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Category talk:Hijra (South Asia) people

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Colonial view?[edit]

@User:Place Clichy, I'm not certain that categorizing hijra people as "non-binary" is suitable and may in fact reflect a Western, colonizing subsumation of non-Western identities into a non-binary catch-all. I think the categories for this and other categories (kathoey, two-spirit, etc.) need reconsideration. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 10:01, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt that British colonizers of India cared much about wether or not the anachronic term of "non-binary" applied to Hijras. The topic here is the presentation of Category:People by gender. It is worth remembering that this is a category for people, not for articles about gender identities. It is currently mostly organized between Category:Men, Category:Women, Category:People with non-binary gender identities, Category:Intersex and Category:Transgender and transsexual people‎. BTW, notice the plural in People with non-binary gender identities. There are plenty of identities which fall outside of the binary, and this category is for them. It does not assume to be restricted to the people who would use the exact word of non-binary to describe their own exact gender identity (which is I guess what you mean by words like Western, subsumation and colonizing, although the connection is unclear). It seems to be instead for people whose identity is not binary, rather than is non-binary. From their definition, hijra, kathoey, two-spirit, third-gender people for instance would definitely belong there. There has been discussions on mentioning these identities among non-binary identities on Talk:List of people with non-binary gender identities, and also at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 July 19#Category:Genderqueer people, which led to the creation of this category. One of the main arguments was that while genderqueer is a specific identity (call it Western colonial if you want), non-binary is an umbrella term. Anyway, in terms of Wikipedia categories I think that these identities will be better organized in a common subcategory (whatever its name is) rather, than for instance, at the root of Category:People by gender. Place Clichy (talk) 15:25, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]