“The new, 'spiritual' man of today can browse through bookstores or surf the internet to find any religious idea or practice that strikes his fancy, from Western to Eastern, from Sufism to satanism. The more data he stores in his head, however, the more vague his worldview becomes. He has religious interests in several areas, but he basically believes that all is relative, i. e.: 'My ideas work for me, your ideas work for you.' He believes in everything at once, but in nothing very deeply, and in nothing that will demand a sacrifice from him. He has nothing worth dying for. But his antennae are out, feeling for something else that will strike his fancy, that will satisfy his vague unrest without asking that he honestly look at himself and change, without disturbing his constant endeavor to satisfy his ego.”
—Hieromonk Damascene
“Consequently, when colonists first came to the Americas, they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in Native communities because they realized that indigenous peoples would not accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not structured on the basis of social hierarchy. Patriarchy, in turn, rests on a gender-binary system; hence it is not a coincidence that colonizers also targeted indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model.”
—(page 61, heteronormativity of settler colonialism, Andrea Smith)
Just putting this up here as a partial response to that tool who suggested that the colonial instillation of the gender binary was a consequence, not a tool of colonialism.
Their claim was that there are better ways to subjugate a people other than instating gendered oppression in the form of a binary patriarchy. That, “on a list of tools used to destroy cultures, this has got to be at the very very bottom”. Despite, idk, it being ‘a necessity’?
(hint: this is also, in turn, why even non-binary white people benefit from the binary. your whiteness privileges you in this respect)
