‘Consider What Decolonising Gender Can Look Like’: Non-Binary Ways of Being as Anti-Colonial and Abundant
By Ayling Zulema Dominguez
Existing outside the gender binary has allowed me to inhabit this brown body in a way that feels ancestral, agentive and liberating. As someone committed to questioning and subverting the systems of social control we live under, and having studied the imposition of a racial order by Spanish and American regimes, I began questioning the gender roles so many of us abide by and so much of society is shaped around. Who is served vs. subdued by the gender binary? In a time when so many champions of intersectional justice and liberation are calling for decolonisation, I urge us to consider what decolonising gender can look like, not just in terms of how we dress or present, but in our interpersonal relationships, expectations and ways of being.
When singer, songwriter, rapper and actress Janelle Monáe publicly shared that they identify as non-binary because they don’t see themself as solely woman and want to honour all the energies they feel within, it was the first time I felt permission to be my full self in my body. They’ve shared that they were non-binary long before they had the language for it, and while writer Leigh Thomas has aptly called attention to the difficulty of an identity label centred around what one is not rather than what one is, they also admit that it’s a useful term for those who are neither solely ‘man’ or ‘woman’. I want people to see ‘non-binary’ as more than just a term or identity label but as a way of abundant life, radical love and fullness that is in direct opposition to ongoing settler colonial systems of oppression.
If we embody the principle of Sankofa from the Akan Tribe of Ghana and turn to our past to remember the knowledge that may help us deconstruct present-day false Eurocentric narratives, anti-binary relationships to gender have existed for centuries. Though Muxes are often seen as a ‘third gender’ in the indigenous cultures of Oaxaca, Lukas Avendaño, anthropologist and self-identified muxe from Tehuantepec, expresses that ‘to try and pigeonhole ‘muxiety’ into a thing of gender is to submit to the needs of others,’ which is a mark of European colonial tendencies, as exhibited when they first arrived at lands foreign to them and felt the need to label and categorise indigenous peoples without room for nuance and with an appetite for commodification.
Avendaño shares, ‘Este ser existe antes de que pudiera hablarse de teorías de género.’ This way of being existed before we could even speak in theories of gender. They go on to say, ‘Zapotec, the native tongue of our region, does not have the pronoun for man or woman. Muxe is not he or she, but muxe – period. If you ask me what my gender identity is, it’s what I least think about. I’m taking a political stance in my way of being, saying that everyone should have the power and liberty to decide who and how they want to be.’
So much of my advocacy and organising around intersectional justice is rooted in the question of who we are at our most free, and what it might take to arrive there. And because I am always grounded in community, I asked other enbies to share how they see themselves as subverting Eurocentric gender norms and reclaiming liberated bodily and interpersonal relationships.
I spoke with Mexican Indigenous interdisciplinary artist Katherine Bahena-Benitez (they/elle) while they were in the motherland (Mexico), and they shared that for them being non-binary is to exist through their ancestral lens, not a Western colonial one. ‘Before colonisation, we were free. There was no policing of gender, sexuality or self-expression. Conquistadores came and saw what they described as ‘men in dresses’ and didn’t know how to conceive of that kind of liberated expression, so they started a genocide of our ancestors. In being non-binary, I reclaim our ancestral truth and resist erasure.’
Agustin Garcia Badillo (they/them), who is a reconnecting-Indigenous (Nahua/Otomi) and Mexican activist, and Coordinator of the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Pride Centre, is also very intentional about embodying the fact that queer, nonbinary and trans people of colour have always existed. They decorate the Centre with art from artists of those expansive identities so that when students walk in, they feel welcome and affirmed that we are not new to these lands. ‘We’ve existed for centuries, even if we are just now finding words and language for how we are.’
For Agustin, decolonialism means decolonising from all aspects of our life, questioning concepts like monogamy, gender, education and beyond, knowing that all these structures are intersectional and the white supremacist apparatus stretches far. The impetus comes from having felt uncomfortable in both white queer spaces because they fail to acknowledge the overlap between racial and gender-based violence for their siblings of colour, and in Latine queer spaces because the history of colonialism has manifested into toxic gender roles and the exclusion of non-binary and trans Latine people.
Still, Agustin holds onto hope and encourages Black, Indigenous, and person of colour non-binary and trans siblings around the world to experience a ‘coming in’ to their identities, rather than a more Western ‘coming out,’ which Palestinian poet George Abraham (they/he/هو) has also written about in terms of reclaiming agency over one’s own queer narrative and confronting the dangers and dismemberments of Western queerness and toxic positivities around ‘coming out’ stories.
In a similar vein, poet and cultural anthropologist Ashley-Devon Williamston (they/them) points out the lack of study and writing on Black womanhood in critical gender studies. Ashley-Devon identifies as a genderqueer non-binary Black Woman, and shares that, ‘To be a Black Woman transcends any notion of Western gender because you are not a woman in the white sense; you will never be seen as this delicate, soft thing that demands protection and safe-keeping. But we are also not men and do not embody masculine gender or its accompanying norms and expectations. In this nebulous third space, there is so much room to play with identity and to explore who one is, even for Black Women who identify as cis, especially under the confines and standards of American society.’ Williamston also expresses a want for AfroFuturism to include more queerness and to challenge Black nationalism. Where there is nationalism, there is so often pressure for people to give up parts of themselves.
For non-binary Latinx and Mexican scholar-artist Gabriel Andres Guzman (they/she/he), one of their favourite and most tender parts of being non-binary is the revolutionary and subversive platonic love that non-binary and trans relationships allow for. This idea aligns with the writing of social commentator, essayist, memoirist and poet bell hooks, who wrote so much about the need for loving abundantly and without qualification as a way to deconstruct patriarchal systems of control, punishment and qualified love.
Being from Tijuana and San Diego, Gabriel also embodies a borderland liminality when it comes to their body: ‘I think there’s a certain leaning into liminality and acceptance of disorientation to space and to self that comes with identifying as non-binary or trans, and the way in which I deepen my relationship to my body is play – playing with clothes, jewellery and tattoos deepens and helps reshape my relationship and fixed understandings of body and identity politics.’
I see this conversation with Gabriel in constellation with novelist Alice Walker’s writing about the body as a site of colonisation, and also see all interviewees’ experiences as being grounded in exploration, reclamation and play in ways that are actively returning to ancestral ways while simultaneously nurturing freedom for increasingly diverse identities and conceptions of self.
We have been handed gender and social constructs that need more than a decolonial approach if we hope to ever be free from racial and gender-based violence. To be non-binary or trans and Black, Indigenous, or a person of colour is to be inhabiting ways of being in interpersonal relationships that are actively subverting and creating anew more room for love in its most abundant form. The way we love, experiment with aesthetics, make and feed friendships and explore who we really are beyond these fleshy vessels we call home is unique and imaginative in ways that confront harmful gender norms.
All interviewees have shared a desire to build community, to encourage young queer people of colour to take up space and be the fullest versions of themselves, and to reach out to current queer elders-in-the-making if they seek advice or affirmation in their journey. Their social media information is below.
Ashley-Devon Williamston is on IG @thestoryteller_ad
Agustin Garcia Badillo is on TikTok and IG @agustintheeeee
Katherine Bahena-Benitez is on TikTok @benitezkay and IG @_imjstlivin
Gabriel Andres Guzman is on TikTok @cisjennerr and IG @duckiegabe
Citations:
● https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/nonbinary-lgbtq-adults-us/
● https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2022/3/31/what-being-black-has-taught-me-about-being-nonbinary
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G-JHoqHA8U