The binary of man and woman is a social architecture — a particular answer to the question of gender that has been imposed with great force but that has never fully contained the actual range of human experience. Cultures across history and geography — from the hijra of South Asia to the two-spirit traditions of many Indigenous peoples to Juana's own fierce inhabitation of intellectual space that her world coded as exclusively male — have known that gender is far more various than the binary allows. The full spectrum is not a modern invention; it is a recovery.
Juana