Before European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders

Brotherboys: Indigenous Trans Men In Australia

transguys:

Kai and Dean share what it means to be a Brotherboy–indigenous Australians assigned female at birth but who have a boy spirit and live as males. More than a label, Brotherboy is also an affectionate term that reflects kinship.

“It’s just been amazing, seeing the Brotherboys have a voice for the first time.”

Understanding the Complexities of Gender: Sam Killermann at TEDxUofIChicago

Sam Killermann is a comedian and social justice advocate, and the guy behind It’s Pronounced Metrosexual, a one-man comedy show and blog about snap judgments…

TED talk: Understanding the Complexities of Gender: Sam Killermann

Sam Killermann is a comedian and social justice advocate, and the guy behind It’s Pronounced Metrosexual, a one-man comedy show and blog about snap judgments…

Pretty great TED talk. This guy is an engaging speaker who promotes positivity towards exploring gender identity, and talks a lot about gender presentation (and how it doesn’t correlate with sexual orientation.) He encourages people to look at our cultural ideals and realize how ridiculous they are! I enjoyed this video and hope you do too.

-Kai

Little Boxes: 6 Ways to Make Room for Bigger Truths

This article focuses on being a resource for parents, but I found it personally helpful as well. It suggests ways of teaching kids about gender and culture, as well as how to constructively break free of cultural labels and stereotypes, which the article calls “boxes”.

I appreciated this article most because of it’s insistence that binaries do not exist anywhere, and by trying to squeeze ourselves into binaries and boxes, we limit our ability to express ourselves authentically. It also gave me some warm fuzzies, hearing the author tell stories about her own children challenging the norm and educating their peers.

-Kai

[This is my experience as an AFAB genderqueer person who experiences a lot of body dysphoria but no consistent mental gender.]

((“What was your process like to choose/ or accept either side?”))

At first, I didn’t.
When I asked my classmates to call me Kai & use male pronouns, I told them I was exploring my identity and didn’t want to give a solid identifier because that didn’t feel comfortable. (For sure, this made everyone else uncomfortable, and I had to live with that for a while.)

Initially, it was feelings about my body- switching to wearing masculine clothes and getting some relief from dysphoria- that brought the whole YOU ARE TRANS thing to the forefront of my life. It was like remembering something I had forgotten about myself, and it was painful. But these feelings were definitely centered around the body, not the mind.

Much of my suffering from this point on, though, came from the mind. The mind wanted to just figure it out, as if there was some solid thing to figure out. I drove myself mad thinking, What am I? and trying to measure this with puzzle pieces from my culture. But as I felt different day to day, I realized there was going to be no way of reliably measuring myself, even if the pieces from my culture were indicative of something. It was like building a card-castle with the windows open during a hurricane.

I decided to go on the assumption that what my culture appraises as masculine and feminine is arbitrary and essentially empty of meaning or value when it comes to appraising my own body and lived experience. 

I shifted gears and started asking the body what it felt.

In doing this, I got the very clear message that the body did not want to be developing as female and this must stop immediately please. Even though I was on the fence about the gender of my mind (or even how to determine the gender of my mind) I decided to take on the role of a loving parent and act on what felt best for the body. 

For me, it wasn’t until the day I started hormones that the identifier transgender started to be more comfortable, and that the identifier of “transboy” felt a bit more “valid” in my mind (and validated, from a medical / psychological standpoint). 

((How do you deal with the uncertainty of not being able to decide/ or feeling like you have to?)) 

When I give identifiers for myself, I am giving an answer for whatever is true in the moment. Then, I don’t have to decide a damn thing, other than what is true at that very second.  I realized that I just didn’t need to be suffering so much by pressuring myself to pick something that will be true in the future. I ain’t no future teller!

I practice mindfulness & meditation and that has been really helpful for me. I set aside time to allow these things to be felt completely and brought into a place of acceptance. But the word practice is really important, because feeling these things, practicing non-judgement towards yourself, feeling compassion for yourself and your history, being more comfortable with the groundlessness of identity…they are really difficult and really do require practice.

((Is it just some unrealistic societal expectation?))

In my personal opinion, yes.

In America and many other places in the world, there is a lot of pressure on one to “figure out who they are”, as if this we have these solid, unchanging traits that are there for us to discover and take ownership of. Our culture gives us the impression that it is possible to identify or “BE” just one thing consistently throughout time. 
The problem is, this is not how the universe, or people, work. We are constantly learning, changing, growing, etc. 

When I’m really in touch with myself, both body and mind, I feel such a multitude of things! I panic because I feel that I “shouldn’t” be feeling so many things, because my culture says I should be experiencing something else.

But the reality is, I am feeling it. And I only hurt myself by denying what is really going on within me.

So at the core of that “identity panic” for me is the unrealistic belief that I’ve indeed internalized from my culture: that my identity is a static thing that can be “found”. And in my experience, it can’t be.

It can only be felt. 

-Kai

thepeoplesrecord:

Going beyond the Western gender binary - unlearning our backward cultural conditioning 

In Western colonial society (which dominates many aspects of the globalized, capitalist world today) we operate under the presumption that there are only two genders, male and female. But gender is a social construction. One’s options for what gender they identify with are shaped by the culture they are born into. Biological factors are most-often the primary driving forces that choose among the available socially-constructed gender categories.

Cultures around the world have different ways of talking about, thinking about, and identifying gender. It’s often a challenge for (particularly cis-sexual) Westerns to think about other ways gender can be socially constructed. Westerns have the false equivalency of gender and sex drilled into their eternal psyche from the time they are very young, and re-enforced through examples in popular culture. There is no biological reality to gender. Many Westerners have the bizarre belief that one’s XY-sex-determination should also inform one’s gender identity, a socially constructed role in society.

In some cultures, there is no distinction made between gender and sexual orientation and the same can be said for sexual orientation - our culture socially-constructs the options and our biology helps us identify which socially-constructed option feels most ‘right’ and best resonates with us.

I’ve attached some photos to offer some examples of non-colonial, non-Western construction of gender. They’ve all been uploaded onto our Facebook page photostream in case you’d like to ‘like’ or ‘share’ them there. There are literally hundreds of ‘third-gender’ identifying peoples around the world. The eight I’ve chosen are mostly examples I remember from some of my anthropology courses but if you google ‘third genders’ you can find many lists and examples.

Who cares? Why it matters.

The most obvious reason to care about the way our culture has constructed gender and sexual orientation is to deepen one’s capacity for solidarity with people who identify as transgender, transsexual, and others whose gender or sexual identity exists outside of binary Western culture.

But there are other reasons as well. Western culture’s binary nature often creates non-sensical, problematic binary identity constructions that are inherently problematic. For example, I believe that Western masculinity (dominance, aggression, lack of communication, lack of emotional expression, etc) is inherently problematic. I believe that to be the reason why most acts of large-scale-violence and terror are committed by men (see: 100% of the mass school shootings in the United States), and I believe it fosters a degree of internal misery within people who heavily adopt these particular ‘masculine’ traits.

In the age of information, and the age of global connectivity, there is no longer any reason (particularly for young people) to feel isolated or restricted to Western definitions of gender, sexual orientation and identity in general. I think the social ramifications of a generation where more and more people begin to identify outside of the gender binary would be tremendous, and I think we should all consider how we can unlearn our cultural conditioning to embrace other, perhaps less exploitative and dominating identities.

Background information on the identities depicted in the above images:

Hijras
Hijras are male-body-born, feminine-gender-identifying people who live in South Asia (mostly in India & Nepal). Many Hijras live in well-defined, organized, all-Hijra communities, led by a guru.

Although many Hijras identify as Muslim, many practice a form of syncretism that draws on multiple religions; seeing themselves to be neither men nor women, Hijras practice rituals for both men and women.

Hijras belong to a special caste. They are usually devotees of the mother goddess Bahuchara Mata, Lord Shiva, or both.

Nandi female husbands
Among the Nandi in Western Kenya, one social identity option for women is to become a female husband, and thus a man in society’s eyes. Female husbands are expected to become men and take on all of the social and cultural responsibilities of a man, including finding a wife to marry and passing on property to the next generation through marriage. Female husbands may have lived their lives as women and may even be married to a man, but once she becomes a female-husband, she is expected to be a man. Women married to female-husbands may have sex with single men uninterested in commitment in order to become pregnant, but the female-husband (who is often an older woman, often a widow) will father the child of said pregnancy and treat the child like her own.

Two-spirited people
Two-Spirit is an umbrella term sometimes used for what was once commonly known as ‘berdaches’, Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations communities. The term usually indicates a person whose body simultaneously manifests both a masculine and a feminine spirit. Male and female two-spirits have been “documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America.”

Travesti
In South America (with a large presence in Brazil), a travesti is a person who was assigned male at birth who has a feminine gender identity and is primarily sexually attracted to masculine men. Therefore, sometimes the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation is not made. Travestis have been described as a third gender, but not all see themselves this way. Travestis often will begin taking female hormones and injecting silicone to enlargen their backsides as boys and continue the process into womanhood.

The work of cultural Anthropologist Don Kulick (a gay male by Western definitions) in Brazil demonstrated that gender construction in Brazil is binary (like Western gender construction), but unlike Western gender construction, instead of having a male-female binary, there is a male-notmale binary.

In this particular construction of gender:

• Males include: men who have sex with women, men who have sex with Travestis but are never on the receiving end of anal sex, men who have sex with men but are never on the receiving end of anal sex.
• Not-males include: women, men who receive anal sex from ‘male’ gay men or from Travestis.

Fa’afafine
Fa’afafine are the gender liminal, or third-gendered people of Samoa. A recognized and integral part of traditional Samoan culture, fa’afafine, born biologically male, embody both male and female gender traits. Their gendered behavior typically ranges from extravagantly feminine to mundanely masculine

Waria
Waria is a traditional third general role found in modern Indonesia. Additionally, the Bugis culture of Sulawesi (one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia) has been described as having three sexes (male, female and intersex) as well as five genders with distinct social roles.

Six Genders of old Israel
In the old Kingdom of Israel (1020–931 BCE) there were six officially recognized genders:

• Zachar: male
• Nekeveh: female
• Androgynos: both male and female
• Tumtum: gender neutral/without definite gender
• Aylonit: female-to-male transgender people
• Saris: male-to-female transgender people (often inaccurately translated as “eunuch”)

Kathoey 
Australian scholar of sexual politics in Thailand Peter Jackson’s work indicates that the term “kathoey” was used in pre-modern times to refer to intersexual people, and that the usage changed in the middle of the twentieth century to cover cross-dressing males, to create what is now a gender identity unique to Thailand. Thailand also has three identities related to female-bodied people: Tom, Dee, and heterosexual woman.

-Robert

EDIT: So let me clearly say that in no way am I intentionally encouraging white people (or anyone else) to appropriate these identities.  Rather, I hope that this post and conversations like this will lead to an understanding of cultural diversity and other gender constructions/identities and an understanding that there is no biological reality to gender, and that gender manifests itself in many beautiful ways across many cultures.

I AM encouraging people in colonial society to have a less-binary, more nuanced approach to gender that doesn’t lead to so much domination and exploitation.

I also understand that in order to talk about these things, words like ‘male-bodied’ or male are inherently western concepts. Each of these societies and cultures have other ways of talking about these identities. Although I wasn’t born in the U.S. I have spent most of my life and the entirety of my adult life in the United States. I speak no languages other than English. There are concepts that I can’t understand, that my language limits me from even talking about, and in order to communicate these ideas, I am restricted by the only language I have available to talk about these concepts with. My perspective is etic. I do not belong to the above cultures, so when I talk about these things and use the English language to describe them, I am limited in my options for describing a concept as abstract as gender. The very categories of gender and sexuality belong to the cultural lens through which I view the world and I could not possibly provide a comprehensive emic analysis of the way the things we call ‘gender and sexuality’ actually are understood (if at all) within these cultures. In that way, mine is a very limited perspective. But it is geared toward other people living in Western society and it is aimed at changing this culture, not to appropriate these others but to not be so terrible toward gender and sexual variant people in this culture and to begin to question the implications of how we define gender and sexuality both personally, and as a whole culture. 

Also, there’s some problematic stuff in the way I framed this and some of these only have one source.

-Robert