You ask me what I am; what, not who.
You want to know what my gender is? Let me tell you: Today, I am mad.
My gender is the wrath of my history; my gender is more than this body you see. My gender is a lifetime of tears; my gender is paralysed in fear. My gender is self-mutilation; my gender is shame and humiliation. My gender is angry; it is the rage that quakes through me.
My gender is mine, and it is magic.
It’s excited and it’s manic; my gender is sacred, my body it’s temple. I worship but one god, and that god is me. My gender is whatever I want it to be.
But my gender is not mine alone.
It has history, it has cultures. Its roots run wide and they run deep. My gender, our gender, is culture you didn’t let us keep.
But while you went to sleep, we tied it to our bones, buried it deep within our homes; twisted into our hair, pressed between the pages you wouldn’t tear; sown into our sheets, burned within this heat. You took everything from us, but you wouldn’t take this.
You killed us, silenced us, ridiculed us; you tried to erase us, tried to deface us, tried to break us, break our hearts, but you couldn’t take away our art. And our gender, oh our gender, it is art.
It’s soft and it’s fluid; it flowered from the dark we hid in, bursting with colour, with possibilities. Our gender is fairy dust: it’s passion, it’s love, it’s trust.
And we’ll protect it if we must.
We’ll still be here, through this violence, this fear; this hate won’t make us any less queer.
This blood that flows through our bodies, it’s coloured with generations of trauma, stories of abuse I’ve heard from grandmamma and those she’d heard from hers. There’s centuries of your people brutalising mine, time and after time; killing us, raping us, sexualising us.
You melded us to a distorted vision of you, but we made it through.
It took courage, it took thought, and it won’t be for naught.
We rose from the ashes of our pain, and we won’t let this happen, not again.
We see you, I see you.
I see you dismiss me, my gender, my race, my culture; I see you claim to know better, claim to be better. Tell me, tell me how it feels. To look down on those you colonised, to tell them you’d keep them safe? Tell me, did you know? Did you know it was you, that it was your people, who broke them in the first place?
Or do you claim that’s not on you, that the massacres weren’t true?
Do you not see that you’ve been lied to too?
You stand here and tell me I would be safer in your country, built on whiteness, bigotry, and stolen money? You tell me they would accept me more than my own people?
You’re right; I’d be torn limbs apart if I ever peek past this closeted heart, but don’t tell me it’s because your people know better.
Don’t offer that hand to me, pretending it’s care for me. That hand you offer is coloured with my ancestors; it’s dripping with their blood.
Brown blood; Black blood; Queer blood; Trans blood.
You soiled my motherland, enslaved us with those very hands. You killed us with no remorse, so I am here.
I am here to remind you; this fluidity of gender, this wave of magic? It was my people who held it sacred till you marched in with your rifles and your gender, parading your whiteness as the ideal.
But you don’t know better, you couldn’t. They don’t tell you our history, do they?
You don’t know what you did, what your ancestors did; not really, not all of it. How could you? You never tried, you were taught not to.
You can’t be racist if you never talk about race, but that erases us; don’t tell me you don’t see the colour in my face. My skin is burnt brown with the memories of my people left in the ashes of our history.
WE.
We are man.
We are woman.
We are both and we are neither.
We are the third gender, and you are done erasing us.
About the artist: Xaine is an aspiring queer, disabled writer and artist from Lahore, Pakistan. Xe aims to create safe creative spaces for queer expression, disabled pride and appreciation, and cultural recognition. Xyr work channels xyr history, trauma, and their socio-political ideas.
See more of Xaine’s work on Instagram.