Binary sex is both function and feature of white supremacy. That is not to say that other cultures did not have their own ideas about gender and what constitutes a man or a woman. Nor is it to deny these may have been oppressive in their own right. It is to say that the West imposed its own definitions as a uniform measure, and, unsurprisingly, everyone else came up short. This is why Western representations of Arab and Asian men over the centuries have seemed to contain baffling contradictions—simultaneously depicting them as monstrous and violent and emasculated and androgynous.
