I recently received pushback from the usual channels when I posted about decolonizing the gender binary. As is my way, I went looking to history to see if I was being unfair to white guys. What I found was pretty clear, and it’s not just related to race (like gender, a relational construct), but more about power.
Gender flexibility tends to appear in cultures where gender is understood as a relational/functional/spiritual category rather than a biological one. The binary hardened historically where:
- Roman law codified sex/gender into property and inheritance structures: strict gender roles ensure that only certain people are eligible to pass along the family name, and that eligibility is determined by the accidental conditions of one’s birth, framed as divine right—the same power structure that legitimized the emperor.
- Abrahamic traditions systematized binary creation theology: by encoding the male/female pair as the first and foundational act of divine sorting, the binary was lifted out of social negotiation and into ontology—it became not a human arrangement subject to revision but a feature of reality itself, which meant that any person who didn’t fit wasn’t merely unusual but was an offense against the created order, converting natural human variation into theological emergency.
- Colonial administration required legible, fixed categories for population management: census-taking, taxation, land assignment, and conscription all demanded that bodies be sortable into stable, enumerable units—and a population with fluid gender categories resisted that enumeration, making it ungovernable by the ledger’s logic, which is why colonial law didn’t merely discourage gender variance but criminalized it, converting a bureaucratic convenience into a moral imperative.
- Industrial capitalism needs stable labor and domestic role assignments: the factory and the household have to be administered as separate spheres with non-overlapping populations, because the system’s profitability depended on reproductive and household labor remaining unwaged. Enter binary gender roles, enforced at the level of law, medicine, and social shame simultaneously.
Each of these systems borrowed legitimacy from the one before it, passing the same externalization cost forward in an unbroken chain.
What’s lost if we only recognize the one narrative? We miss that the relational/functional/spiritual frame for gender is much older than the biological one—many traditions that include multiple genders are thousands of years old. The binary as a rigid universal is, relatively speaking, a recent and geographically specific imposition.
And in many countries around the world where gender and sexual binaries are strictly enforced after the supposed retreat of colonialism, it’s not a return to some older tradition. Many of the countries with the most prescriptive gender codes had some of the most complex and dynamic relationships to gender in pre-colonial times: they are literally continuing to do the colonizers’ work. It turns out that the gender binary’s effectiveness as a sorting mechanism is often seen as more important than recognizing a history that embraces human variation.
So yeah, it’s looking like mostly white guys. I look enough like a white guy that I don’t have any trouble pointing out this information. My inner white guy can handle it. I choose to transcend the binary. How? Understand the history of the sorting mechanism, and for whose comfort it was designed—and then decide whether your discomfort with dismantling it is really yours, or just the mechanism doing its job.