The Prison of Gender ; Beyond The Binary

There is a war being waged on any Black person who would dare to exist outside of the gender binary. The ways we define sex and gender today are not natural or universal, but rather are intimately bound up with white supremacy. Our understandings of both sex and gender are informed by white knowledge systems that can be traced back to the colonial period. These knowledge systems demonised and attempted to erase gender variance or anything that did not fit neatly into Western understandings of sex and gender.

The White gender binary has been imposed onto non-Western people via continuing processes of either direct or indirect colonisation. While many pre-colonial societies surely did not approve of gender variance, in many pre-colonial societies however, gender was not binary, and there are numerous documented examples of gender variance and gender nonconformity.

How do we liberate ourselves from the prison of gender?