RED PILL OR BLUE PILL?

it often feels like non-binary people popped into existence recently.

of course, it would feel that way to anyone living in the western world, where non-binary identities were stamped out, where colonisation and abrahamic religions erased any means of stepping outside the binary.

often, i felt like i was just copying people i saw around me that i thought were "cool." 

i thought i was faking it, i tested myself, detested myself for how much attention i brought to myself.

but i am not alone: as zanele muholi said, "i am not just one. i come with many forces."

hence, our pronoun, they.

mythology is filled with non-conforming characters. lan caihe, one of the eight immortals in the taoist pantheon, is described to be a "man who could not understand how to be a man," living a confused, lonely existence, gender played for laughs. 

we see many similar characters, who likely are trans, being treated as transvestites rather than transgender. notably, we have loki. marvel held this character, this god, in their hands, harnessing all the potential in the world...

and did nothing with loki's famous genderqueerness. 

loki, who was a mother, daughter, brother. 

dionysus of greek mythology, too, paraded around forests and often took the form of a woman when coming down to earth. clearly, dionysus doesn't give a shit what anyone else thinks about gender - dionysus will do as dionysus will do!

mawu-lisa, the creator goddess of yoruba mythology:
comprised of mawu the moon a woman
and lisa the sun a man
a perfect combination of two entities,
a being both man and woman,
unbound to the codes of one gender or the other.

even athena, who had a serious, unsexual personality, often came down to earth as man. so, we see the act of stepping outside the binary was not solely a sexual one in ancient greece, as may be gleaned when viewing dionysus in isolation.

even the rainbow serpent, yurlunggur of dreamtime, creator of the world. while male or female in some indigenous cultures, is often represented as both, neither, hermaphroditic, or something else entirely.

and the matrix was made by trans women.