The Last Person Before Gender, the Fractured One, and the First Child of the Next World

A Speculative Reflection on Time, Gender, and the Colonial Imposition of Identity

Gender was not always real. It was imposed, made into law, turned into a cage. But what was created can be unmade. There was a time before gender—there will be a time after. We are the ones meant to carve the path between them.

Introduction: The Weight of a Stolen Future

Would we, the colonised, even know what a future might look like? Not a future carved out of the ruins of empire, where survival masquerades as freedom, but a world untouched by the forces that have shaped our bodies, our identities, and even our sense of time? The weight of colonialism does not just linger in the past—it is woven into the present, into the very way we conceive of ourselves, into the names we are given and the categories we are forced into. Gender, as we know it, was not always here. It was not always a system of control. It was not always a rigid binary dividing people into fixed roles. It was made into this—by the coloniser, by the patriarch, by the systems that require submission to function.

There was a time before gender was a weapon. There was a time when people moved through life without needing to prove who they were, without having to negotiate their existence against a world that demands compliance. But that time is gone, overwritten by the colonial order, by the demand that all things must be classified, sorted, placed in opposition to one another. There was once a person who lived before this was true. The last person before gender. She did not call herself a woman. She did not call herself anything at all, because there was no need. She simply was. She lived in a world where identity was shaped by age, by kinship, by role—where people became, transformed, moved through life as whole beings, not as halves of a binary, not as bodies defined by opposition to something else. But she is standing at the edge of that world now, and the fissures have begun to form. The white men have arrived with their books and their rules, and soon, everything will be changed.

And then there is me, caught in the nightmare reality of the present, where gender has become something you must prove, something you must fight for, something you must fit into - properly - to be recognised at all. I have never known a world where I was simply allowed to be. I have spent my life explaining myself, justifying myself, shrinking myself into what is tolerable to those with power over me. I do not know what it means to exist outside of gender, because it has been built into the fabric of my existence. And yet, I know that it was not always this way. I know that time itself has been stolen from us, that the natural cycle of life has been rewritten into something fixed and rigid. What would it mean to transition in a world that never imposed gender to begin with? What would it mean to grow without the knowledge that you must fight for every inch of your identity? I cannot imagine it, but I long for it.

And then there is her, the first child of the next world, born into a place where gender has never held power, where people move through life freely, where transformation is not policed or punished. She does not understand why I suffer. She does not understand why I must prove myself to doctors, to bureaucrats, to neighbours, to colleagues. She does not understand what it means to be tolerated instead of belonging. She has never had to choose. She has never been made to shrink. In her world, people are simply allowed to be, to move through cycles of life without being defined by what phase they are in. She asks me questions I cannot answer. What do you mean they made you choose? What do you mean they built entire hierarchies around a single phase of being? What do you mean they controlled people’s lives based on something that could change? I have no response. I cannot explain it to her, because it does not make sense. It never did.

Between these voices, between the last person before gender and the first child of the next world, I stand in the in-between. The past is lost to me. The future is too distant to reach. But if it has existed once, and if it will exist again, then perhaps it is possible to carve a path between them. Perhaps the work of this moment is to refuse the lie, to reject the cycle, to imagine something else—even when the world has spent centuries teaching us that there is no other way.

The Last Person Before Gender Speaks

I did not grow up as a woman. That word does not belong to me. It came later, imposed upon my body by those who arrived with their books, their laws, their insistence that the world must be carved into two halves. Before them, before their division, I was simply a person, moving through life as we all did—first a child, then an elder, measured not by what lay between my legs, but by the passage of time, by the weight of wisdom, by the standing I earned within my community.

We did not speak of men and women as separate kinds of being. We did not look at a newborn and declare its future based on the shape of its flesh. We saw children. We saw people growing. We saw the ways they would take their place among us—not as opposites, not as lesser and greater, not as fixed roles set against each other, but as parts of a whole. Our names for ourselves were not built on separation. We were known by our relationships—child of, sibling of, elder to, leader among. We were known by what we did, by how we moved through the world, by how we contributed.

When we spoke of birth, we did not make it a burden for half of the people. When we spoke of care, we did not demand that only certain hands be the ones to provide it. When we spoke of strength, we did not assume it belonged only to those who fought. A person could be all things, at different times, as they grew. To be young was to be unformed. To be old was to hold knowledge. And in between, there was transformation.

But now the world is shifting. The white men have come, and with them, their words. “Woman.” They say it as though it is a fact. As though it has always been true. As though my people have simply been waiting to be told what we are. They take our ways of living, the fluidity of our roles, and force them into a structure that does not belong to us. They say that those who bear children must be weak, that those who do not must rule. They say that this is how it has always been, even as we stand before them, living proof that it is not.

I do not yet know how far this will go. I do not yet know that the next generation will be raised without memory of what came before. That they will be taught to say “woman” as though it is something real, something they must shape their lives around. That they will be taught submission not as a violence, but as a virtue. That the roles we once moved through freely will be closed off, locked away, until people forget that they were ever open at all.

I want to tell them, the children growing up under this new rule, that it was not always like this. That they were once free to move through life without this weight upon them. But what happens when a thing is taken for long enough? Does the memory of it fade? Do the people stop believing it was ever real? I do not know. I only know that I am standing at the edge of something vast and terrible. And when I speak of the time before, I can already see that there are those who will not believe me.

The Fractured One Speaks

I have never known freedom.

Not in the way the last person before gender did, not in the way the first child of the next world will. From the moment I was born, I was sorted, categorised, measured. A file was created. A name was assigned. A box was checked. I was placed into a system that demanded to know what I was before I had the chance to become who I was.

I have spent my life proving myself. Proving my gender. Proving my mind. Proving that I deserve to be here. I was not born into a world where I could simply exist—I was born into a world that demanded justification. And so, I have learned to explain, to present my evidence, to make a case for my own existence. To say, this is who I am, let me in.

I do not know what it means to simply be.

To move through life without resistance. To wake up and know that I belong. I have learned that belonging is conditional. That I may be tolerated, but only if I perform the role expected of me. That my body must fit their idea of “woman,” that my mind must fit their idea of “functional,” that my way of moving, speaking, existing must not disrupt the order they have built.

I have learned that deviation is punished. That silence is safer than contradiction. That to be trans, to be autistic, to be both, is to be suspect—something to be examined, diagnosed, managed… prevented. That gender is a thing you must apply for. That identity is something you must prove before they will let you have it.

I wonder, sometimes, if even time itself was stolen from us.

Was there once a way of moving through life without being bound to roles?
Were we always made to choose between fixed labels?
Did our ancestors live in a world where people could transform without being confined?

What if the cycle of life was never meant to be gendered?
What if “womanhood” was never meant to be a category, but a phase, one of many that a person might enter, might leave, might return to?
What if we were meant to shift, to change, to become—not within the boundaries they have drawn, but freely, without question?

I look at my own transition and wonder—if I had been born outside of this system, who would I have been?

Would I still be trans if gender had never been weaponised?
Would I still have needed a diagnosis if neurodivergence was never seen as disorder?
Would I still feel this weight, this constant need to prove, to explain, to justify?

I cannot imagine a world where I am not being measured. I cannot imagine a world where I do not have to fight for my own becoming. And that terrifies me, because if I cannot imagine it, how will I ever find my way to it?

I do not know freedom. I only know longing. But if the last person before gender was real, and if the first child of the next world will be real, then this world is the lie, not them. And maybe that means there is still a way through. Maybe that means I do not have to settle for tolerance when I was meant to belong. Maybe that means this fight—to exist as I am, without condition—is the most honest thing I have ever done.

The First Child of the Next World Speaks

I have never had to prove who I am.

I do not know what it is to beg for recognition, to gather documents and declarations, to be interrogated on my own existence. I do not know what it is to have my body measured against a checklist. I do not know what it is to ask permission to become.

I am from a world where gender was never made into a law. Where it was never turned into a boundary. Where it was never used to rank and divide and determine who may enter and who must be left outside. I do not live in opposition to anything. I do not move through life as a rebellion, as a defiance, as a contradiction to some original, unquestioned state. I simply move.

I see you, fractured one, and I do not understand your suffering.

"What do you mean they made you choose?"

Where I am from, there is no choosing. Or rather, there is only choosing, always, endlessly, freely. One does not step into a fixed state and remain there. One does not enter a category and find the door locked behind them. One does not carry a name that does not shift with the seasons.

We move through phases. Through cycles. Through states of being that rise and fall like the tides.

There are times when we are bright and loud and restless, and times when we are still and quiet and heavy with knowing. There are times when we lead and times when we follow, times when we nurture and times when we are nurtured. And there are words for these things, of course—sounds we offer each other in recognition, in affection, in communion—but never as a command, never as a demand that one must remain where they have once been.

"What do you mean they built entire hierarchies around a single phase of being?"

I cannot fathom it. To build an entire world around a single form, a single function, a single point in time. To carve divisions into something as natural as transformation. To say: this, and only this, and never anything else.

Where I am from, we do not think of ourselves in halves. We do not call some strong and some soft. We do not say that one set of hands is made for war and the other for care. We do not decide who is meant to create, to nurture, to build, to lead, based on what they were in one moment of their becoming. We do not sort people into categories that must follow them from birth to death.

"What do you mean they controlled people’s lives based on something that could change?"

Could change. Would change. Will change. Because it is in the nature of all things to shift, to evolve, to shed and grow and become something else. The mountain was once the sea. The riverbed was once a desert. The tree was once a seed buried in the dark.

And you, fractured one—you, who were told that you must fit into one shape and never another—you were always meant to change, too.

That is what I do not understand. Not that they sorted you. Not that they named you. But that they convinced you it had to be that way. That you spent years fighting for the right to be what you always were. That they made you think of your becoming as a rebellion, when it was simply the most natural thing in the world.

I cannot imagine a world where gender is a cage rather than a state of being. I cannot imagine a world where transformation is punished. I cannot imagine what it is to move through life, not as fluid, not as shifting, but as something fixed, frozen, declared once and for all.

And yet, I look at you, and I see that it was so.

That your world was built in chains. That the cycle was broken, forced into something linear, something without return. That those who were meant to be many things were made into only one.

But I see you now. And I see that you are not what they said you must be.

I see that you are already breaking through.

Between the Ruins and the Horizon: A Reflection on What Must Be Reclaimed

I stand between what was and what will be.

The last person before gender tells me: This was not always the way things were.
The first child of the next world tells me: It does not have to be this way.
And I—I am caught between them, in the wreckage of a world that was rewritten before I was even born.

I have never known a life without this weight. Without these borders. Without the demand that I define myself in terms they can understand, in words they have given me, in a language that was built to contain rather than to reveal. I have never known a time when I was not measured, when I was not required to justify the space I take up. I have only ever known the world as it is now: gendered, policed, controlled, fixed in place like a script that must be followed to its end.

But the last person before gender knew another way.

She stands in the past, looking at me with grief in her eyes, knowing that what was stolen from her will never be returned in full. She does not understand the world I live in, where a person must prove what they are, where gender is a structure rather than a state, where a life is defined before it is even lived. She does not understand how we came to believe that these boundaries were always here, that they were natural, that they were necessary. She wants to reach for me, to tell me that there was a time when we simply were, when we moved as freely as the wind, when transition was not a battle but a given, a rhythm, a tide that carried us from one phase to another.

And the first child of the next world—she does not understand either.

She looks at me with confusion, wondering why I have spent so much of my life asking for permission. Wondering why I was ever told that I could be only one thing, only one way, only in one form. She does not understand the fight, because she has never had to fight. She does not know the fear, because she has never had to ask herself if she would be cast out, erased, punished for being what she is.

I stand between them, and I wonder: If the world before gender was real, and if the world after it is possible, then what is my role in getting there?

Because I know now that this world—this nightmare reality I have been given—is a lie.
A powerful lie, a deeply rooted lie, but a lie nonetheless.
It is not the natural order. It is not inevitable. It is something that was made.
And what is made can be unmade.

Perhaps it is my task to carve the path between them.

Perhaps I am not meant to reach for the past, to try to reclaim something that was lost—but to build a bridge toward the world that has yet to exist.

Perhaps my refusal to submit, to be tolerated, to be contained, is what makes the next world possible.

Perhaps the cycle is broken when someone—anyone—refuses to pass down the lie.

I do not know what the next world looks like. I do not know how to get there. But I know now that it is real, that it waits on the horizon, just beyond the boundaries they have drawn. And if it is real, if it is possible, then the only way forward is to break free from the nightmare of the present and dream a future that has never existed before.

The Possibility of a Future Without Chains

Gender, as we know it, was an imposition.

It was not always here. It was not always law. It was made into law—through colonisation, through violence, through the slow suffocation of possibility. It was pressed onto our bodies, onto our lives, onto the way we move through time itself. It was turned into a structure of power, a system of control, a boundary between who is permitted to exist freely and who must always fight to be seen.

And with it, something else was taken—the natural rhythm of life, the cycles that once allowed us to move and shift without constraint. We were divided into roles that were never meant to be cages. The fluidity of who we were became a fixed path, a one-way journey with no return. We were given names that did not belong to us, told stories about ourselves that were never ours to tell. We were taught that to change was a violation, that to move between states was unnatural, that to exist outside the lines was to be unrecognisable.

And so, we grieve. We grieve the world we never knew, the life we were never allowed to live. We grieve for the last person before gender, who saw the fracture begin. We grieve for ourselves, who have only ever known this divided world. We grieve for the time we have lost—years spent proving, explaining, negotiating our right to be.

But grief is not the end.

Because if we can imagine something else, it means it can exist.

If we can dream of a world where we move freely, where transition is not a fight but a state of being, where no one is forced to define themselves for the sake of someone else’s understanding—then that world is possible.

They taught us to believe this world was inevitable. It isn’t.
There was a time before gender. There will be a time after it.
And maybe, we are the ones meant to make it real.

Final thoughts: The Fragility of Liberation

This reflection was born from the weight of history and the urgency of the present. It carries the echoes of Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women, where she exposed gender as a colonial imposition—an artificial structure forced upon societies that once moved fluidly through roles, relationships, and time itself. It carries the speculative clarity of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, where gender is nothing more than a transient state, a phase of being rather than a hierarchy. And it carries the wound of Stephanie Jo Warren’s words: "They preached submission as a virtue, but never questioned power as a vice."

This world—this colonised world—was built on the demand that we submit, that we bend, that we make ourselves small enough to fit within the borders they have drawn. And in moments like these, it is easy to believe that submission is the only option. The machinery of oppression grinds forward—Texas House Bill 3399, seeking to strip gender-affirming care from all Texans, whispers a warning of what could follow. It does not take much for a single state’s cruelty to become national policy. It does not take much for a single pen stroke to turn joy into exile, to send me, and others like me, scrambling for safety once more.

And yet, in the midst of this, I have found something I never expected: a new way of seeing, a new way of knowing. HRT has not only given me a body that feels more like home—it has unleashed my autistic gestalt-processing mind in ways I never imagined. Thoughts come together now in forms that were once distant, fractured, disconnected. I can feel my mind reaching, grasping the shape of an idea all at once, like holding an entire constellation in my hands. I can take history, theory, memory, longing, and turn it into something whole. I can process this moment, this grief, this fight, in a way I never could before.

And I fear losing that.

I fear what it means to have found this clarity, only for it to be ripped away by the return of a man who has built his empire on cruelty. The Tangerine Tyrant, whose hunger for control has already shaped so much of my life, waits for the moment to strike again. I fear waking up in a world where transition is no longer possible, where my own body is held hostage by the state, where my ability to process, to think, to exist in this new and beautiful way is stolen from me.

But if this reflection has shown me anything, it is that nothing is inevitable. Not gender. Not history. Not the future they would force upon us.

There was a time before this, and there will be a time after it.

And though I do not know if I will be allowed to reach that world, though I do not know if my joy is safe, I know that this moment—this mind, this clarity, this power to shape and dream and write—is real. And that means something.

That means that even if they try to take it from us, we will remember.
We will remember that this world is a lie.
We will remember that we were meant to be free.
And we will keep moving forward, refusing to submit, until the next world is ours.