Decolonizing Gender (Patreon)

By Sam (@StuffFromSam)

Did you know colonialism destroyed a lot of Indigenous genders? (Watch the brief explainer by the BBC.)

Did you also know many cultures don't gender language or use third-person pronouns? It's a different imagining of gender when you don't think of everything as gendered. In the West, there's much debate over the language convention of third-person pronouns, but the White European dominance structure is so all-encompassing that people argue over the right way to use third-person pronouns rather than questioning the existence of this convention—unable to imagine an alternative. It's close-ended, forcing non-conforming identities to be "discovered" or labeled "new" and added in. Consider a closed operating system like Apple, which is a technological hegemony. Not only must they approve all additions to their operating system, but everything that interacts with Apple must conform to Apple; otherwise, it's incompatible. White supremacy is like that.

You can see this in how other countries must be made compatible when interacting with the West. Which doesn't just mean learning their language but also adopting their conventions. 

Cathy Lai in Ariana writes:

"In contemporary Chinese, the character 他 (pronounced as tā) is specifically associated with men, however, that is a relatively modern construct. For much of Chinese history, the word served as a gender-neutral pronoun, covering feminine, masculine, and neutral pronouns – the equivalent of 'he', 'she' and 'it' in English. In many works of Chinese classic literature, such as 18th-century Dream of the Red Chamber, authors used 他 to describe male and female characters."

"Due to increasing linguistic and cultural interactions with the West, a shift took place at the turn of the 20th century. Gradually, Chinese speakers started using 他 to refer only to men..."

White supremacy also means universalizing White Western social conventions.

(Scratched out an inaccuracy pointed out by netizens.)

I know there's a push to no longer use "x" as an inclusionary symbol, but white allies should also be culturally sensitive and cautious before they universalize their perspective onto all others because many BIPOC use "x" to mean the unknown variable, the thing lost, erased, or omitted—whether known or unknown.

There is still a general lack of understanding around colonialism and white supremacy. It's like a fire that burns the world; nothing can escape its touch. Some profit, and many get burned, and many die. But what was truly lost in the fire, we will never know. It can NEVER be fully accounted for or made whole.