Daily Archive

The woke left speaks endlessly about colonization, erasure, and the violence of imposing alien categories onto other peoples. Then, on gender, it does exactly that. “Two-spirit” is not a generic synonym for nonbinary or trans. It was coined in a specific Indigenous context, for Indigenous people, to describe realities bound up with particular nations, ceremonial roles, and community obligations. The same is true of hijra, fa’afafine, bissu, and similar roles elsewhere. These are not free-floating proof texts for Western activists. They are culturally embedded forms of life. To strip them out of their own cosmologies and social structures, then redeploy them as evidence for a universal modern gender framework, is not solidarity. It is appropriation with moral vanity attached.

“The people most fluent in the language of decolonization cannot stop subordinating Indigenous meaning to Western identity fashion.”

The same pattern appears in history. Joan of Arc, Chevalier d’Eon, Herculine Barbin, and other ambiguous or unusual figures are routinely conscripted into a modern trans genealogy, as if the past existed chiefly to validate present slogans. But this is not historical recovery. It is retrospective annexation. These people lived inside worlds structured by religion, law, custom, sex, status, and necessity in ways that do not map cleanly onto 21st-century identity language. To force modern labels onto them is not to “see” them at last. It is to erase the terms on which they actually understood themselves. The activist flatters himself that he is rescuing the past from ignorance. In reality he is recolonizing it.

That is the real irony. The people most eager to denounce Western universalism cannot stop universalizing their own categories. The people most fluent in the language of decolonization cannot stop subordinating Indigenous meaning to Western identity fashion. The people most obsessed with “listening to lived experience” routinely ignore living communities when those communities resist being folded into the approved script. This is not liberation. It is a familiar imperial habit in progressive costume: take what is particular, local, sacred, and historically bounded, flatten it into an abstract category, and then call the theft inclusion.

John of Arc