TransActive III: Advocating for Trans People if Not Trans
Filed by dentedbluemercedes
August 16, 2010

http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/transactive-iii-advocating-for-trans-people-if-not-trans/

(Part three of a series on trans advocacy.  Part one spoke about changing the narrative used to describe trans people, and part two looked at expectations.)

In order to be an advocate for any group that you are not a member of and that you don't have the intimate knowledge of from life experience, a person really has to understand the damage caused by the colonial mentality in order to start seeing where the boundaries are.

Colonial practices in history are fairly well understood, settling and subjugation, the taking of land and resources and rule from a distance that occurred.  The thought processes that people used to rationalize and justify those practices continue to shape our society today, in ways that we are often blind to.  Modern colonialism assumes that there is a right and a wrong, and that the right has a preordained blessing and / or responsibility to (at worst) control and exploit the wrong — or to (at best) rule and "protect" (including from themselves) the wrong.