so. so. there’s. mm.
there are a couple of posts going around re: noncis ppl hoping the petition for legal nonbinary genders does not do well for reasons that have to do with abolishing legal gender markers entirely and. it. makes me, a nonbinary POC, extremely uncomfortable for a lot of reasons. but here’s a thing.
if you’re white. like. don’t. don’t? don’t. a lot of gender binarism is rooted in colonialism and like. when you fill your mouth up with those words you are inevitably going to get grits of white supremacy and racism stuck in there too, you can’t escape that, not if you’re white.
like. there are safety issues here, and each person who would want to use a nonbinary gender marker would have to make those safety decisions for themselves, but they should have the chance, you know? they should have the chance to make that choice. whether or not you believe that gender markers should be abolished as a whole — i tend to agree with that as an ideal, i really do. but. here’s the thing.
my people have a very shaded and murky and uncertain history with gender systems and roles outside of the binary, and this is largely due to forced assimilation with white culture. i have to dig until i’m too tired of digging to think to find information about nonbinary genders in mexican history because so much of mexican history that isn’t written by white people (americans or spaniards) is just…nonexistent anymore. scraps that have been written by my people have been wiped out and rewritten by white people. there are traces there, there is history there — mostly in Native history, which i am not, so i do not feel comfortable speaking about because that is not my place — but it is small and hard to find because even in revolutionary movements re: gender and race, white people’s voices have been overpowering, and put into our mouths, and written into our history.
i don’t have access to my people’s history of gender because of white people. that is something that you need to think about if you are going to talk about gender systems, especially in western culture, ESPECIALLY in the USA where mexican peoples and cultures are extremely relevant — just as relevant as many other POC histories and cultures.
so when you talk, with your white history and your white voice, about prioritizing the abolition of gender markers over the introduction of nonbinary markers, you are putting your voice over mine. you talking over and spitting on the history i do not have access to, that i scrounge to find on a daily basis, because you have an access to relatively recent history of your own because you are a white person and this is a privilege given to you born out of your whiteness.
i do not live in a space where it would be safe for me to use a nonbinary gender marker. i risk a lot if i were to make that decision. but here is the thing that white people will never understand but you need to try to: my culture is already dying inside me. my very conception was, in part, an act of colonialism and white power and my childhood was entirely comprised of forced white assimilation. my history is dying inside me. my access to parts of me that are true and real and not white are slithering away from me for many reasons all the time, and each time a white person talks about gender with words created by POC and couches it in disfigured POC-oriented language, marred by their whiteness and divorced from their whiteness by their choice of language, i lose access to even more of those parts, of that history. everything about me that makes me mexican feels like such an effort. i struggle to be me, i struggle to relearn my own language, my own past, my own people. i am dying in your whiteness.
and so for me, for someone whose gender is inexplicably linked to my culture and my people and my history and my mexican mother and grandmother who both struggle with words and concepts that are lost to them and the hands of the white men in their lives and the white people in power over their work and their livelihoods, having a nonbinary marker is something like a revolution. it is a way to say “no” to the assimilation i have been forced into all of my life by primarily white people, white men. i am lost and sad and aching almost every day of my life as i try to navigate what it means to be me, mexican, in this very white world that i live in. and i have made the decision that i would rather be hurt more, i would rather die — as i inevitably will, whether physically or not — at the hands of a white person who cannot deny, cannot contradict my legal gender marker, than quietly clothed in the assumptions that white people have flung at me for my entire life.
that is a decision i am making, and want to make. and it will not be the decision that every nonbinary POC, nor ever specifically nonbinary mexican will make. but it should be a decision that is given to us, one that we are able to take from whiteness if whiteness will not hand it over willingly. and if you are white, your voice does not belong here, and if you want to be an ally, your place should be considering the implications of what you have to say about gender and nonbinary gender in particularly in a world that is not restricted to white interpretation and practice, no matter how much you have been coached to believe that it is.
your white voice starts out as poison. you do not have the ability to escape that. your white voice starts out louder and more important than mine. you do not have the ability to escape that. when you talk, your words are heard before mine, taken into account before mine, praised before mine — picked apart and even damned before mine, because even in the sphere of bad opinions, white words are considered more worthy of any reflection than POC words. you need to consider what a balm your silence might be. you have power that i do not, and when you use it blindly to express your white-rooted discomfort on an issue that is so wrapped up and involved in non-white histories, you are saying, whether your mean to or not, that your white opinion is more valid and important than the vast amounts of history that do not involve you positively — than the vast amounts of history i cannot access because of your voice.
if you are white and you want to be an ally, you need to consider every time you open your mouth. and when you don’t, when you defend your white discomfort tooth and nail without giving any kind of concessions to the POC you are actively hurting, then you prove that you are not my friend, not my brother/sister/sibling, not aligned with or aware of my gender, not my ally standing beside me, but my murderer standing above me. you are watching me die inside myself and saying “yes, okay, but gender as a whole makes me uncomfortable.”
and you are agreeing, now, if you continue to do so, that your discomfort still matters more.
