”Go Back & Get It”
Black gender variance exists. Black gender variant people have always existed and we deserve to be heard. We deserve self determination and our rightful places restored in our communities that colonialism and slavery has taken from us.
The term Two-Head comes from the Rootwork tradition cultivated by enslaved Africans here on Turtle Island, or so called North America. A Two-Head was a spiritual practitioner who possessed both natural &supernatural knowledge, TRANScending human categories. This manifesto is a proposition that we (Black gender variant people) repurpose or rather EXPAND the term to be used for genderqueer African people here on Turtle Island.
In many traditional African societies, gender variant peoples were revered, seen as balanced and were often the spiritual healers in their communities. Hoodoo/Rootwork itself is a Kongo-based African traditional religion. In precolonial Kongo religion there were “third-gender" priests called Jimbandaa who were known for their healing wisdom and as diviners. European colonialism would strip them of their place in their culture and it did many other African cultures including ours.
The term Two-Head calls back to our ancestors and reinstalls a place for gender variance in our culture straight from our African roots and spirituality.
What a Two-Head is
• A wide encompassing term for Black gender variant people. It is an attempt at self-defining ourselves that comes directly from our culture
• It includes a wide variety of people: those who exude masculine energy, those who exude feminine energy, those who lie in-between (a combination/androgynous) and those who lie outside of human categories of gender or have no category at all.
- Two-Head can function as noun & descriptor. (I.e. you can be a Two Head, you can be Two-headed, and you can be a Two-head(ed) man/woman/person)
What a Two-Head is NOT:
• Two- Spirit. This is a term reserved for Amerindigenous folx. The terms are similar in wording and meaning because we are working within a colonial language forced on us . (Even the meaning of Two-Spirit can change depending on what nation you are speaking of). Two-Head has its etymological roots in African American English and follows a common compound word pattern ( PeanutHead, Hard-Head, BigHead, etc)
• For Non-Black people. This term is NOT for Non-Black people’s usage. It was created by a poor New Afrikan working class gender variant person and was intended to be used by other Black gender variant people, naturally making it a Pan-African term.
• A replacement for LGB+, WLW, MLM, SGL, AGL. This does not have anything to do with sexual categorization as our ancestors did not see the need to categorize people by who they had sex with. Of course you can still identify in these ways because multiple realities can exist, especially as we continue to fight White Supremacy and Queer Oppression.
*This can & will be added onto in the future , because living things change .
