By a colonial mindset we mean that white trans people and white queers in general often have an idea, based on the strict adherance to the western gender binary, what it means to be trans or queer and will police and/or punish anybody that steps outside of those lines or say that they are not really trans or queer etc. A lot of queerness and transness colonialism attempted to wipe out or erase which thankfully didn’t entirely work, but sure as heck doesn’t stop people from trying!

Cultural appropriation is taking something from another opressed culture someone or somemany were not raised in and have no familiarity with, nor explicit permission from and changing it to fit their own desires, or just having taken it in general. The most obvious example of this is AAVE (African American Vernacular English), also called Black English etc, most white queers (and white people in general) hear a word or saying, take it, remove its original context and then overuse it to the point of ridicule which is then what the original people, in this case black people, then face when using it correctly.

Other examples are things like aesthetics, for example white people attempting (we say attempting because it’s impossible for certain types of hair to have the same styles etc due to texture, makeup etc) to have locs as a hair style, or wearing native american head dresses as a costume, especially for things like halloween, or wearing certain types of feather earings because they think it looks cool, having ‘tribal’ tattoos which do not belong to them and they likely do not understand the meaning of, etc.

That’s not an exhaustive list and we hope that helps.

Just a note, not that we expect it, but just in case any feel like arguing about any of this we’re not here to argue. This is what we have learned from listening to actual people of colour and anti-racist people raised in white culutres which we try to be ourselves. So if any try to argue we won’t be doing that. If any wish to learn more we will give links etc 🙂.