Living and Loving Beyond Binaries...
On wombs, gender, and the walls we build around our identities.
Inside REWILDING, we hold Red Tent Circles every Monday.
They’re a place for us to gather for live workshop, ritual, discussion, and exploring the work of decolonising our minds and finding our roles in the revolution via radical cycle reclamation and mythwork.
I love them with my whole heart. They’re one of my favourite parts of my week.
Sitting in circle with other decolonising feminists and having the kinds of conversations that actually matter is restorative to me in ways I can’t properly articulate - because it seems too simple to be as enormously profound as it continues to be.
Last Monday, we were orbiting around the concept (construct) of gender, colonial binaries, and what it all means for us as decolonising activists working specifically with our wombs.
I want to share some of it with you here, because it’s the kind of shit we all need to be talking about - particularly for you who are working with cycles too, or any space that proclaims itself to be feminist.
A few important points to get out of the way before we begin:
Gender is made up. The gender binary as we know it today is a colonial construct, and is oppressive to literally everyone and every body.
Biological sex is also not binary. It’s much more nuanced and complicated than you might be comfortable believing.
Womb work is not “women’s work”. Womb work is for WOMBS, regardless of gender.
“Women’s health” and “menstrual health” are not synonymous concepts. “Women’s health” refers to the impacts of colonial patriarchy on the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of people socialised as women (and in a lot of ways extends to include all non-men). “Menstrual health” refers to the physiology of menstrual cycles (which again, exist totally outside the colonial construct of gender). While there’s obviously loads of overlap between women’s health and menstrual health, they’re not interchangeable.
Abolishing the gender binary does not mean that you don’t get to keep your gender identity. All it means is that you, or anyone else, no longer gets to police the gender identities and bodies of other people. That’s literally it. No one is coming for your Woman-ness. All we’re talking about here is a world where the state doesn’t police the bodies and minds and spirits of humans based on a colonial binary.
If any of the above facts are offensive to your sensibilities to the point where your instincts are telling you to leap into contempt and vitriol, this post isn’t for you. In fact, most of my work probably isn’t for you.
If maybe that instinct is a little bit present, but you’re curious about why it’s coming up and where it comes from, read on.
All of that being said, let’s get into it.
The whole gender thing, for me…
My relationship to the gender thing has always been a bit of a question mark, and I’m enormously grateful for that.
The best way I can articulate my grasp on the whole gender concept is “no thank you”.
The whole conversation, the clusterfuck around it, the roles and prescriptions that come with it, I look at it like I look at a plate of food someone’s offering me when I hate that food but don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings when they hold it out to me.
“No thanks, not for me today, I’m good. Looks yum though!”
Oh, okay. So you must be non-binary then right?
Nope. Not that either.
Because to call myself non-binary is to acknowledge some kind of buy-in into the binary in the first place - which I firmly do not. (“If you’re not any of these categories then you MUST belong in this category over here! That’s the only one left!” No! I don’t want any of them! I don’t hang out in a space where any of these categories even make sense!)
It’s like if someone called me a Satanist. Like, no, I’m not, but even having that conversation requires me to step into a Christian paradigm and belief system where the basic concept of a Satanist makes sense.
I’m not that, but I’m also not any of it, because I have zero investment in the Christian dogma that makes up the foundation of everything we’re talking about here. I am simply not involved at all with any part of this paradigm in any way.
I feel similarly about the gender thing. Just, pass. Not for me, thanks.
(I’m a loosey-goosey Hermeticist by the way.)
I’m a creature of the Earth, a mammal with a womb. Everything on top of that is myth and story.
I say I’m incredibly grateful for this weird no-thank-you relationship to gender, because my womb and my cycle are - for me - foundational to my identity and my recovery.
(I mean, obviously right? I did build out a whole body of work with accompanying healing modality and overarching philosophy to boot all about how our cycles are our own personalised maps out of colonial patriarchal consciousness and into our roles in the revolution…)
I’m grateful because many years ago, when I first started stepping into spaces that were specifically centred around menstrual cycle awareness and reclamation, the vast majority of them were deeply, DEEPLY entrenched in gender binary stuff. Think New-Age ✨divine feminine✨, and a whole lot of white feminist and capitalist rhetoric wrapped up in the empowerment of learning about your cycle.
I’m grateful because I always felt just a little bit othered in those spaces. It never quite landed for me in the ways I was watching it land for others I was sharing the space with.
For a long time I couldn’t articulate why. For a long time I shamed myself for it, made myself into the problem, assuming it was feeling icky and weird because I wasn’t doing it right or I wasn’t working hard enough.
Classic, right?
I’m grateful because I stepped into spaces like those with so much desperation and urgency around understanding myself and finding a “home” for my wounding. I was suffering enormously from my stage 3 endometriosis, angry at a world that didn’t pay any attention to cyclical suffering, angry at a system that didn’t even really know what the root cause of my pain was or where it came from, let alone how to properly treat it.
I was angry, traumatised, and desperate for relief.
And I know that if I didn’t feel that weird icky sense of othering and not-quite-right-ness, I might have been swept up in white feminist TERFy bullshit completely - probably for years.
I was exactly the kind of person who’s extremely susceptible to bigotry and dogma when it dresses itself up as solidarity and empowerment. And I can imagine how long it would have taken me to untangle all of that, had I found the sense of “home” that I was looking for there.
Grateful, grateful, grateful to have dodged that particular bullet.
Grateful that my feelings of othering there were able to become the foundations of the philosophies and bodies of work I teach and practice now.
When bigotry and dogma disguise themselves as empowerment and solidarity…
How does it happen, and what can we do about it?
When there’s a dominating power exerting its control over the groups it deems to be “less than” with all manner of oppression, exploitation, and dehumanisation, the members of the group deemed “less than” will tend to bind together for protection, solidarity, comfort, and eventually - the power to overthrow the dominating force.
In the case of gender stuff, the “dominating power” is patriarchy (duh).
The “less than” group will always have a specific set of characteristics, traits, or values that bind them together. This binding becomes the “safe space” for people in the “less than” group to feel at home in - and it’s natural to feel very protective of those bindings.
When they start to fall away, it can feel like the boundaries around the group collapse, which tends to make everybody feel a little vulnerable.
This is when solidarity and empowerment turns into bigotry.
Without a grasp on the intersectionality of our own oppression and subjugation, the bindings we build with others we’re building solidarity with tend to become incredibly rigid, and seriously dehumanising.
Let’s take TERFs for example.
(For those who may not know: a TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. TERFs are highly gender critical, they have incredibly dogmatic ideas on what womanhood and femininity represent, and their whole worldview is rooted firmly in the gender binary - and the oppression of what they’ve decided is “woman” by what they’ve decided is “man”. And just as a quick side note, it seems super weird to me to be calling yourself a feminist of any kind if your whole thing is rooted in gender roles and gender presentation, but anyway.)
Now, the oppression and dehumanisation of women and femmes by patriarchy is very very real. Victims of that oppression band together to form bonds around that shared oppression. But - oh no! Our understanding of “woman” (our default oppressed class) is changing, the boundaries around my safe little group are falling away! If I can’t even be safe here, amongst the people with whom I’m sharing this experience of oppression, I can’t be safe anywhere! Quick! Attack! Get those walls back up! Strengthen those bindings! Get out of my Safe Space, you don’t belong here and you never can, because you represent the breaking down of the bindings and boundaries I depend on to help me feel safe! Attack! Attack! Attack! Anything to redefine the boundaries of the group!
This is where the instinct for contempt and vitriol comes in.
Someone experiencing harassment and oppression from patriarchy (someone who’s mind is deeply colonised and has no understanding of intersectionality) will create bindings with others who share that experience. That person’s identity will then get emotionally enmeshed with their experience of oppression, and they make connections with others in the group that further bolster this specific understanding of oppression - and therefore solidify their identity.
For example: “I experience harassment and oppression because I am a woman. I know I’m a woman because I have a womb, I wear makeup, I dress a certain way, I have certain priorities, I behave in specific ways in relationship with others, I have specific goals for myself that fit into my understanding of woman-ness. Oh, you also have a womb and wear makeup and dress in a similar way to me and have similar goals? You ALSO experience belittling and harassment and oppression? Yay! We are the same. Let’s build a shared identity around these experiences, it’ll make me feel really safe.”
That shared identity around victimhood and oppression creates with it a big long list of criteria that determines whether or not someone is allowed full access to “woman-ness”.
You don’t dress a certain way? You’re not a real woman. Get out of here.
You don’t wear the same kind of make-up and adorn yourself in the same way we do? You don’t get to call yourself Woman in the same way.
You don’t have a womb? No woman-ness for you, away with you.
You don’t have the same goals because you have no interest in competing at the same level as cis men inside the capitalist machine? You don’t belong with us - surely you’re not a real victim of patriarchy.
You don’t look like me or have the same values and priorities as me? You’re not enough of a woman to hang out with us.
On and on it goes.
The identification with a specific kind of victim-ness strengthens, as do the bindings between members of the group - and the vitriol and hatred of anyone who represents a breaking down of that identity gets more and more intense.
When we were talking about this on our Monday call this week, one of the REWILDING folks brought in a conversation they’d overheard between two so-called feminists as they were discussing, with much contempt and derision, a gender expansive person:
“Well, if (Paula) wants to be taken seriously as a woman, then (she) needs to put in more effort.”
Referring to (Paula’s) clothing or adornments.
Do you see this phenomenon playing out here?
A very rigid and brittle and dogmatic understanding of the criteria someone has to meet to fully belong in the oppressed class, an over-identification with the victimness of that oppressed class, bonds forming with others inside that group who “already belong” - thereby strengthening the walls around the group, and amping up the attack to anyone who represents the crumbling of those walls.
It’s worth noting here that I, a femme-presenting person with a womb, have literally never once in my life been told I need to “put more effort” into my “woman-ness”. I’m not a make-up person, and I pretty much only wear clothes that could comfortably double as pyjamas.
So that criteria is certainly feeling pretty flimsy.
Many cis women (women who were assigned female at birth) don’t menstruate. Either they elect to cut off their cycle with hormonal birth control, or they simply don’t bleed for any number of other health-related reasons. Are they no longer women simply because they don’t bleed? Are menopausal women who haven’t had a period in years, no longer women?
Does the womb make the woman? Of course our intersectional, decolonising, and gender-expansive friends know that no, it absolutely does not - but let’s play out this hypothetical for a moment too.
Plenty of cis women don’t have wombs. They get them removed for any number of reasons. Sometimes the ovaries and the cervix go too. Are they no longer women then? Because their womb is removed, is their woman-ness gone too?
Okay, so that criteria doesn’t really work either, does it.
This is not a new phenomenon, by the way.
During the 60s and 70s, when what we now call Second Wave Feminism was sweeping the world, mainstream feminists would campaign really fiercely to make sure that queer women were kept out of the feminist movement.
Lavender Menace was the pejorative term at the time for lesbians. Which incidentally is a super fucking cool band name.
Mainstream white feminists did a whole bunch of fear mongering and harassment and abusive tactics against the terrifying lavender menace to exclude them from organising, from policy change, protests, and from the movement as a whole because they “weren’t real women”.
Lesbians and queer women were apparently “perverse, unnatural, mannish, and couldn’t possibly understand what real oppression from patriarchy feels like”.
I mean. Lol.
The script hasn’t even changed.
When the colonisers came to the Americas and later to Australia, they not only imposed the colonial gender binary onto the indigenous peoples of the land they were invading - erasing pre-colonial understandings and expressions of gender (plus, yknow, all the genociding and rape and displacement and destruction), they also disqualified indigenous women from “woman-ness” because - get this - they’d never been oppressed the way white women have before, so they couldn’t understand what “woman-ness” really meant.
The coloniser white women, in an effort to “assimilate” the indigenous population, would teach them colonial binary gender roles, so that they could “learn their place”. They could not be called “woman” until they’d learned what that concept meant, inside of colonial paradigm.
How to not accidentally be a giant bigot in your very normal and healthy quest for solidarity and empowerment:
So hopefully now we all have a better understanding of why that instinct to leap into contempt and vitriol might come up when someone poses a threat to the “safe group” that’s been created.
What can we, as comrades and decolonising feminists, do about this?
The solution here is to orient yourself towards a more non-binary way of thinking.
(Pun intended. 😉)
Having an awareness of intersectionality in our praxis means learning to move out of the “I’m a victim, therefore someone else must be the perpetrator” mentality, and more into “I’m a victim, but I am also a perpetrator”.
Bigotry happens when we get all emotionally enmeshed with our identity as victim, to the point where we literally cannot grasp the fact that we’re a perpetrator as well.
Can you feel the very rigid and dogmatic binary in place here?
Patriarchy is overarching, and all women, femmes, and non-men are victims of oppression under patriarchy.
White women are victims of patriarchy. But until they do the work to interrupt the white supremacy that literally everyone born inside this paradigm is indoctrinated with, they will also be perpetrators of that white supremacy.
Women women forming bonds with other white women who share their experience of oppression, who then begin to over-identify with that experience, will be really, REALLY unwilling to see their identity as perpetrator, because they’re too invested in their identity as victim.
That’s the recipe for white feminism.
Cis women are victims of patriarchy. But until they’ve interrupted the cisheteronormative conditioning that drenches the air inside the colonial paradigm, they’re gonna also be perpetrators of that cisheteronormativity.
Same deal here, over-identifying with victimness, refusal to see perpetratorness, whoopsie - you’re a massive TERF now.
I say the solution here is to come into a non-dual way of thinking here because the dogma and the rigidity will only begin to loosen if we realise that accepting your role in one dynamic as perpetrator doesn’t take away your role in another dynamic as victim.
You’re both. Many of us are both. It’s more complex and nuanced than a cosy binary of “I’m either this or I’m that”.
Recognising that you’re the perpetrator of harm and violence doesn’t mean that harm and violence doesn’t also happen to you.
Recognising that the concept of Woman is shifting and expanding doesn’t mean that you don’t get to be a woman anymore.
Abolishing the gender binary doesn’t invalidate your experience of gender-based trauma or harassment.
An exercise in leaning into non-duality to make you a safer and more effective activist:
Reflect on who you think you are - with particular regard to your status as an oppressed person under cisheteronormative, white supremacist, colonial capitalist patriarchy.
(All of us are oppressed under the empire, btw)
What is it that makes up that identity?
What are the criteria that you’re meeting in order to grant yourself this status?
For example, what classifies you as woman?
What classifies you as queer?
What classifies you as neurodivergent?
What classifies you as disabled?
What classifies you as working class?
And here’s the important bit: who made up those classifications?
Was it you? Did you have any say in it at all, or were they prescribed to you? Who prescribed them? Did they have your liberation and all of ours in mind when they did?
Really think about this. Let yourself get reeeeeal curious.
Secondly, what DISQUALIFIES someone from being “classified” in the same group as you?
Who made up those rules? Can you see the paradigm we’re all working to dismantle showing up in those criteria anywhere?
Done that? Cool. I hope you’re feeling nice and non-dual.
Next, reflect on your status as a perpetrator of cisheteronormative, white supremacist, colonial capitalist patriarchy.
This bit is particularly for you if you’re any combination of white, generationally wealthy, straight, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical.
Hold that energy of perpetrator right next to your previous understanding of yourself as victim.
See how it feels to hold both of them, simultaneously.
Notice your mind trying to polarise you to one or the other. Gently keep coming back to holding both.
For example, you might be a white, generationally wealthy, neurotypical, physically disabled, queer woman.
Can you hold the fact that even as you experience victim-ness based on your gender, your sexuality, and your disability - you may have unchecked biases towards whiteness and class-based privilege?
Can you hold yourself in both?
Yay! That’s intersectionality.
I’m gonna leave it here for today.
Huge thank you to everyone inside REWILDING for holding this conversation with me in person on Monday with so much grace and wisdom.
Thank you to all of you here reading this, I hope it lands for you.
Got questions, insights, something not quite making sense, something clunking into place in a new way for you? I’d love to know.
Love and need you, thanks for being here,
Leila xx