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It took me a while to realize that the majority of feminist spaces are entirely trans-exclusionary, even when they don’t claim to be. Even if they have one trans person in attendance every other group meeting, or they feature one of us on their media platform.

Trans and gender variant people’s existences are overlooked, invalidated, and erased every single day.

Our bodies and minds are policed when we enter cisgender-majority spaces, our identities are interrogated, and our narratives are underrepresented.

But all of these contemporary instances are compounded over time, through historical erasure, to form the modern impression that gender variance is a new phenomenon that started up in globally powerful countries like the United States and England.

This notion is ridiculously false. Trans and gender variant people have existed throughout time and across the world, but we haven’t always used the same universal language to describe ourselves.

‘Transness’ may be a recent phenomenon that arose in the United States and England in the sense that the word ‘trans’ originates in Latin and was popularized in English.

Gender variance is a phrase that has been used to describe people who transgress the traditional boundaries of gender in context but who do not use the label ‘trans’ to describe themselves.

Some examples of gender variant identities are yinyang ren in China, kathoey in Thailand, Mahu in Hawaii, and Ninauposkitzipxpe in the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Considering that gender variance exists in many countries and people of color (POC) communities across the world, it definitely isn’t the case that the United States and England are pioneers in gender variance.

Mainstream history, which is often whitewashed and colonized, helps to create this impression. But, really, white colonizers have depicted “Native sexualities and genders” as “deviant, vulgar, and non-livable, their bodies designated for death while white colonizer sexuality and gender binaries signified the moral and social future” in popular culture and mainstream history.

Here’s how I think cisgender, gender variant and trans people can challenge this continuing colonial legacy:

1. Realize that gender variance isn’t a Western or novel phenomenon

The erasure of gender variance that has historically existed outside of the West is a racialized process.

It results from historians’ failure to acknowledge the racialized gendering that occurred during colonization and from the failure of present activists to comprehend its residual effects.

White European and American historians recount colonial ‘encounters’ without attention to the ways that colonizers have tried to control and correct indigenous genders and sexualities in order to achieve conquest.

These processes of criminalizing what is considered to be ‘deviant,’ or wrong, genders and sexualities are an under-discussed part of forced assimilation.

Forced assimilation is a fundamental quality of white colonization. Colonizers who came to what is now called ‘the Americas’ went to dramatic lengths to forcibly assimilate Native and indigenous people, like putting Native kids through boarding schools in which they were abused and ‘civilized’ in accordance with white colonial standards.

One of these standards, common to gender assimilation, is the gender binary. The gender binary is the naturalized system of two genders: male and female.

In “Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble,” Che Gossett writes that “the gender binary is imbricated in racial slavery and colonization.”