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binary gender is a historically Western product and weapon of ongoing settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. it can be laundered into respectability, but it can never be cleansed of its central function in regimes of political violence.
hi, if you are an unreconstructed nineteenth century racial science + colonial anthropology apologist, yeah no, I’m not going to be dignifying your reply with a response
for folks who are interested, a few excellent books to get you started: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity chronicles the production of sex as a quality of flesh through chattel slavery’s captivity: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/black-on-both-sides">https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-divi...
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two Spirit Memory chronicles the violent imposition of a sex binary on the Cherokee nation over 5 centuries: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/asegi-stories">https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/aseg...
The Biopolitics of Feeling charts how “impressibility,” a plasticity of feeling accorded to white women bc of their presumed sex difference, championed white supremacy in the US 19th century: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-biopolitics-of-feeling">https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-biopo...
I also chronicle the scientific and medical history of sex biology and the invention of gender in the mid 20th century in my book (chapters 1 and 3 are most useful): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/histories-of-the-transgender-child">https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-divi...
And for a look at the prior roots of all this, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America chronicles how sexual and racial differences were produced out of a wide array of natural sciences https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/natural-history-sexuality-early-america">https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/nat...
There is great work on other locations than the Americas, too. Check out Indian Sex Life for how the figuring deviant women’s sexuality consolidated modern social thought and statecraft: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691196343/indian-sex-life">https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...
And Holy Science expounds upon the post colonial assumption of a Hindu nationalist biopolitics in refiguring the relation of Vedic religion to modern Western science https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295745596/holy-science/">https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780...
