Hey fam, it's me, Amara Jones.

Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives.

November is National Native American Heritage Month, where we lift up the tremendous contributions

of the people and cultures, which have been here for tens of thousands of years.

What is often left out of these reflections, however, is the fact that indigenous communities

across what we now call the United States have celebrated

and honored gender expansive people long before people from Europe ever reached this land.

So today I want to explore this deep history and how it can inform what it means to live beyond

the binary as an indigenous person,

even for all of us, now and into the future.

First, I'll chat with Dene, scholar, and advocate Charlie Amaya Scott

about honoring her various intersectional identities.

There's a sort of slight disruption of what it means to be trans when you sort of move

beyond the colonial gender binary.

And that's where I think transness really expands and sort of materializes a little bit beyond

of how we currently know.

Then I'll talk with Cleopatra Tatebeelle about their work as a black two-spirit

change maker. People will always be anti-black towards me or anti-indigenous and try to like

keep me out of spaces or keep me out of wherever. But like we're all entitled to healing.

Just a heads up, we had some issues with Cleopatra's microphone,

so the first few minutes of their interview may sound a little strange.

But bear with us.

...