A line from Bernd Leygraf, writing on cultural sensitivity in therapy and psychosexual work in particular, has stayed with me for weeks. When our frameworks assume that sex and gender exist as fixed categories, he says, we end up marginalising the clients whose cultures never carved things up that way in the first place. I keep turning it over. It’s true of the work I do with clients, and it’s also pointing at something much bigger than that.
The usual way we’re handed this subject is that there’s a settled human reality, two sexes, and then a set of newer ideas pressing against it. That story has the history backwards. The two-box model, sex fixed into male and female and nothing else, passed off as the plain fact of the matter, is not the timeless default it presents itself as. In a great many places it arrived on a ship.
The fixing of sex is a colonial artefact
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí makes this argument about the Yoruba, and once you’ve read it you can’t unsee it. Before colonial administration, she shows, Yoruba social life wasn’t organised around gender the way European life was. Seniority mattered far more than whether you were male or female, and “woman” as a category with a fixed meaning and a fixed set of consequences was in large part a colonial creation, brought in and imposed rather than found already there. María Lugones takes the same thread further and calls it the coloniality of gender: the modern gender system, the neat binary with its hierarchy built in, was part of the apparatus of conquest, not a neutral description that conquest happened to carry along with it.
You can hold whatever view you like about sex and biology and still take the historical point seriously. The claim isn’t that bodies don’t differ. It’s that the particular way one culture sorted those bodies, two categories, ranked, treated as immutable, and made to carry the weight of law and money and kinship, got exported as the human default and pressed onto societies that had their own, often more plural, ways of understanding all of it. What existed first was stripped out, and then the thing that replaced it was called nature.
Not just over there
It would be comfortable to leave this as something done to other people somewhere else. It isn’t. Ashis Nandy’s point in The Intimate Enemy is that colonialism deforms the coloniser as much as the colonised. The machine that narrows everyone runs in the metropole too, on its own people. The narrow box marked “man,” the one with the acceptable range of feeling and the acceptable things to want, was imposed here as surely as anywhere, and it was imposed on me.
I wrote a few years ago about my own father, near the end of his life, telling me he’d always known I was gay. I’m not gay, as it happens; I’ve been with the same woman for forty years. But for him I didn’t fit cleanly enough inside the straight-male stereotype, so there had to be another box to put me in. That’s the whole mechanism in one small domestic moment. A range of ways of being a person gets narrowed to a few permitted shapes, and anything that doesn’t fit has to be reassigned somewhere, because the one thing that isn’t allowed is to simply be various.
There’s a name for the assumption underneath all of this. Psychology has built much of its picture of the human being out of a very particular sample: Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic, the people researchers could most easily get hold of, who turn out to be some of the least representative humans on the planet. WEIRD, the acronym goes. We took one unusual slice of humanity, called it “people,” and built the general theory on it. Fixed binary sex is a piece of exactly that move: a local arrangement mistaken for, and then enforced as, the universal.
What’s being fixed, right now
This isn’t an old argument I’m dusting off. The fixing is happening in law as I write. In the United States, one of the first executive orders of the current administration, signed in January 2025, declared it federal policy to recognise two sexes only, male and female, described as immutable and set at conception, and required passports, visas and other federal documents to record the holder’s sex as assigned at birth, doing away with the marker that intersex and non-binary people had been able to use. In the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court ruled in April 2025, in For Women Scotland, that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act mean biological sex, so that a trans woman holding a gender recognition certificate is not a woman for the purposes of that Act.
I’m not going to pretend these are simple, or that reasonable people don’t hold hard and sincere positions on the questions of fairness and safety tangled up in them. My point is narrower, and I think harder to argue with. Both are acts of fixing: the state reaching in to make sex two things, immutable and legally enforced, settling by decree what a great deal of human history, and a fair amount of the present, treats as more various than that. That reach is the colonial habit turned inward, working on its own population.
A trap worth naming
One thing needs naming here, because it borrows this language and turns it inside out. Some of the loudest “pro-family” voices now describe LGBT identity itself as the foreign import, the decadent Western thing being pushed on the rest of the world, and call that decolonising. It rewrites the history. The anti-sodomy laws that criminalised same-sex life across large parts of the globe were themselves colonial exports, written in London and enforced by empire, and many of the countries still living with them are living with our old legislation. So when I say the fixing of sex is a colonial artefact, I mean the fixing, the two-box enforcement, not the human variety it was imposed on top of.
Against one particular sold as universal
I want to be precise about what I’m objecting to, because it isn’t norms. Every culture has them, mine included, and a therapy that pretended otherwise would be no use to anyone. What I’m objecting to is one culture’s particular arrangement being dressed up as the neutral human baseline and exported as truth, with everything else recast as deviation from it.
There’s a better word for what I’d put in its place, and it comes from the Zapatistas by way of the decolonial writers: pluriversality. A world in which many worlds fit. Not a flattening where nothing means anything and everyone’s a bit fluid really, which is just the same universalism in looser clothes, but an actual plurality, room for more than one way of being a person to be real at once.
And I can’t make this argument about everyone else and leave my own trade out of it. The relational therapy I practise is itself a Western artefact, carrying its own picture of the bounded, self-disclosing individual as the model human. Even the small assessments I make, deciding whether someone’s “ready,” whether the work is workable on my terms, are a version of the same gesture scaled down to one consulting room: a threshold, set by me, about whose way of being counts as available to the work. That’s an uncomfortable thing to notice about my own practice, and it’s where I want to take this next.
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