For all our lives, we've always … seen ourselves refracted through other people's prisms. We've always heard people analyze us, describe what our fee… - Leslie Feinberg

What was responsible for the imposition of the present-day rigid sex/gender system in North America? It is not correct to simply blame patriarchy, Chrystos stressed to me. "The real word is 'colonization' and what it has done to the world. Patriarchy is a tool of colonization and exploitation of people and their lands."

“I saw a devilish thing,” Spanish colonialist Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote in the sixteenth century: “Sinful, heinous, perverted, nefarious, abominable, unnatural, disgusting, lewd"—the language used by the colonizers to describe the acceptance of sex/gender diversity, and of same-sex love most accurately described the viewer, not the viewed. And these sensational reports about Two-Spirit people were used to further "justify" genocide, the theft of Native land and resources, and destruction of their cultures and religions.

In that one moment I knew you really did understand how I felt in life. Choking on anger, feeling so powerless, unable to protect myself or those I loved most, yet fighting back again and again, unwilling to give up. I didn’t have the words to tell you this then. I just said, “It’ll be OK, it’ll be alright.”