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.
At least when I bring these things up, decolonizing gender isn’t strictly my goal. When I bring up cultures I’ve learned about with nonbinary genders (that is, gender categories that don’t confirm to the Western binary, not the largely Western-concieved they/them nonbinary category we’re beginning to have), I’m usually using them to illustrate that it’s even possible for humans to think about gender in other terms. This is still very big news for a lot of people. I’m mostly thinking of verbal conversations that I’ve had so I don’t know how often I bring up the role of colonialism in delegitimizing non-Western conceptions of gender, but I’ll try to make sure it’s in my scripts.
“decolonizing gender isn’t strictly my goal.
…
I’m usually using them to illustrate that it’s even possible for humans to think about gender in other terms.“
Ok, if you are white you probably need to rethink everything you’re doing with this, because here you basically say very explicitly:
I use the stories of colonized people as illustrations for the message I want to send and ignore the parts that don’t fit that narrative.
That’s like… very bad. These stories don’t exist for you, they are not yours to tell and most definitely not yours to tell for your own agenda. Mentioning the role of colonialism from now on is not enough.
These are stories about gender experiences that have been systematically almost completely destroyed by white people’s colonialism. And currently a lot of white people with a very limited understanding of those stories and no lived experience of the violence of colonialism are dominating the conversation and constantly repeating simplified versions of these stories to promote their own ideas about gender.
They are exploiting the suffering and struggles for survival of people of color to tell their own stories about white non-binary politics. That needs to STOP.
QueerAnarchism 