#indigenderphobia

[willowbilly]

Nonbinary people, intersex people, genderqueer and gender nonconforming people, Two-Spirit people, and other culture-specific genders being negatively affected by anti-trans legislation are not "collateral damage." Any and all nonconformity with the Western cisperisexist sexgender binary is being punished on purpose.

[willowbilly]

PSA for anyone who heard the myth that Two-Spirit genders were invented at the 1990 transnational gathering of American Indian Gays and Lesbians:

Third/fourth/fifth/sixth/etc. genders have been established in many Indigenous cultures for a minimum of hundreds to thousands of years across all regions and within all associated economic structures of Turtle Island.

Academia formerly settled on the term "berdache" for these culture-specific genders in English. Because this term is understood to be a gendered sexual racial and ethnic slur, it was necessary to replace it. During that 1990 gathering, Cree Elder Myra Laramee dreamed of seven spirits who shifted between male and female, two of whom declared her to be Niizh Manidoowag, which translates into English as Two-Spirit. This was presented at the gathering and adopted as the replacement English umbrella term for preexisting Indigenous culture-specific genders.

Two-Spirit is not a replacement term for Indigenous language terms and should not be prescriptively applied to individuals who do not identify as such. "Two-Spirit" also does not directly correlate to "Indigenous nonbinary;" some Two-Spirit people may also identify as nonbinary or binary trans (and/or other terms) in English, but Two-Spirit is a broad umbrella term for all traditional Indigenous gender variant identities.

Enforcement of the gender binary is inherently an act of anti-Indigenous racism and cultural chauvinism.

[willowbilly]

Insisting that culture-specific genders from cultures without a traditional gender binary are by definition "nonbinary" is itself an act of binarism that requires the conceptual imposition of the colonial gender binary upon native gender systems. "Binary" "men" and "women" from such cultures are as equally "nonbinary" as their cultures' other genders if their cultures' traditional gender systems are not in fact gender binaries. Using the dichotomous language framework of "binary/nonbinary" for the purpose of differentiating genders that correlate to exclusively and fully "male" and "female" from other genders is therefore inaccurate at best in the context of cultures with gender systems that have more than two established traditional genders to which one can conform.