Sexuality, Body-Territory, and the Freedom of Life to Express Itself

How can we recognize differences without turning biology, identity, or ideology into a new prison?

Before learning words such as “man,” “woman,” “masculine,” “feminine,” “gender,” or “sexuality,” a child is already experiencing bodily, affective, and relational transformations.

There are chromosomes, genes, hormones, organs, and developmental processes. But there are also nutrition, bonds, language, family expectations, play, religion, school, territory, and collective ways of recognizing a person.

Let us begin without quickly choosing one side:

Does biology determine in advance who someone will become, or does it offer possibilities that continue to encounter territory throughout life?

Perhaps the very opposition between “biological” and “social” already causes us to lose part of the phenomenon. After all, where does bodily development end and culture begin? When a word changes posture, when a prohibition alters breathing, or when fear reorganizes how a space is inhabited, are we still dealing with separate dimensions?

The NeuroEducation of Weichö proposes another formulation:

DNA participates in the possibilities of life, while the Body-Territory continually participates in their expression, experience, and transformation.

Sexual development does not have a single key

Human sexual development involves different processes: chromosomes, gene expression, gonadal differentiation, hormones, receptors, anatomy, and transformations that continue after birth.

These dimensions generally organize into recognizable patterns. However, they do not form a single sequence capable of automatically determining identity, affection, behavior, and future.

Brazilian researchers Rafael Loch Batista and Luciana Mattos Barros Oliveira reviewed studies on genetic, hormonal, and neurobiological factors related to gender identity in 2024. Their review does not identify a “gender identity gene.” Instead, it describes a complex phenomenon in which different biological and developmental dimensions must be investigated without simplistic explanations. (PubMed)

We also know that sexual differentiation involves epigenetic mechanisms. DNA methylation, histone modifications, and chromatin regulation participate in activating and inhibiting genes involved in gonadal development. This does not mean that social experiences can freely modify any bodily characteristic. It means that biology itself operates through regulatory networks rather than through an isolated command inscribed in a single gene. (ScienceDirect)

We can therefore ask together:

Does recognizing the importance of biology require us to turn biology into a sentence?

A category can provide care—or become a prison

Sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation seek to describe different dimensions of human experience.

These categories can be important. They help organize research, guide healthcare, make suffering visible, and guarantee rights.

But let us observe what happens when the category stops serving the person and the person begins serving the category.

It may start determining:

• how someone should dress;

• which movements are permitted;

• which emotions they may express;

• whom they may love;

• what work they should perform;

• which place they will occupy in the family;

• what future they are allowed to imagine.

The NeuroEducation of Weichö does not propose eliminating all names. It proposes that we think about what names do.

What does this category help us perceive? What does it conceal? Does the person recognize themselves within it? Can they question it without losing care, dignity, and belonging?

Weichö does not deny differences. It prevents one difference from being confused with the totality of life.

When knowing someone transforms the person who knows

Let us imagine that someone describes their body, sexuality, or identity using words different from those we have learned.

What would our first movement be?

Perhaps we would try to place the person quickly into an existing classification. Perhaps we would reject their words. But we can also remain in the encounter a little longer and ask:

What are we still unable to perceive because we are trying to translate this life too quickly?

This is where Dialogical Multiplication, proposed by Brazilian psychologist Danilo Silva Guimarães, can transform the very way knowledge is produced.

In Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology, Guimarães begins with the limitations that emerge when psychological theories constructed from European societies are applied as universal truths to communities that understand personhood, body, relationship, and world in different ways.

The proposal is not simply to add “Indigenous content” to an already completed psychology. It is to allow the encounter to transform psychology’s own concepts and methods. (Springer)

In works published in 2022, Guimarães warns about the epistemic violence produced when culturally situated knowledge is treated as universal truth. He also questions methodolatry: the moment when a method ceases to be a tool and begins deciding in advance which experiences deserve to exist scientifically. (University of São Paulo Repository)

Perhaps we can apply this reflection to our theme:

Are we using a category to care for the person, or are we trying to make the person fit the category in order to protect our own way of thinking?

In a dialogical relationship, the researcher does not remain unchanged.

I observe you.
You perceive that you are being observed.
You describe your experience.
Your description modifies my question.
The new question allows both of us to perceive something that was not previously available.

This is shared agency: knowledge does not arrive at the encounter already complete. It is transformed by those who participate in it.

Before colonization, other ways of producing personhood existed

The colonization of the Americas did not occupy land alone. It also reorganized bodies, families, relationships, social roles, and forms of belonging.

Jean Tiago Baptista and Tony Willian Boita analyzed more than one thousand Jesuit documents, as well as architectural and artistic remains from South American missions. Their 2024 study shows how Christian and European categories of gender and sexuality were used to reorganize Indigenous bodies that had previously been constituted through other family, collective, and territorial networks. (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)

This does not mean that all Indigenous societies were identical, free from hierarchies, or automatically welcoming. The pre-Columbian Americas contained an enormous plurality of peoples, conflicts, cosmologies, and social organizations.

What we can sustain is more careful:

Colonial ways of organizing the body, family, authority, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are not the only human possibilities.

Archaeology can help us perceive how many of our current expectations are projected onto the past.

In 2024, archaeologists working at Pañamarca, Peru, announced the discovery of a Moche throne room, probably dating from the seventh century, with paintings of a female figure associated with authority. Wear marks on the throne and materials found on it indicate that the space was actually used. The evidence led the team to consider that a woman—or a lineage of women—may have exercised power at Pañamarca. (Pañamarca Archaeological Landscapes)

The finding does not demonstrate that all Moche society was egalitarian. It does something perhaps more important: it forces us to reconsider the automatic expectation that political, ritual, and territorial power in the ancient world was always male.

The pre-Columbian past does not enter this discussion as a paradise.

It enters as an opening toward human plurality.

Body-Territory: when violence crosses skin and land

Indigenous feminist perspectives from the Americas use Body-Territory to relate violence against bodies to violence against land, communities, plants, animals, and collective forms of existence.

Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis and Lorna Quiroga show that colonialism, patriarchy, and extractivism do not operate as separate problems. Violence against the land transforms food, labor, relationships, security, reproduction, and future. Violence against the body also weakens the possibility of defending and continuing the territory. (ANPHLAC Journal)

Sexual freedom, therefore, cannot mean only choosing a word with which to define oneself.

It also depends on:

• protection from violence and coercion;

• the right to healthcare and information;

• material security;

• bodily autonomy;

• respect for language and community;

• the possibility of forming relationships without fear;

• the right not to be converted into a commodity.

Mexican anthropologists Edith Yesenia Peña Sánchez and Lilia Hernández Albarrán show that body and identity are currently situated within a dispute among local Indigenous meanings, the hegemonic sex-gender system, and new subjectivities that also circulate through global capitalism. (INAH Journals)

An identity can open paths toward belonging and rights. It can also be captured by markets, platforms, and political disputes that transform a person into a consumer profile, electoral segment, or permanent representative of a category.

We can therefore ask:

When does a name expand freedom, and when does it begin limiting all the future movements of the Weichö?

The 5D Body-Territory

In BrainLatam’s interpretation that Consciousness Is Spatial, sexuality, identity, and bodily experience are not located in a single point in the brain.

They participate in a 5D Body-Territory:

• three material dimensions;

• movement;

• qualia.

The material dimensions include the brain, organs, hormones, other bodies, objects, architecture, and territory.

Movement includes development, approach, withdrawal, hormonal transformation, learning, gestures, relationships, and social displacement.

Qualia correspond to how that life feels and recognizes its own body, affections, desires, safety, and belonging.

This is a BrainLatam theoretical interpretation, not a conclusion directly demonstrated by the cited studies.

The model does not seek to replace biology with a new metaphysics. It offers a common table from which we can ask how matter, transformation, experience, and territory participate in the same life.

The freedom of life to express itself

We can now elaborate the central thesis of this blog together:

The freedom of life to express itself does not mean forcing someone to deny their biology, nor does it mean transforming biology into destiny. It means creating conditions in which every Body-Territory can understand, express, and transform its existence without being reduced to a gene, organ, diagnosis, identity, or ideology.

Perhaps the question is not whether we should accept every category or abandon all of them.

Perhaps it is learning to keep them open to the encounter.

The NeuroEducation of Weichö invites us to ask:

How can we recognize the differences necessary for care and rights without transforming those same differences into boundaries for the worlds that each life may still create?

Commented references

Batista, R. L.; Oliveira, L. M. B. (2024). The Genetics and Hormonal Basis of Human Gender Identity.
This Brazilian review brings together evidence on genetic, hormonal, and neurobiological factors, showing that gender identity cannot be explained by a single gene or mechanism. (PubMed)

Guimarães, D. S. (2020). Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology.
This foundational work proposes that Indigenous and interethnic communities should not merely be objects of analysis, but participants capable of transforming psychology’s concepts and methods. (Springer)

Guimarães, D. S. (2022). Indigenous Psychology as a General Science for Escaping the Snares of Psychological Methodolatry.
The article criticizes the transformation of method into absolute authority and argues that psychology must revise its assumptions when encountering different cultural worlds. (University of São Paulo Repository)

Guimarães, D. S. (2022). The Historical Task of Indigenous Psychology After 60 Years of Psychology Regulation in Brazil.
The text shows how culturally situated knowledge can produce epistemic violence when presented as universal and proposes a psychology open to sharing among different perspectives. (University of São Paulo Repository)

Peña Sánchez, E. Y.; Hernández Albarrán, L. (2023). Cuerpos e identidades: significados locales, sistema sexo-género, diversidad sexual y subjetividades fluidas.
The Mexican anthropologists examine the body as a contested territory among Indigenous meanings, hegemonic binaries, and new identities produced within contemporary capitalism. (INAH Journals)

D’Arcangelis, C. L.; Quiroga, L. (2023). Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarities in the Americas.
The article connects bodily violence, colonialism, patriarchy, extractivism, and territorial destruction, showing that bodily autonomy and the defense of land are not separate matters. (ANPHLAC Journal)

Baptista, J. T.; Boita, T. W. (2024). Indigenous Bodies, Gender, and Sexuality in the Jesuit Missions of South America.
The study demonstrates how the Christian colonial project reorganized Indigenous understandings of body, gender, family, and sexuality according to European standards. (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)

Kumar, C.; Roy, J. K. (2024). Decoding the Epigenetic Mechanism of Mammalian Sex Determination.
The review presents sexual differentiation as a complex regulatory process involving transcription factors, chromatin, DNA methylation, and non-coding RNAs. (ScienceDirect)

Pañamarca Archaeological Landscapes (2024). Discovery of the Throne Room of a Female Moche Authority.
The Peruvian discovery expands the evidence for female authority in the Moche world and challenges modern assumptions that automatically associate ancient power with men. (Pañamarca Archaeological Landscapes)