These postcolonial types love to romanticize “third sex” categories in traditional colonized societies and deride European Christian colonizers for despising them.
Also, transgenderism as defined by those like Leslie Feinberg is an umbrella movement that includes people in these categories as “transgender”, though the term is a Western American creation.
Hence, why you see “feminists” and gay people of color support transgenderism, because it acknowledges these third categories in colonized societies.
But these categories are products of strict divisions of labor and stereotyped traditional sex roles no different from those of Western Europe during colonialism.
In a traditional hunter-gatherer society, if the male is too “effeminate” to hunt, then he is given women’s clothing, put with the women to gather, and given a “third sex” identity.
That is what hijras, beardaches, kathoey, fa’afafine and others really are, males marginalized from manhood because they don’t live up to social expectations. And it’s not like they aren’t despised or ostracized in their own communities, because they are.
East or West, Global South or North, developing or developed, Third or First World, traditional sex roles are limiting. Pretending to be the opposite sex or being placed in a third category that doesn’t exist isn’t liberation.
Including such males in feminism or suggesting they’re more socially important than decriminalizing homosexuality is regressive. But it’s easier to blame white colonialism for it, than to seriously critique the sexism, misogyny and homophobia in your own backyard.
It’s easier to blame some made up “white feminism”, rather than to acknowledge that it’s a radical critique of male social hierarchies imposed on women and on men who don’t live up to the requirements of masculinity.
This is why you have people claiming this is a “white woman” issue, when it isn’t. It means you have to look in the mirror, and you may not like what you see.
