Title: You Can’t Dismantle the Master’s House by Repainting It Rainbow
Welcome to Pride Month. For those of us who aren’t here to be palatable, who aren’t trying to be digestible to systems that have always depended on our erasure, let’s start with this: we’re not here to make binary thinkers comfortable. We’re not here to translate ourselves back into a framework designed to control us. We’re not softening the truth, and we’re not here to play respectability politics with people who can’t distinguish between lived experience and linguistic compliance.
Let’s call it out clearly: binary thinkers rely on language as a tool of control. They confuse words with reality. They see deviation from system-approved definitions as personal attacks. And when they occupy queer spaces, they don’t bring liberation, they bring rulebooks. Identity becomes a script to perform, not a life to embody.
What’s worse is when they enforce this framework under the guise of inclusivity. “Say it this way.” “Identify like this.” “Use these terms or you’re erasing someone.” No. What you’re doing is making personal truth subordinate to collective fear. You’re not breaking binaries, you’re upholding them with prettier grammar.
We’ve been sold a lie that language is liberation. But most of modern language, especially around gender, was built within colonial, patriarchal, white-supremacist logics. The current gender system isn’t neutral, it was artificially constructed and violently maintained to split people based on perceived sex, then shame and condition them into two artificial social castes: man or woman. Not for self-understanding, but for economic productivity and domestic control.
There’s no way to play with the current gender system and not also be touching the rules of the game that uphold the power dynamic. You can’t “identify” your way out of that structure while still insisting others recognize and validate your role within it. Gender isn’t just a costume, it’s a governance technology, built by those with intentions of control.
What’s more insidious is how the binary system erases identity through accessibility. It rewards only those who can participate in its sanctioned expressions, those with the language fluency, social standing, and systemic approval to “perform” their identity correctly. This doesn’t validate queerness. It filters it. It sanitizes what’s raw, feral, and outside the lines. It leaves behind those who are too poor, too neurodivergent, too disabled, too complex, or too nonconforming to fit into the binary’s curated image of queerness. The result? A curated caste of “valid” queers, and a growing graveyard of the erased.
This is a core tool of control. It doesn’t just divide us, it edits us. It programs us to self-abandon in order to be seen. And that’s not liberation, it’s assimilation with better branding.
This is why we say: Choose yourself & your inner knowing. Not because we don’t care about people, but because we care about truth more than we care about comfort. There is no liberation in playing the same game under a different flag. If you want out of the gender binary, you also have to let go of the tools used to enforce it: language control, identity hierarchy, and shame-based compliance.
For those of us who want to build something else, a reality not based on categories, coercion, or performance, let’s create a new game. One where embodiment leads, not language. Where curiosity replaces conformity. Where we live and name from the inside out, not the outside in.
We don’t need to be legible to systems that were never built for us. We don’t need to be understood by people who only know how to enforce. We don’t need to be nice about it.
We need to be free.
And freedom starts with walking away from the script entirely.
& listening to the inner guidance that is not mad at you for complying with the systems at large, but probably has a different message for you.
