5/27/19
when the british imposed sodomy laws they criminalized homosexuality because it was “against the order of nature.” they would forcibly strip “women’s clothes” off of gender variant people & force them into “men’s clothes.” they did this in the name of hygiene, in the name of protecting nature. colonialism shaped what we have come to understand as natural & unnatural. it naturalized heterosexuality & a binary gender system making it seem like the only option, not one of many options. it minimized the millions of forms of intimacies required to create & sustain life outside & beyond normative heterosexuality. gender variant people — who had long maintained an intimate relationship with nature — were demonized and made to seem foreign & threatening. we see the legacy of this in mainstream feminism which continues to uphold cis women’s bodies as natural and trans feminine bodies as wrong & disorderly. what is natural isn’t given, it’s a political decision. heteronormativity is naturalized by discrediting, delegitimizing, & ultimately disappearing intersex & gender variant people. in order for their nature to work we have to be eliminated. our existence is threatening insomuch as we gesture to another world outside of heteronormativity’s grip. we model & template forms of living that exceed the confines of their natural. we ambition beyond the manipulation of our bodies in the service of a security that is so tenuous & brittle it breaks with the slightest view of our artful becoming. it is so important that we reclaim the natural that they weaponize against us. that we remember that gender & sexual plurality & fluidity is natural. that there are as many bodies as there are bodies. infinite expression, variability, transformation. this is my NATURAL.
