Guna Yala: The Islands Where Women Make the Rules

Patriarchal societies educate men to think and act in a masculine way and women to think and act in a feminine way, punishing anyone who dares cross those boundaries.

Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for women’s role in the evolution of…

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I imagine there have been periods in my ancestry when gender was held very differently, maybe didn’t matter so much, or was less binary. And I imagine there will be a future with a multitude of widely known and understood genders. In this moment, I get to be part of the expansion of possible genders that can live and love safely on this planet.

Since myths, rather than biology, define the roles, rights and duties of men and women, the meaning of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ have varied immensely from one society to another.

Remember that many of the creation myths from our earlier ancestors—the indigenous, pre-colonized peoples from cultures around the world—painted a different picture of the origin of women and men, and their worth and roles. In many of those stories, neither sex was created to dominate the other. Both men and women shared the responsibility to help