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My sister ended her life because she had chest hair.

TW: Anxiety / Depression

My younger sister ended her life a week ago because she had a condition called "Idiopathic hirsutism". Growing up she was severely bullied because of it.

She had thick body hair all over her body. It was easy to remove hair from all over her body, but the chest, neck, and chin, were very sensitive areas. We had tried every single hair removal method, and post & after care method, we could think of, but she always ended up with bumps, pimples, ingrown hairs, and hyperpigmentation. And it'll always get itchy after a few days. We tried laser hair removal but it didn't work, so we moved on to electrolysis and it just made her hair grow back 10 fold.

Knowing that she'd have to live like this for the rest of her life, had made her extremely depressed. She always wore polo neck tops and scarfs, to cover the hair. She hated being seen in public so she quit her job, and I took her in.

She would always cry about how she couldn't enjoy life, and couldn't do normal things. How she couldn't wear what she wanted, and how no one would ever fall in love with her. I decided to take her to therapy, and it seemed like she was doing well. She seemed very happy. She had even started going out again. But I guess she was just pretending.

I wish there was more I could've done to help her. If there was a way to transfer her condition onto me instead, I would've gladly done it, if it meant she'd be happy. I'm truly devastated.

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TW: Ableism, transphobia, anti-african

This case whether true or not, is the issue with European concepts of gender. 

Traditional colonial ideas of gender are just that they are ideas, theory and theoretical. People are real. People really suffer when these ideas are imposed through violence. That violence has happened and continues through religious indoctrination, social death, isolation, humiliation, ridicule and physical violence against people that do not neatly fit colonial ideas of existing. 

Traditional gender roles are white supremacy. How? 

The concept of what a man or woman is, was defined by white supremacists who believed women were inferior to men and Africans inferior to Europeans. Traditional gender roles rely on hierarchies that deemed Africans non human and women child-like. The logic and reasoning was ableism, the idea that people with less ability to do certain things were worthless and needed to be told what to do. 

Ableism was a vehicle to deny people human rights and consolidate power for rich cishet European men. Those men were white supremacists and dictated that women should be thin, because African females were fat and immoral. Those men dictated that women should have long flowing hair preferably blonde, unlike the kinky untamed hair of African females, etc. When these literal colonisers visited Africa and saw various people in various roles, people they deemed women doing work that they insisted were mens work, they used that as justification to traffic and torture African people. They deemed it unnatural, immoral, devilish and perverse. 

The insistence of uniformity and conformity to their world view and the violence enacted on queer people to scare others into submission is white supremacy. Gender roles, strict rules about gender expression, the threat of social death and physical violence could and has definitely destroyed many peoples mental health and led them to death. 

Bio essentialism which is a belief that sex equals gender, and there are only 2 sexes and 2 genders. This is a religious dogma, a European approach to gender that is wholly transphobic and rooted in anti African beliefs. 

The swing back to conservatism and facism will not bring back 2019. It will bring back the cruelty of yesteryear and with that brutality, cruelty and barbarism people will suffer greatly and we still will never return to a pre-pandemic world. The pre-pandemic world was very shit and it being highly romanticized is unfortunate.