, and treat as if they do? This session explores what intersectional practice actually looks like in clinical and macro social work — how overlapping identities (race, adoption status, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration status, class) compound both harm and resilience, and how to build treatment approaches that hold the whole person rather than fragmenting them into categories.
The full-day event offers 6 CEUs for licensed social workers, with additional sessions on bias in professional decision-making, stalking within domestic violence cases, and forensic social work skills. Registration is $40 for general attendees (free for UND Social Work faculty and students), and space is limited — pre-registration closes September 15.
Whether you're building your own intersectional practice, supervising a team, or simply looking for CEU hours that will actually shift how you show up in session, I'd love to see you there.
Full event details and registration →
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You Are Allowed to Be All of It
Intersectionality Awareness Month asks something quietly radical of all of us: to stop asking people to simplify themselves for our comfort, and to start making room for the full complexity of who they actually are.
If you have spent your life translating yourself, presenting one identity at a time depending on who's in the room, deciding which parts of your story are safe to share and which parts to leave out, we want you to know that therapy does not require that kind of editing. You are allowed to bring it all here. The adoption story and the racial identity and the sexuality and the faith background and the class history and the disability…and everything else that makes you who you are.
You were never meant to be understood one piece at a time.
Whenever you're ready, we’re here.
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References
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
National Organization for Women. (2025, August). NOW celebrates Intersectionality Awareness Month. https://now.org/media-center/press-release/now-celebrates-intersectionality-awareness-month/
