POC Non-Binary Identities, Transphobia and White Supremacy
Even though there’s been a lot of pushback from a small minority of very vocal idiots, people with non-binary gender identities have in recent years been seeing more visibility, acceptance and in some cases more legal recognition than ever before. However…
See, when I make statements like that, as a white British person I’m speaking from a very white-centric, specifically Western-centric viewpoint. Yes, in Western cultures non-binary people have been (mostly) unknown and invisible until very recently. In other societies, however, the acceptance of trans and gender diverse people has been much more entrenched into local cultures and history- a history that’s been largely ignored, thanks at least in part to colonialism and a heavy dose of racism (more on that later). But first, here’s a brief introduction to some non-binary gender identities, specific to certain POC communities.
(NB: as a white, cis person I’m about as far from an expert on this article’s subjects as it’s possible to be, and what I’ve written here is the result of the brief and very limited research I had the time for prior to writing this, with the Non-Binary Wiki site as my biggest source. If I’ve made any errors, please feel free to correct me. Secondly, the people I’ve written about here are just the tips of a huge, very diverse iceberg- click here for a much longer, more comprehensive list.)
Bissu
Bissu people fit into one of the five (yes, five!) gender categories recognised by the Bugis, the largest ethnic group in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi. The quickest way to be considered Bissu is to be obviously intersex at birth, although according to Wikipedia ‘a normative male who becomes a Bissu is believed to be female on the inside’- suggesting that there is also space for non-binary AMAB and AFAB people. In any case, Bissu are seen as the result of all genders combining to form a complete person, and are traditionally revered as shamans and community priests.
Depressingly, the number of people identifying as Bissu has declined since Indonesia gained independence in 1949 (usually, this seems to work in the opposite direction- see below), due to persecution by politicians, hardline Islamists and the police.
Fa’afafine and Fa’atane
People who identify as fa’afafine are integral to Samoan culture. They’re exclusively assigned male at birth, while AFAB people are referred to as fa’atane, fa’atama and fafatama, although it’s difficult to find much info about them. Fa’afafine people are seen as embodying a unique combination of traditionally masculine and feminine traits; Isyss Honnen, a community organiser who works to increase public awareness and empathy of trans and gender diverse people, describes herself as queer, femme, trans and gender-diverse, for example. They’re whole-heartedly accepted in traditional indigenous culture, with up to 5% of Samoans identifying as fa’afafine, but not so much in some predominantly Christian communities.
Hijra
In his documentary Out There, Stephen Fry described the Hijra community as “male to female transgender”, but it’s actually more complex than that. Although some possibly ID as trans women- the self-described queen Fry talks with in this video (skip to around 46:00) has had a vaginoplasty, for instance, and the Hijra pride flag includes pink and blue for binary trans people- Hijra are generally closer to non-binary femme people, or AMAB non-binary people with a feminine gender expression. Having been oppressed under the British Empire, they’re routinely subjected to discrimination and disproportionately affected by poverty and the AIDS crisis, although their situation is slowly improving in areas such as legal recognition.
Lhamana
(Originally I was just going to do a paragraph on “Two-Spirit” Native Americans and leave it at that, but that was before I learned two things. Firstly, while specific to Indigenous LGBTQ people, two-spirit is more of a pan-Indian umbrella term that doesn’t always account for tribal differences and covers a huge list of too many different identities to list here. Secondly, not every identity under that umbrella seems to “count” as non-binary in the generally understood sense. (More information on the wider two-spirit community can be found here.) Anyway, back to the Lhamana.
The Zuni tribe’s creation myth involves with the clouds and water being created by Awonawilona, ‘a deity both male and female’, so it’s unsurprising that they’re anything but draconian about the gender binary- in fact, according to this article gender is traditionally seen as “acquired rather than inborn”, so kids are raised gender-neutral until confirming their gender identities around puberty. Those who identify as lhamana are seen as creators of balance between the genders, and can achieve a highly respected status within their community. Traditionally, a Lhamana person can move easily between the societal roles traditionally assigned to men and women, regardless of gender assignation at birth i.e. biological sex. (And no, the Evil Trans Lobby™️ isn’t going to come after me for “saying that sex is real”. See this essay by a kick-ass trans woman.) Sadly, a combination of Western and/or Christian interference has damaged the legacy of Zuni culture and left its people understandably private about it today.
Māhū
The word literally translates to “in the middle”, so it makes sense that māhū people are classed as a third gender in Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) and Maohi (Tahitian) cultures. They had a respected status in pre-colonial Hawaii as priests and healers, and as teachers of hula dances, chants and other cultural traditions- they might even be asked to name children. (Amusingly, the painter Paul Gauguin was mistaken for a māhū by indigenous people in Tahiti due to his slightly effeminate style of dress.) Today, people identifying as māhū are active in efforts to revive and safeguard aspects of traditional indigenous Hawaiian culture- from languages and songs to dances and traditional musical instruments- as well as passing them on to the next generation. They’re also known for taking care of those in the LGBTQ+ community who’ve been rejected by their birth families. Unfortunately, the main reason such families are necessary dates back to the colonial-era encroachment of other ideologies, which leads us to…
Transphobia and White Supremacy
You can see the pattern in most of those descriptions, right? With the exception of the hardline conservative Islamists messing with Bissu culture, so many communities have been screwed over because of colonialism rooted in white supremacy. Because some white people somewhere saw their religions, cultures and societies as inferior. The Samoa Faafafine Assocation was as of 2009 still fighting to repeal homophobic and transphobic laws dumped on Samoa by colonial-era Britain and New Zealand. The Hijra, once respected and even revered in Indian society, were reduced to pariahs once the British came, ostracised them and projected their gender norms onto the colony along with a belief in the innate superiority of white, Christian societies. As for the Lhamana… well, this Britannica section gives a general idea of how the desire for white dominance in America and Canada (also, see this page), and the effort to forcibly convert Native Americans to Christianity, has caused serious and sometimes irreparable harm to both the people and many if not all aspects of their cultures- including the acceptance of gender-diverse people. And the Māhū? Hawaii’s first law criminalising “sodomy” was passed in 1850, under the influence of Christian missionaries who’d been weaving church and state together there since the ’20s. The societal position of the Māhū only got worse from there, and from the 1960s trans women had to wear badges that labelled them as male. It was missionaries, too, who put a lot of effort into suppressing and erasing the Māhū’s role in Hawaii’s pre-colonial history.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that (for example) a white trans person can’t benefit from white privilege or have racist biases, or that a cisgender person of colour can’t be transphobic- just ask pretty much every character in Pose. But that doesn’t change the fact that while white supremacists were spreading their cultures and religions everywhere, judging all others to be inferior, they all brought some seriously ingrained anti-LGBT bigotry, often tied up in the same “Well the Bible says it’s sinful and unnatural so clearly it must be” rhetoric that Queer Eye’s Bobby (and also Miles from Georgia and that nice pastor in Season 5) had to deal with growing up. And frequently, transphobia on “feminist” grounds is favoured by those who also happen to be White Feminists (no, that doesn’t mean what you’re thinking. See this link for more info.)
This crossover was recently exemplified when small group of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (no, TERF is not a slur) made their priorities pretty clear when they crossed paths with a Black Lives Matter march. The confrontation became a shouting match with, bizarrely, the white “gender-critical” women telling the black women they were arguing with that they were “misogynists” who “can’t even understand what a woman is”, and accusing them of being the aggressive ones. Oh, and then there was this twitter gem:
(Check out this article I wrote in June for a more in-depth deconstruction of why claiming that black men’s “male privilege” trumps literally trumps everything else is… well, a load of bollocks, essentially.)
When you take all that into account, remember when J.K. Rowling decided to publish her rambling, citation-free essay full of anti-trans dogwhistles and conspiracy theories just as the Black Lives Matter movement was reaching unprecedented heights? Yeah, suddenly that doesn’t seem like quite so much of a coincidence.
The point is, non-binary identities aren’t the newly-discovered (or made-up) concept that they seem to be to a lot of post-colonial and/or white and/or Western people. The dominance of predominantly white-oriented cultures has resulted in others being suppressed or erased, along with their very different understandings of which relationships are acceptable, who gets to fit in the boundaries of “male” and “female”, and of the acknowledgement and validity of gender identities that exist outside of those boundaries. Consequently, it’s not a difficult leap to say that if transphobia and white supremacy go hand in hand, then anti-racism and the acceptance of trans and gender-diverse people should too.
Originally published at http://emmamcurzon.wordpress.com on September 5, 2020.
