Are we still Colonized?

Have you ever wondered why every course in sex education, therapy and counselling focuses only on health, anatomy and behaviors? Why is it that despite a consensus that sex education being an interdisciplinary field, we never have any interdisciplinary conversations—well, beyond the usual combos of Medicine, Public Health, Pharmacology and Psychology? Are we turning everything into a clinical discourse? Why in 2026, are we still pathologizing every human behavior that doesn't fit the norms of Cis-Het-White-Allo-Euro-American centric ideals?

Why is it that the field is so White-washed and the studies it quotes are also Euro & American-centric?

Why do the flagbearers and professionals of these spaces adamant about proclaiming their theories as universal when they clearly are not? Why is it that "decolonizing" is being used as a catch-all phrase with no mention of any indigenous or decolonial or postcolonial thinker? Why is it that theories and metrics developed in the West, tested on a Western and white-dominant population, are being co-opted and administered onto cultures who weren't represented at all in the construction of the theory in the first place? Where are the People of the Global Majority? Why do we claim to be inclusive when spaces are designed to be exclusive?

Who is in your community? Whose voices do you listen to and continue to platform? Who is absent? Who is seen? Who is centered? Who is pushed to the margins? Even when you talk of marginalized people, you set the reference point as white=normal. Why is it that none of you seem keen to diagnose the systems we live in but oh, are you so keen to diagnose an individual?! Do people need to be categorized and boxed up for them to appear legible to you? When you celebrate your LGBTQIA+ "inclusive" spaces, remember to note who is absent from those spaces. Which demographic of queer people are not comfortable? Who takes space? Who doesn't?

We all have our biases. We are all hypocritical beings. But it takes a certain type of hypocrisy to parade as a Leftist, while indulging in colonial legacies of looting and extracting indigenous and global south resources, all the while denying entry to dispossessed voices. If the only manner in which you think you can represent multitudes of dispossessed voices is by adopting an intellectual and economic colonial stance, then you are no less than a modern colonialist and an orientalist. Do you pause and question if your mind is still colonized? Remember, it took one conference to split up Africa amongst colonial powers. It took a single corporation to colonize South Asia. As intellectuals, have we colonized people's minds? When do we hold ourselves responsible?

So if theorists and theories mentioned are only white-centric, if metrics one speaks of in their classes is from a pathological or clinical lens, whom are you serving? Who is your audience? Can human relations be collapsed to only include sex? Can sex be collapsed only into legible behavioral, biomedical and pharmacological categories to be measured, diagnosed and managed? How different are discourses on "proper sexual health" from those on "proper social health"? Well, in the latter, we did have a century of policing moral and socially unhealthy behaviors. Have we learnt for our mistakes or are we just evolving and adapting to re-create the same hegemonic systems of oppression?

Who decides who is considered healthy? Let's assess this question from a sociological lens as opposed to a medical lens. I am not talking about STIs/STDs, medical factors or even consent-related conversations. Who decides what erotic content is considered healthy? Who decides whom to police for engaging in said erotic content? Who decides what kinds of intimacies one needs to share in order for a relationship to be considered healthy? Who decided that human-human relationships are the norm and the rest is tangential (be it fictophilial or human-animal or human-AI)? Most of you, who consume my content are sexuality professionals. So tell me, who gave any of us the authority to decide what is the norm and what is considered healthy?

When was the last time you questioned even the basics of sex education? When was the last time you questioned labels and identities? When was the last time you have critically analyzed what demographic of individuals claim personal identities and why? To whom does publicly acknowledging identities, feel like a death sentence? Have you wondered why a question about identities often results in an answer on personal identities? Where did your communal identities disappear? Are you not relating to culture, language, colors, food, music, dance, textiles, land, animals, philosophies anymore? What parts of you do you erase to make yourself legible to authority, media, systems and relations? Are these legible parts of you considered legible because they share an inherent quality, and that is, they can easily be exploited? Exploited by systems to be legislated and to be governed?

Think about it. Why are your identities only defined by personal identifiers? To whom is your identity legible? In what ways can your identity be legislated and governed? Are we playing so much into identity politics that we forget human relationalities we have engaged with for centuries?

You may wonder why I am asking you these questions today and on a platform dedicated to research. These sets of questions are ones I engage with regularly to keep myself accountable to the demographics I serve.

We speak of positionality statements and land acknowledgements. And yet, our actions speak otherwise. After all, what's the point in engaging with land acknowledgements when corporations are still colonizing indigenous lands? What is the point in maintaining a positionality statement, when your first act is to desecrate and extract from indigenous knowledge systems to platform your own epistemologies?

We say Sex Ed is political and we continue to stay apolitical.

Our mental health providers are constantly being advised to remain apolitical.

I ask again, whom do you serve?

Who are you outside your office, your lab and your classroom?

Who are you when no one is watching you?

Is your advocacy and activism a performance?

When do you begin to question your own biases in research, education and health care?

Who has shaped your mind, your ways of knowing and thinking?

Have you engaged with epistemologies in languages you do not speak, from people outside of your culture?

This one always hits me hard, considering much of my critical thinking is in English, despite the fact that I engage with epistemologies from cultures across the world, from South America to Africa to Asia.

We are all mushrooms, powered by an underground network of mycellium.

What does your mycellium network whisper in you ear?

Have you identified the whispers?

Have you critically analyzed them?

Where do you see yourself in the future of this field?

What mycellium networks power this field?

When you walk onto a platform, are you the authority figure?

Or are you in service to those in your audience?

Do you position yourself as an expert?

If we have experts in this field, then there is no requirement for anyone to study anything anymore. Apparently, we have all the answers to all the questions, and the knowledge lies with these experts. So why bother to continue with any research?

How approachable are you to the demographics you claim to serve?

How does your existence challenge the very colonial foundation of this field?

Do you feel the need to challenge colonial foundations or are you comfortable with the way things are?

Do these colonial foundations serve you, bathe you, clothe you, feed you and sustain you?

Do you find peace in these systems?

Does encountering any challenge to the system, pose as a threat to your existence?

Is your mind and body still colonized or are you the colonizer?