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Ignoring colonialism allows British (or other Western) feminists to disregard how the imposition of the strict gender binary of man and woman, with t… - Shon Faye
" "Ignoring colonialism allows British (or other Western) feminists to disregard how the imposition of the strict gender binary of man and woman, with the accompanying hierarchy of male over female, was itself a mechanism of colonialism. Many pre-colonial societies and indigenous peoples did not view gender as binary. Some, as we have seen, had more than two genders, while the social roles around family and childrearing varied widely. To take one among a multitude of examples: in the seventeenth century, , a Jesuit missionary to the Montagnais () people residing in (eastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada), described how the women held ‘great power’ and had ‘in nearly every instance … the choice of plans, of undertakings, of journeys, of winterings’. Often, Montagnais women would hunt, while men looked after children. Conversion to Christianity, encouraged by men by like Le Jeune, required the establishment of a new hierarchy and more rigid gender roles. Within ten years of colonial missionary activity and trading relations beginning, the Montagnais had started to insist on male authority and to inflict violence on wives and children. Such accounts of colonial domination show how rapidly a society’s understanding of gender can be changed as society itself changes. They demonstrate clearly that what it means to be a woman or a man (or neither) is not a fixed and stable entity, but a complex constellation of biological, political, economic and cultural factors, which may shift over time.
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About Shon Faye
(born 27 March 1988) is an English writer, editor, journalist, and presenter, known for her commentary on LGBTQ+, women's, and mental health issues. She hosts the podcast Call Me Mother and is the author of the 2021 book .
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Additional quotes by Shon Faye
The same hormone therapies that today are associated with helping trans people – the use of feminizing oestrogen for trans women and masculinizing testosterone for trans men – were used by endocrinologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century in attempts to ‘cure’ sexual inverts and intersex individuals, by administering hormones to ‘remedy’ the imbalance which caused their ‘disorder’. Homosexual females, for instance, would be treated with oestrogen. Homosexual males were sometimes treated with testosterone and, in some cases, with oestrogen in order to chemically castrate them and prevent them acting on their desires. In the 1950s such hormonal ‘cures’ for sexual and gender variance diminished (largely because they didn’t work), only to be replaced by psychiatric and aversion therapies – the underlying belief in sexual inversion and disorder remained. It must be stressed that the non-consensual, coercive and violent use of hormones to interfere with the bodily integrity of LGBTQ+ people and those born with intersex conditions destroyed countless lives and should be considered a stain on the history of Western medicine. This shared historical experience is also a point of unity for trans people and cisgender lesbians, gays and bisexuals, demonstrating our shared struggle against our pathologizing and mistreatment over the past century and more.
Gender dysphoria is a rare experience in society as a whole, affecting about 0.4 per cent of the population, which can make it hard to explain to the vast majority of people, who have not experienced it. To get around this, we often rely on metaphors. The clumsy phrase ‘born in the wrong body’ has become the favoured soundbite in popular media. Clumsy because – and this must be stressed – many trans people do not think this describes dysphoria at all well. To my mind, the trans writer expresses it more accurately: ‘Dysphoria,’ she says, ‘can feel like heartbreak.’ Heartbreak, its incapacitating grief and the sense of absence and loss which activate the same parts of the brain as physical pain, can be so all-consuming it interferes with your everyday life. So, too, dysphoria. For me, at least, this is a much richer way of describing how many trans people experience distress with their bodies – indeed, how I felt until I medically transitioned.
Britain should be a country whose borders are open to all who are fleeing persecution. It also should be a country where trans people are not subjected to violence by the British state itself, through brutal misuse of policing and prisons. Trans communities and our allies here and everywhere should fight for our siblings who face state violence and systemic transphobia in all its forms.
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