A friend of mine at a nearby university has a grievance to take up with the local Assistant Deputy Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion. It seems there is a hitherto unnoticed species of oppression that has yet to be addressed on most campuses:
This is preferential parking spaces for cis-engined electric vehicles. As it happens, my Ford F-450 XL Extended Cab Diesel Super Duty self-identifies as an electric/bioethanol hybrid. This makes parking in university parking lots a very traumatic and hurtful experience for my pickup truck. Every time I’m on campus, circling past the most-conveniently-placed, perpetually empty parking spots, exclusively and ostentatiously reserved for cis-engined electric vehicles, my pickup is implicitly attacked and judged. These preferential parking spaces denigrate my pickup truck’s painful process of self-discovery, through which it came to see that its mechanically-given, assigned engine did not correspond to its authentic, inner engine. Until recently, this realization had been suppressed by our mechaniconormative, cisenginist culture that habitually and unselfconsciously imposes false, binary, and deterministic narratives upon vehicle propulsion. My pickup’s important witness problematizes the assumption that just because it was assigned the throaty growl of a 6.7L Power Stroke® V8 Turbo Diesel at manufacture, it can’t self-identify as a zero-emission battery pack. It deserves to be affirmed and celebrated, and protected from retrograde vehicular policies, so that it too can have a convenient and safe (parking) space. Tesla, check your privilege.
I expect the memos to start coming out on this soon.