The Gender Binary Was Never Sacred. Colonialism Made It That Way.
The gender binary isn't ancient wisdom. It's a colonial import. Religion was just the delivery mechanism.
If you're non-binary and have ever felt like spirituality wasn't made for you, that your identity and any sense of the sacred are somehow incompatible, that feeling has a source. It was constructed, exported, and enforced by the same colonial project that decided the world made more sense, sorted into two neat columns. And it worked well enough that even people it actively harmed started to believe it was just how things had always been.
It wasn't.
Gender-diverse people aren't recent arrivals asking institutions to modernise. We are in the oldest spiritual stories humans have. The erasure is recent. The presence is ancient. And understanding that distinction matters, not as a comfort, but as a correction to a historical record that got deliberately rewritten.
The Gender Binary Is the Newcomer, Not Us
Before European colonisation swept through the Pacific, the Americas, and beyond, gender diversity wasn't a debate. In many cultures, it was specifically understood as a spiritual attribute that marked a person as having a particular kind of access to the sacred.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the word takatāpui existed in te reo Māori before any missionary arrived to record it. First documented in 1832 as "an intimate companion of the same sex," it turns up embedded in pre-colonial stories, songs, and carvings. Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere describes gender identity in te ao Māori as part of wairua, not a social category imposed from outside, but something closer to the soul itself. That understanding didn't survive colonisation intact. Carvings were destroyed or reinterpreted. Translators cleaned up songs (waiata)s. Knowledge was deliberately hidden by Māori, protecting their communities from what they could see colonial violence doing to anything it didn't recognise.
The same story repeats globally. Across more than 150 recorded pre-colonial Indigenous nations in North America, gender diversity was documented frequently with specific ceremonial and spiritual roles attached. Around two-thirds of the 200 recorded Indigenous languages had words for people who were neither men nor women. Christian missionaries and boarding schools then spent generations systematically punishing all of it. Most of that vocabulary doesn't survive in daily use. That's not cultural change over time. That's policy.
Then there's Asushunamir, from an ancient Mesopotamian myth, created specifically to be neither male nor female because the underworld's rules applied only to binary bodies. Or Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, who spent roughly a thousand years gradually shifting from male to androgynous to female as Buddhism spread through China, because Buddhist philosophy already held that enlightened beings transcend bodily categories entirely.
The rigid, policed, pick-a-column version of gender didn't exist before colonialism arrived to install it. It's just what the record shows.
But Let's Not Romanticise the Past Either
None of this means pre-colonial societies were queer utopias. They weren't, and claiming otherwise is its own kind of historical revisionism.
Acceptance of gender diversity varied enormously between cultures, communities, and time periods. Even Asushunamir's myth includes a curse in which Ereshkigal condemns them to live on the edges of society, in the same breath as Ishtar's blessing. The reverence and the marginalisation coexisted. That's worth sitting with rather than editing out for a cleaner narrative.
Two-Spirit identity is specifically Indigenous and not a universal term for anyone who doesn't fit the binary. Collapsing diverse traditions across hundreds of distinct nations into "Indigenous people were cool with it" is just colonialism with better intentions, replacing one flattened story with another. Some communities had defined ceremonial roles for gender-diverse people. Others were more ambiguous. The historical record is fragmentary, partly because so much was actively destroyed, which means we should be honest about what we know versus what we're inferring.
Alternative spiritual spaces aren't automatically safer either. Many practices that market themselves as ancient or earth-based, such as certain forms of Wicca, neo-tantra, and some astrological traditions, still centre a "divine masculine" and "divine feminine" as fixed opposite poles. Different aesthetic, same binary. Worth knowing before you walk in expecting otherwise.
What the evidence does consistently show is this: the idea that rigid gender binaries are natural, universal, or divinely ordained is false. That's the actual claim. Not that everything was perfect before colonialism, but that the specific thing causing harm now was built deliberately, recently, and in service of a particular political project.
Reclamation Isn't Radical. It's Just Accurate.
The cultural conversation around queer spirituality tends to frame gender-diverse people as asking religion to evolve, to catch up, expand, and modernise. That framing concedes too much. It positions the colonial binary as the default and queerness as the newcomer requesting accommodation.
The more accurate frame is the correction. We're not asking to be included in a tradition that was always straight and binary. We're pointing out that the tradition was never exclusively about those things, and that the version currently being defended as timeless and sacred is largely a 16th- to 19th-century construction.
The data reflects this in the present tense. According to Pew Research, only 48% of LGBTQ+ adults in the US identify with a religion, compared to 73% of non-LGBTQ+ adults. But 80% of LGBTQ+ adults believe people have a soul or spirit, and nearly 70% believe in something beyond the physical world. Queer people aren't leaving the sacred. They're leaving institutions that weaponised it. Those are different things.
What you do with that is genuinely up to you. Organised religion, a solo practice, something built from scratch with people you trust, or nothing formal at all, none of those is the wrong answer.
But the larger point holds regardless: the history is ours. The lineage is real. And the version of spirituality that says you don't belong in it is, historically speaking, the odd one out.
If the gender binary was always a colonial construction, not a spiritual truth, does that change how you relate to your own sense of the sacred? Or has the institutional damage made the whole conversation feel irrelevant? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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