I’m starting to notice that when white trans people talk about decolonizing transgender they mostly talk about the many pre-colonial genders that once existed, describing them in a fascinated-but-unemotional anthropological style and engaging very little with the modern reality of trans people of color aroound the world.
Whereas when trans people of color talk about decolonizing transgender they talk about the personal struggle of finding your identity in a world where 99.9% of the material that’s supposed to be for you is written assuming a white western gender identity and every time someone asks you how you identify you’re forced to choose between doing hours of education work or naming a white western gender identity and if you try to explain yourself to your family they may start seeing you as a westernized other because the knowledge they once had to accept and honor you has been destroyed by the white man.
So I feel a bit queezy when I see a lot of those anthropological style “did you know some cultures have 5 genders!” articles that do not acknowledge the pain and trauma of colonialism in any way. There’s something there that turns the lives and genders of people of color into entertainment, amusing ‘did you knows’ with the pretence of progressiveness.
#!!!#lgbtq#actually I might make a separate post for this entirely but#I remember when ellen page and ian daniel’s series ‘gaycation’ first aired#in their north american episode they spoke with a two spirit first nations person#who was basically talking about decolonizing transgender#and I remember feeling really uneasy at the end of it bc ellen and ian’s takeaway was more that#’oh it’s about getting rid of labels’#which is such a (purposefully I think) non radical phrasing of#a statement that was more like#’I’m two spirit not the labels your people brought with you’#but anyway uh#good post
Yeeeeeees. That’s so much a part of it. When white people talk about decolonizing gender the end conclusion is always ‘so we shouldn’t label people’ & ‘ so non-binary genders are valid’, it is never ‘white people need to acknowledge that they have done irreparable damage to trans communities of color’ or ‘white trans people need to stop demanding that people of color speak about their gender identities in a language of cis and transness that is heavily dominated by white people’.
QueerAnarchism 