Asphodelpelt

“Along with the destruction of people and nations—and their legacies—another deep wound of settler colonialism and slavery is the us/them binary of humans/nature. This tells us that we don’t belong with other mammals, teaching us that we’re not interdependent with every other species in the global ecosystem, and that the land is something we can own.”
― Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

“Another important point to make is that just because an aspect of gender is fluid for somebody does not mean that they could easily choose for it to be otherwise. Often we might observe aspects of our gender shifting over time, but experience these changes as a path that we need to go down. It wouldn’t be easy – or even possible – to take another road, and if we are denied the possibility of going down that path, we can end up feeling a great deal of pain and discomfort. We need to be very careful not to give the impression that people could ever simply choose for their gender – or their gender journey – to be other than it is.”
― Alex Iantaffi, How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are

“Gender identities, expressions, roles, and experiences are not fixed and static. There is no ‘pure’ idea of gender, untouched by the impact of colonisation, globalisation, and technology. Learning about gender diversity in the past and present is not about trying to reclaim an idyllic past or exoticising specific bodies or cultural groups; rather, it is a reminder of the strength of diversity in human nature. No matter how hard we might have tried to suppress gender diversity, our varied identities, expressions, roles, and experiences keep re-emerging, claiming a little more space and room to breathe, reminding us that this is not a landscape that can be tamed and shaped into two parallel and distinct highways.”
― 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