I like learning about other cultures and history and found that it seems most societies even before colonialism had defined roles for men and women by gender/sex. I had never really considered this before and wondered if there was any historical documentation of this? Like we hear all the time that settlers were shocked that women had agency in tribes but we don’t see them discussing other genders or anything like that it seems. And if societies were often divided up by their gender/sex how would gender itself be a colonial construct? Is it the binary man/woman system that was a colonial construct ?
I've written about this on a few previous threads.
Non-binary genders in pre-colonial and early colonial Central and South America
Who are "Two-Spirits" in Native American cultures?
Were many Native American tribes really as genderfluid as we say they were? with additional responses by u/asdjk482 and u/skeletonlady-86.
Gender is always a social construct, so yes, colonialism had a huge impact on how it was constructed in many societies. That doesn't mean gender didn't exist beforehand in these places, or that it didn't exist in pre-colonial Europe - just that colonialism had a huge impact on gender systems around the world.