Asphodelpelt

“For example, in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the cult of the Phrygian deity Cybele was widespread. Her priestesses, called the Galli, were usually people who were assigned male at birth and presented in a feminine manner.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Outward focus is also a great way to resist the shaming, criticising, judging culture that we live in. We can gently but firmly point out that if our genders are difficult in our place and time in history, then it’s the world that’s flawed and needs to change, not us. Without this approach we might never have reached the point of gender equality we’re at now, because women would have simply focused on how to make themselves more feminine – according to patriarchal standards – instead of embracing feminism and demanding equal rights. Similarly, LGBTQ+ people might still be being imprisoned and treated with drugs or electroshock therapies, instead of occupying the place they currently do in many countries as equal citizens with heterosexual and cis people.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“When we divide the world into us/them though, we do not only start to dehumanize the other, as we can see in every form of slavery and genocide. We begin to also dehumanize ourselves. If we start to think that we can own the land, green bloods and red bloods—that is animals—then we can also own people, if we can categorize them as not fully human in some ways.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“So there’s a giant whistling void in our history across large swaths of the world, a void which might otherwise have yielded hundreds of years of custom, law, ceremony, ideas, and ideals about trans and genderqueer and non-binary lives. An artificial void, like there would be if you created the meanest black hole you can imagine – one that makes only that of which it disapproves of disappear completely.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are