Thread by @DonovanCleckley

Here is the author of ‘Histories of the Transgender Child,’ whose argument that “binary gender is a historically Western product and weapon of ongoing settler colonialism and anti-Blackness” ignores how gender as a hierarchy preceded both settler colonialism and chattel slavery.

Another problem with this person’s argument is that gender as a hierarchy, that is, male dominance and female subordination, has existed in patriarchal cultures around the globe since at least Ancient Mesopotamia, which, by the way, goes way back—millennia, not just centuries.

Moreover, it stinks of a “noble savage” mindset to misrepresent all Indigenous cultures as “beyond the gender binary.” While some were gynocentric, others were androcentric. Some had far less rigid gender roles, while others had far more rigid ones. All of that actually matters.

But, regardless of the fluidity or rigidity of gender roles, in relative terms, not one Indigenous culture believed males could be female and vice versa. It was about performing gender roles seen as proper for the opposite sex, but one did not become the opposite sex as such.

Nor did any medical-industrial complex exist in those cultures, as now exists in the Western context, where the medicalization of gender produces a very large profit. Most of the cultures being cited by transgender rights activists do not work within the confines of capitalism.

Coming back to the claim that “binary gender is a historically Western product and weapon of ongoing settler colonialism and anti-Blackness,” we can also note the ignored existence of pre-colonial African and Asian cultures that have been patriarchal, with gender as a hierarchy.

@AbigailShrier, here is that author who slandered you, who, interestingly, has a book called ‘Histories of the Transgender Child,’ presumably used to defend the social and medical transitioning of children and young people, on the false pretense of a historical precedent for it.