The Trouble with Transgender Awareness Week
One Non-Binary Black person’s critique of this tradition
This week is Transgender Awareness Week in the United States, and while I have many thoughts and feelings about it, I have not yet shared anything related to this event.
As a non-binary person, I am free to be my authentic self internally, but society perceives me as a Black man. Gender is a complex entity, and it is affected by social, political, and economic norms.
Although I have the unearned advantage of being read as male, I have also faced micro-aggressions and micro-assaults on my gender identity in the workplace.
In one particularly egregious example, a male colleague (of the European Diaspora) told me, “You seem so much happier when you wear long, flowy dresses.” My then-supervisor (European-American) said, “Yeah, how can we get more of that, Chris?” That same day, I shared that my feet hurt ( I wore heels that day). A colleague joked, “That’s what’s going to happen when you dress like a woman!”
In this former workplace, colleagues would comment on my gender expression repeatedly, with one male colleague sharing, “I’ve never considered you feminine, even with all the makeup and heels.” Later, that colleague stated, “We all thought you were going to fall in those heels.”
I share these real examples to articulate a point- I have experienced the most blatant and vitriolic transphobia from People of the European Diaspora, and in particular in American workplaces.
The average American would expect People of the European Diaspora to be the most gender-inclusive and tolerant. This has not been my reality.
Fortunately, I am grateful to have learned about colonial history, which taught me how European powers used gender norms as barometers of civilization and encouraged the erasure of third, fourth, and higher numbers of genders across the Global South. From the Hijra in South Asia to the Bissou in Indonesia to the Two-Spirit peoples in First Nations, gender-expansive people have always existed.
It is a cruel irony, then, that the descendants of colonizers, settlers, missionaries, and conquistadors, who nearly drove gender-expansive people out of existence, now promote awareness of transgender issues.
Western “human rights” organizations and media cite gender-restrictive norms in the Global South as evidence of ignorance, incivility, and hatred among People of Color. This is, of course, overly simplistic and ahistorical. It is a projection from a people who have not come to terms with their history of suppressing and extinguishing gender-expansive peoples, histories, and norms.
The “West” does not hold a monopoly on gender tolerance and acceptance. In reality, had the European powers not colonized most of the world, who knows how many gender-expansive people, histories, and traditions would thrive today? We’ll never know.
