Black Non-Binary History: Erasure, Resistance & Lineage
The history of gender variance within the African diaspora is not a modern invention, nor is it a footnote to the broader narrative of Black survival. It is, instead, a fundamental current that runs beneath the surface of recorded history, often obscured by colonial erasure and the survival-driven necessity of silence.
For many Black Americans, the reclamation of this history constitutes a profound act of resistance. It is a refusal to accept the Western, colonial imposition of the gender binary as the only truth of human existence.
This post seeks to document aspects of that lineage, tracing the arc of Black non-binary, transgender, and gender-nonconforming existence from the spiritual cosmologies of pre-colonial Africa to the frontlines of contemporary liberation movements in the American South and beyond.
Preface: The Archive of the Unnamed and the Violence of "Ungendering"
Engaging with this history requires a shift in perspective. It demands that we look beyond the rigid categories of "man" and "woman" that were often violently imposed upon Black bodies during the Middle Passage and enslavement. It requires us to listen to the silences in the archive, the gaps where names were changed, where pronouns shifted, and where spirits refused to settle into the comfortable boxes of cisheteronormativity.
As the scholar Hortense Spillers has noted, the violence of the Atlantic slave trade involved a process of "ungendering," a stripping away of human distinctiveness that paradoxically created a space where new, fluid, and resistant identities could be forged in the dark holds of ships and the fields of the New World.
This post aims to explore the gendered aspects of black history as a compilation with the specific intent of amplifying Black voices and Black scholarship. It is an act of witnessing the lineage of those who lived outside the binary long before there was language to describe them in Western terms.
From the ogbanje of Igbo cosmology to the "sissy" in the choir stand of the Black Church, from the blues women of the Harlem Renaissance to the street queens of Stonewall, this is a history of those who have always been here. It is a testament to the fact that Black gender variance is not a deviation from Blackness, but a central, vibrant, and essential component of it.
For the Black reader, this post is intended as a mirror, reflecting a lineage of power and resilience that has often been hidden in plain sight.
For the ally, particularly the white ally, this post serves as a corrective to the whitewashed narratives of queer and gender diverse histories. It is a reminder that the fight for gender liberation is inextricable from the struggle for racial justice, and that Black gender diverse hands have forged the tools for our collective freedom for centuries.
We begin not with the trauma of colonization, but with the wholeness of African origins.
Pre-Colonial African Gender Fluidity: Igbo, Bantu, and Dagaaba Traditions
The imposition of the gender binary, the strict division of humanity into two distinct, opposite, and immutable categories of "man" and "woman", is a relatively recent development in the long history of human societies, and it is essentially a product of Western colonial thought.
Within many pre-colonial African societies, gender was understood not as a biological destiny rooted in anatomy, but as a fluid, dynamic, and often spiritual state of being. The colonial encounter sought to erase these complexities, labelling them as "savage" or "deviant" in an effort to impose European social order. However, the anthropological and oral historical record reveals a diverse array of gender systems that defied binary classification.
The Bantu Matrilineal Zone: Gender Flexibility as Tradition
In the vast cultural region known as the Bantu Matrilineal Zone (BMZ), which stretches across Central and Southern Africa, gender was not the primary axis around which society was organized. Research indicates that, for over three thousand years before European colonization, Bantu-speaking peoples rarely conceptualized gender in binary terms. Instead of a rigid "man/woman" dichotomy, social identity and authority were determined by factors such as age, lineage, and spiritual role.
The linguistic evidence supports this fluidity. In many Bantu languages, nouns are not gendered in the way they are in Romance languages. Names were often given based on the spirit of the ancestor believed to be reborn in the child, regardless of the child's anatomical sex. This suggests a worldview where the spirit takes precedence over the body. The concept of "gender flexibility" allowed individuals to move between social categories according to community needs or the dictates of the spirit world. A striking example of this appears in the title "The Father is also the Sister," (in A Non-binary Gendered History of Matrilineal Bantu Communities by Christine Saidi), a phrase used in specific Zambian communities to describe a spiritual transition.
In this context, a father could spiritually assume the role of a sister or daughter to facilitate connection with the ancestors. By becoming "the sister," the father took on the nurturing and mediating qualities associated with that role, effectively transcending his biological maleness to fulfil a spiritual function. This fluidity was not regarded as a contradiction or disorder, but as a necessary adaptation for the lineage's continuity. The imposition of colonial rule, with its rigid Victorian gender roles, disrupted these practices, forcing a binary structure onto societies that had functioned without one for millennia.
The Dagaaba: Energetic Gender Systems
Further evidence of non-binary concepts is found among the Dagaaba people of present-day Ghana. In traditional Dagaaba cosmology, gender was understood as a "fluid expression of spiritual energy" rather than a fixed biological trait. Individuals were seen as embodying masculine and/or feminine energies, irrespective of their physical anatomy. Contextual experts on Dagaaba culture note that "gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic".
This energetic understanding of gender enabled a proliferation of identities that Western languages struggle to capture. An anatomically male person with predominantly feminine energy was not "transgender" in the modern Western sense (which implies a movement across a binary), but rather a person whose spirit dictated a specific social and ritual role. These roles were often championed and heralded, rather than marginalized.
The Dagaaba belief system suggests that there were no gender binaries in the pre-colonial era, nor was heterosexuality imposed as the singular norm. Queerness, or what we might retroactively term queerness, was celebrated as a manifestation of spiritual complexity.
The Igbo: Male Daughters, Female Husbands, and the Ogbanje
Perhaps the best-documented example of African gender flexibility comes from the Igbo people of Nigeria, meticulously detailed by anthropologist Ifi Amadiume in her seminal work, Male Daughters, Female Husbands. Amadiume challenges the Western feminist notion that gender oppression is universal, arguing that in pre-colonial Igbo society, gender was separate from biological sex.
The Igbo system permitted "Male Daughters" (Ada), in which daughters could assume the social and political status of sons. This was often done to preserve the family lineage in the absence of a male heir. A "Male Daughter" would inherit property, take titles, and carry out the religious duties of a son. Crucially, this was not a "performance" of maleness, but a recognized social category that carried all the weight and authority of the male gender role.
Similarly, the concept of "Female Husbands" allowed wealthy women to take wives. This practice, known as woman-to-woman marriage, was a social and economic arrangement rather than a necessarily sexual one (though sexual relationships certainly existed within these structures). A woman who assumed the role of "husband" assumed the social role of patriarch, thereby expanding her household and influence. This system effectively dismantled the idea that the role of "husband" was biologically tied to men. It created a space in which power and authority were accessible only to those with the capability and wealth to wield them, regardless of their anatomy.
In contemporary times, the Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi has revitalized the traditional Igbo concept of the ogbanje as a framework for understanding non-binary identity. An ogbanje is a spirit child who appears and disappears, cycling between the worlds of the living and the spirits. Emezi describes the ogbanje as inherently non-binary, as it is non-human or distinct from the human gender system.
"An ogbanje is an Igbo spirit that's born into a human body," Emezi explains, noting that their own gender identity is marked by a "violent aversion toward reproduction" and the biological markers of womanhood.
By claiming ogbanje as a gender identity, Emezi disrupts the Western medical model of transgenderism, offering instead an ontological framework rooted in indigenous African spirituality. This reclamation asserts that Black non-binary people are not "new" or "Westernized," but are walking in the footsteps of ancient spiritual lineages.
The Colonial Erasure
The arrival of European colonisers brought with it a violent enforcement of the gender binary.
Missionaries and colonial administrators viewed African gender flexibility as "pagan" and "disorderly." They imposed laws that criminalized cross-dressing, enforced Christian marriage (which required a male husband and a female wife), and reorganized labor and inheritance systems to favor biological men. This "colonialism of the mind" was a deliberate strategy to break the power of indigenous kinship systems and spiritual authorities.
Historical records from the Portuguese Inquisition, for instance, mention an enslaved African named Antonio who, upon arrival in Portugal from Benin, assumed the female name Vitoria. Vitoria's life serves as an early archival trace of the persistence of gender variance despite displacement and enslavement.
The existence of individuals like Vitoria and the systems of the Dagaaba, Bantu, and Igbo peoples proves that the gender binary is not a natural law but a colonial import that Black people have resisted for centuries.
The Middle Passage: Slavery and the "Ungendering" of Black Bodies
The journey from the shores of Africa to the auction blocks of the Americas was a journey of profound rupture. The Middle Passage did not just transport bodies; it transformed them.
In the theoretical framework of Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers, the institution of chattel slavery involved a process of "ungendering." The enslaved person was stripped of the rights and protections associated with gender in Western society. A Black woman was not treated with the "delicacy" accorded to white women; a Black man was denied the patriarchal authority accorded to white men. Instead, they were reduced to “flesh”—units of labor and production/reproduction.
However, this violence also created a paradoxical space of possibility. Because the "Master's" gender norms were often denied to enslaved people, Black communities were forced to forge their own understandings of kinship, care, and identity. In the hold of the slave ship, where bodies were packed indiscriminately, and on the plantation, where the division of labor often defied gender norms (women ploughed fields, men cared for children in the quarters), the rigid binary began to blur.
Resistance in the Flesh
Resistance to slavery often took forms that we might today recognise as gender-nonconforming. Enslaved women disguised themselves as men to escape to the North, utilizing the freedom of movement usually granted to male laborers. Conversely, male-assigned individuals in resistance communities (such as Maroon colonies) often took on spiritual roles that required the embodiment of feminine energies or the channelling of female deities.
The spiritual traditions that survived the Middle Passage—Vodou, Santería, Candomblé—maintained the gender fluidity of their African roots. In these cosmologies, a male priest could be mounted by a female orisha, embodying her spirit, mannerisms, and power. This ritual possession created a sanctioned space for gender transgression, preserving the knowledge that the body's anatomy does not bind the spirit.
This "spiritual role" is a critical lineage for Black non-binary history, suggesting that the "trans" experience in the Black diaspora has always been linked to the sacred.
Reconstruction History: Frances Thompson and the Roots of Anti-Trans Policing
Following the Civil War and the legal end of slavery, the United States entered the era of Reconstruction. This was a time of immense hope and terrifying violence. As Black people sought to claim their citizenship, the white supremacist state sought new ways to control them. One of the primary tools of this control was the policing of gender.
To be a "citizen" in 19th-century America was to adhere to strict gender roles.
For Black men, this meant claiming the patriarchal authority of the head of household.
For Black women, it meant aspiring to the "cult of domesticity."
However, the reality of Black life and the persistence of non-binary existence often defied these mandates.
The Case of Frances Thompson
One of the most significant and heartbreaking figures of this era is Frances Thompson. Thompson was a formerly enslaved Black woman living in Memphis, Tennessee. She lived her life openly as a woman, though later reports would classify her as a "man" based on her anatomy. In May 1866, white mobs, including police officers, attacked the Black neighborhoods of Memphis in a brutal riot designed to crush Black autonomy.
During the riots, Thompson was sexually assaulted by a group of white men. In a profound act of courage, she testified before a Congressional committee investigating the riots. Her testimony was pivotal; it was one of the first times a Black woman's account of sexual violence was officially recorded and used to shape federal policy. Her words helped galvanize support for the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts.
However, ten years later, Thompson was arrested for "being a man dressed in women's clothes." The conservative press weaponized the discovery of her assigned sex at birth to discredit her earlier testimony. She was mocked, labelled a "freak," and sentenced to the chain gang, where she eventually died.
Thompson's story illustrates the "double bind" of Black non-binary existence in the South. Her trans-ness (to use a modern term) was used to invalidate her Blackness and her suffering. The state's obsession with enforcing the gender binary was directly linked to its desire to undermine Black citizenship.
Thompson is a martyr of Black trans history, a woman whose truth was violent enough to shake the foundations of the post-war South, and whose erasure was a calculated act of political warfare.
Harlem Renaissance & The Blues: Gladys Bentley and Black Gender Variance
As the Great Migration drew millions of Black people from the rural South to the urban North, a new cultural explosion occurred. The Harlem Renaissance and the Blues era of the 1920s and 30s represented a "golden age" for the visibility of Black gender variance. In the cabarets of Harlem and the juke joints of the Delta, the Victorian strictures that bound the white middle class were loosened by the necessities of survival and the creative genius of Black art.
Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger’s Resistance
No figure dominates this landscape quite like Gladys Bentley. A Trinidadian-American blues singer and pianist, Bentley was a star of the Harlem Renaissance who built her career on the open celebration of her masculine identity. At a time when homosexuality was criminalized and gender non-conformity was pathologized, Bentley performed in a signature white tuxedo and top hat. She sang bawdy songs that openly referenced her lovers (women) and challenged the audience's expectations of Black womanhood.
Bentley was what the era called a "bulldagger" or a "male impersonator," but these terms fail to capture the fullness of her identity. She told reporters she was "born different," articulating an innate sense of gender variance that predates modern trans terminology. "I have lived, dressed, acted just like what I am," she asserted, claiming a space between binaries.
Her resistance was not just in her dress, but in her voice. The Blues provided a lyrical space for articulating queer desire. Ma Rainey, known as the "Mother of the Blues," sang in "Prove It On Me Blues": "Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men." This was popular culture as resistance. It normalized same-sex desire and gender non-conformity for Black audiences across the country.
However, the story of Gladys Bentley also carries a warning about the state's power. As the Cold War set in and the "Lavender Scare" (the persecution of LGBTQ people in the government and arts) ramped up in the 1950s, the space for Bentley's gender freedom collapsed. Facing intense pressure, she published an article in Ebony magazine in 1952 titled "I Am A Woman Again." In it, she claimed to have been "cured" of her deviance by taking female hormones and marrying a man. Scholars argue that this was a survival strategy: a public performance of conformity required to escape the crushing weight of McCarthyism.
Bentley's coerced transition back to womanhood is a stark reminder of how Black gender variance has been policed and suppressed by the politics of respectability.
Lucy Hicks Anderson: "I Defy Any Doctor"
While Bentley was performing in Harlem, Lucy Hicks Anderson was living a quiet revolution in Oxnard, California. Born in Waddy, Kentucky, in 1886, Anderson insisted from a young age that she was a girl. In a remarkable turn of events for the time, a local doctor advised her mother to raise her as such. Anderson lived her entire adult life as a woman, marrying twice and becoming a respected socialite and chef/hostess in her community.
Her trouble began in 1945 when she was arrested and tried for perjury for signing a marriage license as a woman. Her defence in court stands as one of the most powerful affirmations of trans identity in American history. She told the court: "I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just like what I am, a woman".
Despite her defiance, Anderson was convicted, and her husband was stripped of his military pension because the government refused to recognize their marriage. Anderson's life and legal battle highlight that Black trans people were fighting for recognition and rights decades before the term "transgender" was coined.
Her roots in Kentucky also remind us that this is not merely a coastal or urban history but also a Southern one.
Civil Rights Erasure: Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, and Respectability Politics
The mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement is often remembered through the lens of the Black Church and the charismatic male leader. While this era achieved monumental legal and social victories, it also marked a period of strategic erasure for Black queer and non-binary people. Facing the violent gaze of white supremacy, many Black leaders adopted a "Politics of Respectability." The logic was that to be deemed worthy of rights, Black people had to be unimpeachable in their morality, family structures, and gender presentation. This strategy required the silencing of those who did not fit the mould.
Pauli Murray: The Saint of the In-Between
Pauli Murray is perhaps the most intellectually significant non-binary figure of the 20th century, though history has primarily remembered them as a woman. A lawyer, poet, priest, and activist, Murray's legal theories laid the groundwork for the Brown v. Board of Education decision and were later used by Ruth Bader Ginsburg to argue for gender equality.
Privately, however, Murray fought a lifelong battle with gender. In letters to doctors, Murray described an "inverted sex instinct" and repeatedly requested testosterone therapy, believing they were a man trapped in a woman's body. "I don't know whether I'm right or whether society... is right," Murray wrote. "I only know how I feel and what makes me happy". Denied medical transition by the gatekeepers of the time, Murray lived in the "in-between."
It was precisely this location at the intersection of oppressions—unable to fully claim male privilege, yet alienated from traditional womanhood—that allowed Murray to see the law so clearly. Murray coined the term "Jane Crow" to describe the specific oppression of Black women, a precursor to the concept of intersectionality. Murray's life is a testament to the idea that non-binary people have often been the architects of liberation, even when their own identities were unnamed.
Bayard Rustin: The Architect in the Shadows
Bayard Rustin, the organizational genius behind the 1963 March on Washington, was an out gay man. While not identified as trans, Rustin was criminalized for "lewd vagrancy" (a standard charge for queer people) and was repeatedly forced into the background of the movement he helped build. Other Black leaders, fearing that Rustin's "perversion" would be used to discredit the movement, silenced him. Rustin's erasure is a painful example of how the politics of respectability fractured the Black freedom struggle, leaving its queer architects vulnerable to state violence without the protection of the community they served.
The Black Church and the "Sissy"
The Black Church, the spiritual engine of the movement, played a complex role. On one hand, it was a fortress against racism. On the other hand, it often enforced rigid gender roles. Yet, within the church, gender variance was usually an "open secret." The "sissy" in the choir and the masculine woman on the usher board were present and essential, their labor fueling the church, even if their identities were never spoken from the pulpit. This "don't ask, don't tell" dynamic provided a degree of shelter but came at the cost of proper recognition.
The Stonewall Uprising: Marsha P. Johnson and the Black Trans Roots of Pride
The mainstream narrative of the Gay Rights Movement often centres on the experiences of white, cisgender gay men in New York and San Francisco. However, the catalyst for the modern movement, the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, was sparked and sustained by Black and Brown trans women, drag queens, and butch lesbians. These were the people who had the least to lose and the most to fight for.
Stormé DeLarverie: The Spark
Stormé DeLarverie is often credited with throwing the punch that initiated the Stonewall uprising. A Black, butch lesbian (sometimes identified as a drag king) from New Orleans, DeLarverie was a performer in the Jewel Box Revue, the first racially integrated drag troupe in America. Born to a white father and a Black mother, DeLarverie carried the complexity of Southern racial identity into the streets of Greenwich Village.
Known as the "Guardian of the Village," DeLarverie patrolled the streets with a registered gun, protecting "baby gays" from violence. On the night of the Stonewall raid, as police dragged her toward a paddy wagon, she fought back, shouting to the crowd of bystanders: "Why don't you guys do something?" That question ignited the powder keg.
DeLarverie's role reminds us that the movement was birthed in physical resistance to police brutality, led by a Black gender-nonconforming Southerner.
Marsha P. Johnson and STAR
Marsha P. Johnson, a self-identified "drag queen" (a term that functioned as an umbrella for trans women at the time), was the "saint of Christopher Street." Johnson was poor, Black, and often homeless. Yet, she was known for her boundless generosity and joy. When asked about her gender, she famously said the "P" in her name stood for "Pay It No Mind", used as a radical dismissal of the binary that confused and enraged the authorities.
Together with Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970. STAR was arguably the first modern organization led by trans women of color for trans women of color. They established a STAR House, a shelter for homeless queer youth, which they funded through their own sex work. This was an early form of transformative justice and mutual aid in building systems of care, in which the state provided only cages.
Johnson's legacy is one of "survival pending revolution." She understood that liberation was not just about laws, but about housing, food, and protecting one another from the police. Yet, in the years following Stonewall, the white-dominated Gay Liberation Front marginalised Johnson, viewing her as a liability to their assimilationist goals. She was banned from leading the 1973 Pride march and told to walk in the back, which was a straightforward segregationist tactic replicated within the queer movement.
Black Lives Matter & Non-Binary Leadership: From Janaya Khan to Da'Shaun Harrison
The modern movement for Black lives is inherently queer and non-binary. This is not an accident, but a deliberate correction of the exclusions of the Civil Rights era. The founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, explicitly centred the lives of those on the margins.
The Queer Roots of BLM
Alicia Garza wrote in the movement's early days: "Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum". This statement was a radical departure from the respectability politics of the past. It asserted that no Black life is disposable, and that the most marginalized, Black trans women, are often the primary targets of state violence.
Janaya Future Khan: Rewriting the Script
Janaya Future Khan, a co-founder of BLM Toronto and an international ambassador for the movement, represents the new face of Black non-binary leadership. Khan, who is Black, queer, and non-binary, uses the framework of Afrofuturism to describe their activism. Khan argues that the gender binary is a colonial script, and that to be Black and non-binary is to be a "futurist"—someone living a reality that the current world is not yet built to sustain.
"Everybody is born into a script they didn't write for themselves," Khan says. "But activists defy that script to rewrite the narrative". Khan’s leadership has focused on direct action, such as the sit-in at Pride Toronto to demand the removal of police floats, reconnecting the Pride movement to its anti-police roots.
Da'Shaun Harrison: Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
The theorist Da'Shaun Harrison has expanded the discourse of non-binary identity to include a critical analysis of fatness. In their work Belly of the Beast, Harrison argues that "anti-fatness is anti-Blackness." They demonstrate how the policing of fat bodies is inextricable from the policing of Black gender. The "obesity epidemic" rhetoric, Harrison argues, is a way for the state to pathologize Black bodies that refuse to conform to white standards of size and health. For fat, Black, non-binary people, the struggle is against a "desirability politics" that grants humanity only to those who are thin, cisgender, and proximal to whiteness.
Southern Black Queer History: Organizing in the Deep South
The American South is often caricatured as a monolith of conservatism, a place from which queer people must flee to find freedom. This narrative erases the vibrant, resilient, and distinctively Southern Black queer communities that have always existed. The South is the homeland of Black resistance, and for Black non-binary people, staying and fighting is a radical act.
Trans in the Deep South
Organizations such as the Knights and Orchids Society (TKO) in Alabama, led by TC Caldwell, are rewriting the narrative of Southern trans existence. TKO provides culturally competent healthcare, legal support, and mutual aid to Black trans and gender-nonconforming people in rural Alabama. This work is undertaken in the face of immense hostility, yet it thrives by drawing on the deep networks of care that characterize Southern Black communities.
Southerners On New Ground (SONG)
Southerners On New Ground (SONG), founded in 1993, is a regional organization that connects race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality. SONG’s organising strategy is rooted in "Southern hospitality," not the sanitized “hospitality” sold in tourist brochures, but in a radical hospitality that welcomes the outcast. They organize against cash bail and immigrant detention, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the primary enforcer of gender and racial hierarchies in the South.
SONG's "Free From Fear" campaigns use the language of "kinship" and "breaking bread" to build coalitions between Black, Brown, and rural white working-class communities. They argue that the South is not a lost cause, but a frontline. "As the South goes, so goes the nation," remains a guiding principle. To be Black, non-binary, and Southern is to stand at the intersection of the nation's most violent history and its most potent possibilities for redemption.
Black Trans Theory: Transformative Justice, Abolition, and Emergent Strategy
Black non-binary and trans thinkers are currently generating some of the most vital political theories of the 21st century. This work moves beyond "inclusion" and asks how we might fundamentally reshape society.
Transformative Justice (TJ)
Transformative Justice is a framework that seeks to address harm without relying on the state (e.g., police and prisons). It emerged from communities—queer, trans, survivors of color—who could not call 911 without risking their own lives.
Mia Mingus, a writer and educator on disability justice and TJ, has been instrumental in defining this field. Mingus connects the abolition of the gender binary to the abolition of "abled supremacy." She coined the term "access intimacy" to describe the feeling of being understood and accommodated without having to explain or apologize for one's needs.
For non-binary people, who often have to explain their existence repeatedly, TJ offers a model of community accountability in which "access" to care and safety is a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden.
Emergent Strategy
adrienne maree brown, a Black non-binary/gender-fluid author (she/they), codified Emergent Strategy—a philosophy of organizing based on the adaptive, resilient patterns of nature (biomimicry). brown argues that "how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale." If our interpersonal movements are toxic and hierarchical, they cannot give rise to a liberated society.
brown also champions "Pleasure Activism," asserting that for Black people whose bodies have historically been sites of labor and trauma, feeling good is a political act. Reclaiming pleasure, joy, and erotic autonomy is essential to the work of liberation. This framework offers a counter-narrative to the "struggle" mentality, suggesting that joy is the fuel that sustains revolution.
Black Non-Binary Artists: Afrofuturism in Literature and Poetry
Cultural production is the space where the "New" world is imagined before it can be built. Black non-binary artists are currently at the vanguard of this imaginative work.
Porsha Olayiwola and Afrofuturist Poetry
Porsha Olayiwola, the Poet Laureate of Boston and a Black non-binary lesbian, uses poetry to create "speculative futures." Her collection I Shimmer Sometimes, Too asks a fundamental question: "What is the function of the Black body if not to be a joyous thing?" Olayiwola's work refuses the inevitability of Black death, using the lyric form to carve out spaces of breath and impossible survival.
Danez Smith: The Body as Sanctuary
Danez Smith, a Black, non-binary, HIV-positive poet, writes viscerally about the sanctity of the Black male-assigned body. In their National Book Award-finalist collection Don't Call Us Dead, Smith imagines an afterlife—a "summer, somewhere"—where Black boys killed by police are safe, alive, and free to love one another. Smith's work challenges readers to mourn the living as well as the dead and to recognize the "little cops" that live in our own veins.
Akwaeke Emezi: Ontological Shift
Akwaeke Emezi is reshaping the literary landscape by refusing the constraints of Western realism. In novels like Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, Emezi centres the ogbanje experience. Emezi suggests that Black non-binary people are not "confused" or "transitioning" in a linear, medical sense, but are embodying ancient, complex spiritual realities. By narrating from the perspective of the spirit, Emezi forces the reader to accept a non-binary ontology as the baseline of reality.
Allyship Guide: How White People Can Support Black Trans Communities
For the white ally, engaging with this history requires a delicate balance. It is not your role to "teach" Black people their history, but to use your privilege to amplify it, to fund it, and to protect the people living it.
The Pitfalls of Good Intentions
The White Savior: Avoid narratives that position white people as the "rescuers" of Black trans people. Black people have been rescuing themselves for centuries.
Whitesplaining: Do not assume you have the "correct" academic language that Black folks on the ground lack. As the snippet on "Southern Hospitality" notes, sometimes the most radical act is to listen and to be a guest in a space you do not own.
Fair-Weather Allyship: Support must be consistent, not just when a hashtag is trending. It involves "unlearning" racism daily and accepting that you will make mistakes.
Best Practices for Amplification
Redistribute Resources: The most effective allyship is material. Donate to Black trans-led organizations like TKO (Alabama), SONG (Regional), TGIJP (California/National), and The Okra Project.
Cede the Floor: When discussing these topics, quote Black thinkers directly. Use their names. Buy their books. Ensure they are paid for their labor.
Intervene: Use your social capital and physical safety to intervene in moments of state violence or discrimination. As the SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) guidelines suggest, organize other white people so that Black people don't have to.
Respect the South: Challenge the narrative that the South is backward. Recognize it as the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement and the current frontline of queer liberation.
| Name | Era/Movement | Primary Contribution | Key Identity Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antonio/Vitoria | Pre-Colonial / 1600s | Early archival evidence of trans-feminine existence in the Diaspora. | Enslaved, Benin/Portugal |
| Frances Thompson | Reconstruction (1866) | Testified on Memphis Riots; exposed intersection of race/trans-misogyny. | Formerly Enslaved, Trans Woman |
| Gladys Bentley | Harlem Renaissance | Pioneered butch/masculine visibility; challenged "lady" norms. | Butch, Male Impersonator, Blues Singer |
| Lucy Hicks Anderson | Early 20th Century | Defended trans identity in court ("I defy any doctor"). | Socialite, Chef, Trans Woman |
| Pauli Murray | Civil Rights | Legal theory of Intersectionality (Jane Crow); Brown v. Board. | Non-binary (private), Priest, Lawyer |
| Bayard Rustin | Civil Rights | Organized March on Washington; pacifist strategy. | Gay, Quaker, "Sissy" (derogatory reclamation) |
| Marsha P. Johnson | Stonewall Era | Co-founded STAR; mother of trans liberation movement. | Drag Queen, Trans Woman, Sex Worker |
| Stormé DeLarverie | Stonewall Era | Sparked Stonewall Uprising; "Guardian of the Village." | Butch Lesbian, Drag King, Mixed-race |
| Miss Major | Prison Reform Era | TGIJP; Anti-carceral activism for trans women. | Black Trans Woman, Attica Survivor |
| Alicia Garza | Modern / BLM | Co-founded BLM; centered queer/trans voices in the movement. | Queer Black Woman |
| Janaya Khan | Modern / BLM | International Ambassador; Afrofuturist activism against police. | Non-binary, Black, Queer |
| Akwaeke Emezi | Contemporary Lit | Revitalized Ogbanje ontology; challenged Western literary realism. | Ogbanje, Non-binary, Trans |
| Da'Shaun Harrison | Contemporary Theory | Theorized "Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness"; desirability politics. | Fat, Black, Trans, Non-binary |
| Porsha Olayiwola | Contemporary Art | Afrofuturist poetry; Poet Laureate of Boston. | Black, Non-binary, Lesbian |
The Future of Black Gender Variance
The history of Black non-binary existence is not a sidebar to Black History; it is its spine. It is the story of how a people survived the attempt to turn them into "flesh" and emerged as spirits. From the ogbanje to the drag ball, from the hush harbor to the Black Lives Matter protest, the rejection of the colonial binary has always been a rejection of slavery itself.
This lineage teaches us that the binary is a cage. It teaches us that freedom is not a destination, but a practice—a "practice of feeling good," of "leaving evidence," of "paying it no mind."
For the Black reader, know that your variance is your inheritance. You are the wildest dream of ancestors who had to hide their names.
For the ally, know that your freedom is bound up in theirs.
As Da'Shaun Harrison writes, we are working toward a world where "the caged bird is not freed from its cage; in that place, the cage never existed".
That is the work. That is the history. That is the future.
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