Gender and Colonialism pt 1: Gender in Euro-Western culture

collage by nicholas b jacobsen

“Settler heteronormativity has fundamentally disrupted Indigenous traditions of kinship that embrace multiple genders, fluid sexualities, and other-than-human relationships. In order to stop the many-headed monster of settler normativity, we must harness the power of Indigenous kinship to survive and gather our collective forces toward the care of all because, fundamentally, kinship is about care.” - The Red Nation

The Family: A Proclamation to the World is part of an ongoing colonial project to enforce white/Western/Euro-centric sex, gender, and sexuality *norms onto earthlings (*beware of anything called “natural” “normal” “average”).

In the beginning, “God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them.” In this beginning, multiplicities of genders, sexes, and sexualities are erased and the divinity of the Platonic-ideal, straight, abled, cisgender-binary human forms are reified. 

For Carl Linnaeus the “Father of modern taxonomy” (the tree of life) the gender binary was already nature/normal/divine because he believed in this Biblical beginning

“The Earth's creation is the glory of God, as seen from the works of Nature by Man alone. The study of nature would reveal the Divine Order of God's creation."  - Carl Linnaeus

Linnaeus categorized humans into the “animal kingdom” because of our mammalian live birth and breastfeeding (i.e. “women” stuff) but separated humans from the rest of the animals because of our mind/soul (i.e. “man” / god stuff). 

In addition to being a devout Christian, Linnaeus was also a white supremacist. As part of his taxonomy work he created 4 “races” and named them after colors White, Black, Red, and Yellow. He also created a 5th group he named “Monstrous” for “wild and monstrous humans, unknown groups, and more or less abnormal people.” Disabled, mixed race, queer, or anyone else who doesn’t fit his neat system of categorization.

This category lives on as a “Wastebasket taxon” - a term used by some taxonomists to refer to a taxon that has the sole purpose of classifying organisms that do not fit anywhere else. The familiar category of invertebrates is an ‘everything-else’ taxon, comprising all animals without backbones.

“Non-binary” and “trans” are themselves wastebasket taxons. 

My ex-partner writes about their own gender by writing about lichen. As our own bodies are 50-90% microbiota, or 10-50% human, lichen also defies categorization.

“The lichen body lives outside of Linnaean taxonomy, in that they are multiple ‘kingdoms’ of being: plant, fungus, and prokaryote. Linnaean taxonomies have helped (and hurt) humans in their relationships to the world, but lichen asks us to look beyond human-made categories, and see a world of entanglements.” - bug carlson