The White gender binary has been imposed onto non-Western people via continuing processes of either direct or indirect colonisation. While many pre-colonial societies surely did not approve of gender variance, in many pre-colonial societies however, gender was not binary, and there are numerous documented examples of gender variance and gender nonconformity. In many pre-colonial societies, individuals who lived outside of the binary as a “third sex” or “third gender” were often considered sacred and revered by the community, such as the Hijras of India, the Mahu of Hawaii and Tahiti, or the Two Spirit people of the “Americas”. Hijras and Two Spirit people now face demonisation. Gender for the Dagaaba tribe of Ghana, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast was assigned based on “energy”, not anatomy. Some communities also continue to recognise the existence of five genders, such as the Bugis people of Indonesia.

It is my nature to fight as soon as I see wrongs to be made right. So after I read H.G. Wells and Marx and learned what I did, I joined a Socialist branch. I made up my mind to do something. And the best thing seemed to join a fighting party and help their propaganda. That was four years ago. I have been an [IWW Syndicalist] since.

I became an IWW because I found out that the Socialist party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for the party to keep its revolutionary character so long as it occupies a place under the government and seeks office under it. The government does not stand for interests the Socialist party is supposed to represent.

The true task is to unite and organize all workers on an economic basis, and it is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves, who must grow strong. Nothing can be gained by political action. That is why I became an IWW.

Liberalism as a whole has a deadly enemy, an invincible opposite, as God has the devil: by the side of man stands always the un-man [Unmensch], the individual, the egoist. State, society, humanity, do not master this devil.

what concept is the highest to the state? Doubtless that of being a really human society, a society in which every one who is really a man, that is, not an un-man, can obtain admission as a member. Let a state's tolerance go ever so far, toward an un-man and toward what is inhuman it ceases. And yet this ‘un-man’ is a man, yet the ‘inhuman’ itself is something human, yes, possible only to a man, not to any beast; it is, in fact, something ‘possible to man’. But, although every un-man is a man, yet the state excludes him; it locks him up, or transforms him from an inhabitant of the state into an inhabitant of the prison (inhabitant of the lunatic asylum or hospital, according to communism).

To say in blunt words what an un-man is is not particularly hard: it is a man who does not correspond to the concept man, as the inhuman is something human which is not conformed to the concept of the human. Logic calls this a ‘self-contradictory judgement’. Would it be permissible for one to pronounce this judgement, that one can be a man without being a man, if he did not admit the hypothesis that the concept of man can be separated from the existence, the essence from the appearance?