Colonial gender binaries and "new-age" spirituality
tl;dr - fuck that noise. Happy pride comrades 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇵🇸
Hey.
A little heads up going in, this one gets pretty ranty.
I want to begin it with some profound, truly heartfelt gratitude.
May we celebrate our queer and gender-non-conforming comrades and kin — both within our immediate communities, and outside of them, in the movement as a whole.
May we honour our queer ancestors, and live into the rights and freedoms they fought for and won for us.
To all queer and gnc comrades in here with me — THANK YOU for showing us what living into liberation looks like.
THANK YOU for making the world more beautiful, more interesting, and more free.
Remember that cis or not, straight or not, queer or not, cishetero capitalist patriarchy is destroying all of us.
We MUST continue naming it and dismantling it, wherever we see it.
Remember that gender-based roles and the whole rigidly dogmatic gender binary itself is actively harmful and oppressive to ALL BODIES, not just queer ones.
May we continue to live into our liberation and our aliveness as it exists beyond binaries and heirarchies.
Queer joy is medicine.
Queer love is medicine.
Queer liberation is medicine.
THANK YOU comrades for sharing your medicine with us.
We love and need you.
Okay, here’s where we’re gonna get a little ranty. Stay with me here, because this is really important.
Whenever some new age “polarity teacher” type starts going off about the so-called “divine inner masculine” that women + femmes have to learn to “lean on” and “surrender to” (🤮)…
…I want to shake them by the shoulders. I want to say “buddy!!! Do you not hear yourself?!
You’re literally describing the Mother.”
Let’s break this down.
The so-called “Masculine” is said to be the protector.
The provider.
The one with discipline and structure.
The active one.
The brave one.
The one who leads.
The one who holds.
The pragmatic one.
The one with follow-through.
Like… you could not more clearly be describing the Mother if you tried.
The Mother is the protector. She is the one who stands in front of innocents and roars.
She is the provider. She literally nourishes every single one of us. She gives us everything we need.
Look at the cycles of Nature. Perfectly balanced, always predictable, always in perfect harmony. Seems pretty fkn disciplined and structured to me.
The Mother is the one who holds us together. She is the one who leads us. She shows us the way. She walks the path so that the rest of us may follow safely.
I am so fucking sick of this preachy fkn new-age horse shit pretending to be empowering and oh-so-deep, when it only takes the slightest amount of investigation to see it’s nothing more than 1950s style misogyny drenched in patchouli and peppered with culturally-appropriated practices.
Apart from being deeply colonised and actively harmful, because it encourages us to go hard on our own dis-empowerment…
…it’s boring. It’s basic as hell.
You won’t find any enlightenment in doing exactly what your oppressors told you to do and outsourcing all your power + agency to colonial patriarchy, Karen.
In a real way though, I know how insidious this conditioning is.
I know how quickly and easily it slips through the cracks, even in spaces that centre collective liberation.
So to all the women and femmes reading this, seriously, think about the traits you’ve automatically categorised as masculine.
Notice the way colonial conditioning has gendered our very agency, autonomy, and relationship to our WILL.
Any time you find yourself thinking — I need to really lean on my masculine right now…
…start teaching yourself to say instead — I need to ground into the Mother.
Notice how rapidly your agency and your power return to you.
Notice how much more connected to your own body you feel.
Notice just how much more capable you suddenly believe yourself to be.
We are living in times of acute polycrisis.
We are witnessing a live-streamed genocide, happened against a backdrop of catastrophic climate collapse.
We NEED you in your power.
We NEED you to remember your agency.
We NEED you fkn anchored into how capable you are.
We need you remembering the Mother.
The Archetypal Mother is our teacher this month inside REWILDING.
We’re studying the ways of grit, courage, pragmatism, and POWER that she represents.
And of course, we are actively disrupting + abolishing any notion of colonised gender roles in our relationship to action and leadership. It’s pride month. How could we not.
We’ve got 5 spots left to join us.
Love you. So glad you’re here. Thank you.
Free Palestine. Free us all.