Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls

I just read a short (106 pages of text) book, Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations (Waveland Press, 2000) by Serena Nanda.  Nanda, a cultural anthropologist, is the author of an ethnographic study of the hijras of India, though lately, as a professor emerita, she's been working on a series of "anthropological murder mysteries."  Gender Diversity is meant as a brief introduction to its subject, and it's good that its crosscultural scope (while limited) includes Europe and America.  But there are problems, which are all the more visible in such a short book.  That's a good thing, but it doesn't make the problems go away.

There are some errors that are clearly Nanda's fault, like her reference to "the Genesis story, in which Adam creates Eve from his own loins" (87).  Of course in the second Genesis creation myth, it is Yahweh who creates Eve, from Adam's rib.  Less egregious but still significant is the claim that in Plato’s Symposium "Aristophanes argues that three sexes were part of an original human nature, “man, woman, and the union of the two …. having a double nature” before all three groups were split in half by Zeus (Symposium 252-3); as a consequence, human beings spend their lives seeking their lost other half.  Aristophanes doesn't "argue", he simply declares that he's talking about the original human condition.  Moreover, the primordial humans with the "double nature" were the source of what we now would call heterosexuals: "Now all who are the men's slice from the common genus, which was then called androgynous, are lovers of women; and many adulterers have been of this genus; and, in turn, all who are women of this genus prove to be lovers of men and adulteresses."  Those males who became lovers of other males, and those females who became lovers of other females, were originally single-natured, so to speak.  Classical Greece also had stereotypes of effeminate, sexually receptive males, which we know about from hearsay.  The institution of pederasty, in which adult male erastoi courted and loved adolescent male eromenoi, distanced itself from effeminacy in either partner.  So Aristophanes' myth has little if anything to do with the kind of gender variation Nanda is writing about.

Most of Nanda's exemplars of gender variation are our contemporaries, who can be studied and interviewed directly.  In the case of American Indians (as with some African variations, but Nanda doesn't cover Africa in Gender Diversity), this is less true, though that's changing.  So, like others writing about this subject, Nanda must rely on older travelers' and ethnographic accounts, which often leads to trouble.  Her description of gender variants -- alyha (males) and hwame (females) -- among the Mojave, for example, is "based on interviews by anthropologist George Devereux (1937) with some old informants who remembered the transvestite ceremony and had heard stories about gender variant individuals from their elders" (21).  Devereux, then, was writing about a phenomenon he'd never encountered personally, often at third-hand ("stories [they had heard] about gender variant individuals from their elders").  So I'm a bit skeptical about the rather detailed description of alyha sexual behavior Nanda provides, especially since she also apparently accepts John H. Honigmann's account of "female berdaches" among the Kaska of the Yukon -- also based on interviews with gender-normative male Kaska informants who hadn't met such individuals themselves but had heard stories about them from their elders.  Honigmann's work was dissected by Jean-Guy A. Goulet in his contribution to Two-Spirit People (ed. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang [Illinois, 1997]).  Nanda knows and cites that collection, but evidently didn't read Goulet's piece, since she claims that "Among the Kaska, a family who had only daughters might select one to 'be like a man'; by engaging in the male activity of hunting, she would help provide the family with food" (24).  That's exactly what Goulet cast doubt on.  (Such selection isn't unknown in the West, if only as folklore; see, for example, Isabel Miller's novel Patience and Sarah, one of whose protagonists was raised "as a boy" in a large family with no sons.)

Luckily, we can talk to real gender variants around the world today, and observe how their families and neighbors treat them.  Nanda herself talked at length to hijra, for example, as did Gayatri Reddy in With Respect to Sex (Chicago, 2005).  We also have numerous works by gay Indian writers, based in India itself or in the diaspora.  One hijra, A. Revathi, has written his own autobiography in English, The Truth About Me (Penguin Global, 2011).  Martin F. Manalansan IV, an anthropologist who identifies himself as a bakla, has written about the experience of Filipino gender variants in the US; J. Neil Garcia, another bakla academic, has written about bakla and gay life in the Philippines.

Because Gender Diversity is such a short book, its contradictions are thrown into relief, which is handy.  Nanda makes the typical errors on gender variation in the West, saying now that the Western model of homosexuality is homogender, and then that it is based on inversion.  So, for example, she writes that Brazil assimilated a "modern Euro-American 'medical' model of sex/gender relations ... in the late late-nineteeth and early-twentieth centuries."  But this model

…in the last three decades has been challenged by a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation.  This model, which continues the homosexual /heterosexual divide of the medical model, but without its pejorative connotions [sic], is gaining a foothold in the more highly industrialized urban centers of the South (Rio and Sao Paulo), as well as among the more wealthy and educated classes throughout Brazil [55-6].

To her credit, she recognizes that "In Brazil, as increasingly in many contemporary cultures, several sex/gender ideologies coexist" (55), but this has always been true in contemporary cultures and in the past as well.  (Compare classical Greece, with its homogender but age-stratified institution of pederasty which coexisted with a model of penetrable effeminate males.)  As for the "postmodern" (?) ideology, "in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation," this is a gross oversimplification.  The "ideology" that only the penetrated male was "homosexual" was current, and perhaps dominant, in the United States until the middle of the twentieth century, and the denigration of effeminacy has meant that many males in a variety of cultures have used flaming queens as cover for their own activities.  In Mexico (as in much of Latin America), for example, the queen with plucked eyebrows, makeup, and a wardrobe of gowns is the official metonym of male homosexuality, and anthropologists have often mistaken the part for the whole. (Vestidas are so much easier to find and study.)  But gay male anthropologists and travelers have found plenty of sexual partners in such places without having to put on a dress or wig, and there's so much homogender activity going on that perhaps we should be more skeptical whether the activo/pasivo model is actually gendered.  (The same goes for contemporary South Africa, where the white anthropologist Graeme Reid was propositioned by black men who wanted to penetrate him, even though he didn't fit the codes of the lady that supposedly governed male/male sex there.)  For that matter, a naive observer might conclude from popular entertainment that a gendered ideology of homosexuality was dominant in the US, and many people do.  Maybe it is.

I enjoyed this remark by Nanda about Thailand, especially after some people I know on Facebook were getting their pants in a bunch about American evangelicals who blame earthquakes on Teh Gay:

Same-sex/gender eroticism (what would be called homosexuality in the modern West) was considered inauspicious, resulting in natural disasters, such as droughts, being struck dead by lightning, or becoming crazy.  These consequences do not appear to have been directed at (heterogender) man/kathoey relationships … [74]

(Kathoey [กะเทย] are the feminine transgenderish males in Thai society.)  And, of course, she mentions numerous times that "gender variants" almost never, in any culture, copulate with other "gender variants" -- that would be "lesbianism," "incest," even "cannibalism."  For example:

And, similar to India, Brazil, Thailand and the Philippines, but in contrast to the West, gender nonconformists [in the Pacific Islands] do not have sex with each other [74].  

However, it is not true that gender nonconformists in "the West" normally have sex with each other, as Nanda here implies.  For one thing, Latin America is part of "the West"; more important, the idea of two sissies "bumping pussies" (as queens I've known delicately put it) is as outrageous in some contemporary American circles as it is in Rio, Mexico City, Bangkok, Hyderabad, or Manila.  Try this for size, from John C. Howard's Men Like That (Chicago, 1999): "A drop of sissy come would choke us. If we were going to go down on anybody, they would have to be men, trade" (122).  I heard this sentiment expressed in the gay communities of southern Indiana in the early 1970s.

I'm also skeptical about the claim, which is not particular to Nanda, that "The sexual partners of gender variants were never considered gender variants themselves" (17).  As she says a few pages later, Mohave gender variants' "husbands were teased for marrying them" (21).  Numerous scholars have doubted similar claims about males who penetrate other males in Latin American societies: Annick Prieur is one observer among others who's found it difficult to get mayates (gender-normative Mexican men who penetrate Mexican sissies) to admit, let alone talk about their same-sex copulations; see Mema's House, Mexico City (Chicago, 1998).  Stephen O. Murray has written, more stringently, that

Whether the complementary role is a "gay macho" (bujarron) indifferent to what he penetrates is a matter of some controversy among observers -- and also one of dissensus among natives ... Usually, the category is linguistically unmarked (hombre-man) although Schifter and Madrigal reported hombres de verdad (true men), Lancaster attested the reduplicated (hence, highly marked) hombre-hombre, and Tierno listed muy hombre and mucho hombre (very man and much man).  The masculine partner, then, at least sometimes is referred to with linguistically marked forms and is, thereby, distinguished from men in general [50].

And, he adds:

Latinos with whom I have discussed claims that masculinity can be enhanced by fucking a maricon vociferously disagree with Lancaster's assertion that fucking men enhances "male honor."  They also question the extent of banter about homosexual exploits among adults in Latino cultures ... Lancaster does not appear to have asked direct questions of the residents of the working class barrio in Managua, Nicaragua, among whom he lived[,] about whether one gains honor from using a pasivo (cochon in the local lexicon) [54] ...

Murray also notes that Lancaster might have produced a more accurate picture of Nicaraguan society if he had "studied those who call themselves cochones rather than picking up tidbits of hombre-hombres' views of cochones" (56n8).  These considerations may not refute Nanda's remarks, but they do complicate them and the consensus she represents.  Although she cites several authors from the collection in which Murray's critique appears (Stephen O. Murray, Latin American Male Homosexualities (New Mexico, 1995), she evidently skipped his contributions, just as she missed Goulet's in Two-Spirit People.

It's ironic that Nanda, like so many of her colleagues, opposes "third sex" and "third gender" concepts to "modern" (or are they "postmodern"?) "Euro-American" ideologies.  The thing is, "third sex" and "third gender" are both Western concepts, developed in the nineteenth century* by European doctors and disseminated (along with Euro-American homophobia) to doctors and lawyers around the world.  Whether, or how well, these concepts actually correspond to non-Western figures like bakla, hijra, katoey can be and should be discussed more, but like "queer," which is also applied indiscriminately, regardless of culture or era, they are Western in origin and content.

While Gender Diversity is a good introduction to its subject for undergraduates, it also shows some gaping holes in the Euro-American academic account of sex and gender, whether of the "West" or elsewhere.  That could be a good thing, if it leads to a reconsideration of the consensus.

*In fact the idea of a "third sex" has been traced back to the second-century North African Christian father Tertullian, who wrote in his treatise To the Nations:

You ['O unjust pagans'] too have in your midst a third gender -- not so much a third religious persuasion -- but a third sex. They are well suited for both male pleasure and for female pleasure, endowed with male and female aptitudes. Do we offend you with this particular shared affinity?  Equality lends force to envy.  Thus the potter envies the potter and the craftsman envies the craftsman.

I learned this from Willy [Henri Gauthier-Villars, 1859-1931], The Third Sex [ET of Le Troisième Sèxe, 1927]  Translated and with an introduction and notes by Lawrence R. Schehr.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, page 99n4.  The things a promiscuous reader finds ...

Do We Really Need Gender?

We’wha also took advantage of his time in Washington to try out activities he might not have engaged in at home. He took up knitting, a male craft among the Zunis. Although he told a reporter that he planned to give it up when he returned, he must have had some previous knowledge of the craft, and it is interesting to note that he felt free to experiment in this way. 

-- Will Roscoe,The Zuni Man-Woman, University of New Mexico Press, 1991, p. 63

I've been haunted by this anecdote ever since I first read it.  We'wha (1849-1896) was a Zuni lhamana (or "man-woman"), probably the most famous "two-spirit" person in American history thanks to Will Roscoe's book about him.  In 1886 he visited Washington, D.C., as a "cultural ambassador."  He met President Grover Cleveland and received a lot of publicity.  Taken to be female, he was referred to in the press as a Zuni princess, "demonstrated Zuni weaving at the Smithsonian, [and] appeared at the National Theater in a theatrical event".  He then returned to New Mexico and died ten years later of tuberculosis, not even fifty years old.

The reason I find this story about We'wha so poignant is that the institutions surrounding two-spirit people are romanticized by many gay people today, as a symbol of pre-Columbian peoples' supposedly greater freedom of gender and sexuality.  As a lhamana, We'wha dressed in clothing styles worn by Zuni women, and did the work assigned by their culture to Zuni women.  There are men for whom that would be freedom enough, but it seems that We'wha chafed at the restrictions of his society, and when he was far away from the reservation he felt free to do a little bit of men's work, knowing he'd have to give it up when he went back home.  Whether he thought of knitting as men's work, or simply as something he wanted to do, we'll never know, but in any case he could only do it when he was away from his family and home.  And that strikes me, with my Western individualistic standards of personal freedom, as unutterably sad.

"Gender" may be the most confusing concept I've ever grappled with.  And I'm not the only person who's confused: everybody else is too, as far as I can tell.  So one benefit of having read Two-Spirit People is that it gave me some idea, not what "gender" really means, but why it probably doesn't mean anything.  Roscoe's story about We'wha fits with the account I'm trying to construct here.

There were several goads to me in the articles I read in Two-Spirit People.  Jean-Guy A. Goulet's "The Northern Athapaskan 'Berdache' Reconsidered" dismantled an anthropologist's account of "female berdaches" among the Kaska of the Yukon, based on some biased misreadings of interviews with Kaska informants.  John H. Honigmann, the anthropologist in question, tried to find cross-dressing women in a society where, on his own account, men and women dressed pretty much alike; to find women doing men's work in a society where "autonomy and management in the bush all year round were emphasized for both males and females" (Goulet, 53); and to read young women's reluctance to be forcibly impregnated by young men as evidence that they preferred other girls as sexual partners.  (Recall Sabine Lang's claim that "In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between two men or two women -- two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender."  Honigmann assumed that [what he thought was] gender nonconformity was a sign of homosexuality.)  Some other writers in Two-Spirit People referred to Goulet's discussion as a reminder that sharply polarized roles for men and women weren't universal among American Indians.

Then there was Wesley Thomas's attempt to define and rationalize Navajo terms for gender variation, "Navajo Cultural Constructions of Gender and Sexuality."  He concluded "for the time being" (161) that "the older Navajo people recognize five traditional gender categories" (158), which involve combinations of male or female bodies with masculine or feminine genders in varying degrees.  Evidently the Navajo have more sharply polarized roles for men and women than the Kaska do: there is men's work and there's women's work, though some individuals cross the boundaries.  For example:

As one of the original people in the Navajo origin stories, feminine males performed and were responsible for work also performed by women.  The tradition continues to an extent.  Some of the work feminine-male people do includes cooking at religious gatherings, weaving, household chores, and tending children [161].

As the title of his article indicates, Thomas is aware that these work assignments are "cultural constructions," but he still talks as though men's work and women's work are pre-cultural categories.   He also seems to take bodies fairly seriously: if what counts is femininity and masculinity and the work assigned to them, who cares whether a person has a male or a female body?  It's the spirit that (supposedly) counts, not the body.

So too, Jason Cromwell elsewhere in Two-Spirit People quotes a "Latino FTM" (female-to-male transgendered person) as saying, "I don't mix or blend my gender.  What I am is a man with a female body" (130).  But what is this "man" that Cromwell's informant speaks of, that's independent of body configuration?  And what is unmixed or unblended in the idea of "a man with a female body"?  Like many identity statements, this is a pledge of allegiance (like, say, "I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free") that conveys no real information.

Another contributor, Arnold J. Pilling, surveyed census and other records of two-spirit people a hundred years ago, and found that they didn't all fit the platonic model of the invert: in some cases, "their cross-dressing consisted primarily of wearing women's caps from an adjacent tribe; otherwise, each dressed mainly in male ritual costume while curing"(84).  Nor were all of them shamans or other religious specialists, as the popular consensus has it.  Still other writers talked about "multiple genders," as it became obvious that two-spirit people were as varied as contemporary gay people or any other category.  Claire R. Farrer wrote of a Mescalero Apache "singer of ceremonies" she called Bernard Second:

Bernard knew much more than did any regular man or woman as a consequence of being a multigendered person.  He was identified as being special from the age of seven, when he began his training as a singer and linguist.  Only as he aged did he realize he was supergendered.  He was consciously taught men's things and knew them impeccably: how to hunt, skin, and butcher animals; how to protect his family -- especially his sisters in his matrilineage; how to do morning prayers; and how to read the sky.  He also was taught, and was expert in, women's things: how to weave a basket, how to make a cradle for a newborn baby and how to prepare food and clothing.  He never offered an explanation of why he was multigendered, saying only that he did men's and women's work because "the Vision [that he had as a seven-year-old boy] told me how my people would come to me one day and say, 'O! My Brother! Show me how to do the old things.'  And they do!"

... It is a positive gift to be multigendered but also it is a burden for -- at least at Mescalero -- it means being several different people confined in one body [237].

And here the argument went off the edge, as it became clear to me that some of these scholars were using "gender" in a very odd way.  It sounded as if they thought that any variation in any trait constituted a gender difference, so that wearing a woman's hat was a gender, and being good at cooking but not doing laundry was another gender, while being good at cooking and doing laundry was yet another, and so on.  This leads to a reductio ad absurdum, where you have a gender (and maybe even more than one gender) for every individual, depending on his or her age, or mood, or the day of the week.  We'wha, for example, would have had a different gender than another lhamana like him in most respects but who didn't want to knit.  Maybe We'wha changed gender when he went to DC and took up knitting, and changed back when he returned home and gave it up.

(It also occurs to me that Bernard's greater knowledge of both men's and women's work is a difference of degree, not of kind, and nothing to do with gender per se.  Evidently Bernard didn't think of himself as "two-spirit," which isn't surprising since the term wasn't coined until after his death.  Again, it's remarkable how people who'd refuse to label non-Western people "homosexuals" see no objection to labeling them with other terms they would not have used, like "two-spirit" or "multigendered."  Notice that as Farrar quotes Bernard, he described his calling not in terms of gender, but in terms of teaching people the "old things," both men's and women's.  But the wise Western anthropologist knows better than the simple, unschooled indigene, I guess.)

It also would have to count why a man did "women's" work, or vice versa.  If a man cooks meals and does laundry because he's in the army and is required to do such menial work, his identity and subjectivity are different from those of a man who becomes a professional chef or runs a laundry to support his family, and both are different from a male who does these things because he's a woman in a male body and believes that only a woman should cook and wash clothes, preferably for her man.  These would be three different genders.  I'm spelling these examples out in (no doubt) tedious detail in hopes of making the consequences of postulating multiple genders as clear as possible.

This all leads me to doubt whether it makes any sense to speak of two-spirit people in their various forms as a third (let alone fourth or fifth) gender.  They are not (on Wesley Thomas's account, which fits with others') something other than male or female, masculine or feminine, men or women, but combinations of pre-cultural male and female essences in varying amounts.  By this logic, mixed-race people would be third or fourth or fifth or thirty-second "races" depending on the degree or "racial" mixture they inherit; and "sexual orientations" would be as manifold as points on the Kinsey continuum.  The number of genders would approach the number of human beings in the world, with at least one gender for each person.

So American Indian conceptions of gender -- which, remember, vary widely between nations -- are not really so different from Western conceptions.  (Compare the Jungian anima and animus, female and male principles, supposedly present in both sexes in different proportions.  Since they occur in both sexes, it makes no sense to gender them at all.)   Even in contemporary American culture, gender is a troublesome concept, but it doesn't seem that American Indians had better ideas.  Two-spirit Navajo/Oneida contributor Carrie H. House refers to "he-shes and she-hes" as "those who hold in balance the male and female, female and male aspects of themselves in the universe", again speaking of "male and female, female and male" as if they were pre-cultural principles, aspects of the world separate from and prior to the cultural understandings of human beings.  There's good reason to believe they aren't.

Everybody balances "female and male aspects of themselves", because in both human biology and psychology, both sexes combine "female" and "male" qualities.  Testosterone, for example, is conventionally called a "male hormone" and estrogen a "female hormone," but both hormones occur in every human body, only in differing proportions.  Both males and females have nipples, though they're only functional for nursing in females, and not all the time even for them.  Colette Dowling, in The Frailty Myth (Random House, 2000), reports research which found that girls do better overall than boys on fitness tests until their early teens, despite the official standards which expect them to do worse:

At twelve and thirteen [girls] fell behind in sit-ups, and only a handful could meet the boys’ criteria in pull-ups, but their scores overall were so high, they were the fitness winners hands down. So here’s the obvious question, as put by the researchers: “If prepubescent girls are physiologically capable and data from several studies have found no significant differences between boys’ and girls’ performances on fitness test items, then why are American fitness test standards noticeably different for boys and girls of the same age?" [88]

The professor who told sports sociologist Michael Messner, "I always thought that there was something about the female arm that made it impossible to throw [a baseball] like a man," or the Andalusian villagers who told the anthropologist David Gilmore that a married man who helped his wife with the cooking was "performing tasks absolutely unnatural to the male physiology and musculature" (Manhood in the Making, Yale 1990, p. 54) were basically in agreement with American Indian gender norms: if a male does women's work, he's not a man; if a woman throws a baseball like a man, she's not a woman.  Physiological differences between the sexes to justify behavioral differences  are simply invented, as these examples show.  (I think I read somewhere that elementary school boys asserted dogmatically in the 1980s and 1990s that girls can't ride skateboards or play video games because they're built differently than boys.  It goes without saying that these boys had no basis for these claims beyond wishful thinking.)

Psychologically, the differences between males and females are also relative, with greater overlap than difference between the sexes. Dowling again, on psychological testing which aimed to isolate masculinity and femininity:

Over 40 percent of men score above the median on traits considered feminine, and over 40 percent of women score above the median on traits considered masculine -- a substantial overlap if one is looking for attributes to define femininity and masculinity.

Scholars of gender difference constructed these scales, Beall reveals, by selecting questions that men and women responded to differently and then making up a scale accordingly. “The responses that males gave were called masculine and the responses females gave were called feminine,” wrote Beall, who was blowing the whistle on the scale makers, who in essence were creating the difference they were supposed to be discovering. Nineteenth-century concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” remained entrenched in the twentieth, she explains, because investigators never questioned “the theoretical justification for such traits and just assumed the existence of masculinity and femininity, even though many of the scales were not quantitatively reliable.” In such a way can psychologists both create and validate their own theories [49].

The social psychologist Erving Goffman wrote in 1963, before the rise of Second Wave feminism, that

...there are other norms, such as those associated with physical comeliness, which take the form of ideals and constitute standards against which almost everyone falls short at some stage in his life. And even where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of disqualifying many persons. For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America; a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective, this constituting one sense in which one can speak of a common value system in America. Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself -- during moments at least -- as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable [Stigma, Prentice-Hall, p. 128].

But this rejection of a dualistic model of masculinity/femininity never caught on.  Despite its support by lots of empirical evidence, it inspires deep-rooted resistance.  I've found that many people are intensely bothered by it, including (maybe especially) self-styled gender rebels.  One such person, self-identified as genderqueer, seemed upset when I quoted the woman from Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons's Lesbian/Woman (1972: 81), who,

speaking as the new “woman-identified” woman of Gay Women’s Liberation at the 1971 Council on Religion and the Homosexual symposium, was challenged by someone in the audience because of her apparently masculine attire. But Lynda explained, “This short haircut, because it is mine, is a woman’s hairstyle. These so-called men’s boots, because I am wearing them, are women’s boots. This pipe, because I am smoking it, is a woman’s pipe. Whatever women wear is women’s wear. It is a matter of individual choice – and comfort.”

I'm not sure why this statement felt liberating instead of threatening to me when I first read it forty years ago.  But while I understand that the recognition that gender differences are culturally relative, variable, and permeable is upsetting for many people, I don't see how it makes that recognition less valid.  Some people have been just as disturbed by the idea that the earth is round, that it moves, that human beings are descended from other animal species, that dark-skinned people are just as human as pinkish-grey ones, that copulation should only occur between males and females, and so on, yet cultural liberals don't feel any obligation to respect their discomfort about abandoning these boundaries -- on the contrary, they find it exhilarating to mock their discomfort.  But their discomfort should, they believe, be respected.

This is a difficult position to work out, however.  Cultural distinctions are important, and possibly even "real" for some version of that word.  I understand that for many people, assigning certain clothing, hairstyles, work, and other practices to one sex or the other is comforting and meaningful.  These are among the ways of mapping the world that all human beings engage in.  No one is harmed if I, an anatomical male, choose to wear a dress or lipstick, but in order to assert that I must also break the connection between anatomy and culture, "sex" and "gender."  Many people, including many of the transgendered, want to break that connection while still asserting that it's meaningful: that if a woman pees standing up or a man pees sitting down, that's an expression of an essential maleness or femaleness, not a matter of choice and comfort.  They want to maintain the fiction (or myth, in a certain sense of that word) of two distinct, mutually exclusive, essential, natural, pre-cultural genders, but that fiction is unsustainable.

In the long run that fiction is also harmful, even when it includes a loophole like "two-spirit."  (Which, as I've shown, is a dubious one anyway.)  It puts invalid limits on what individuals can do, it allows and requires people to be persecuted for failing to conform to the norm, and the misery it causes many is inextricable from the sense of belonging and fitting that it provides to others.  That doesn't mean that people shouldn't be free to dress, manipulate, decorate, and modify their bodies as they choose, only that that freedom doesn't mean I must accept their account of what they are doing.  A male in a dress and makeup is not thereby a woman, no matter how strongly he feels like one; just as a male who receives another male's penis into his body isn't a woman, even if he maps that experience in terms of maleness and femaleness.  These distinctions and boundaries must be recognized as human constructions, not natural kinds (though even natural kinds do not always constrain us), and as conventional, even arbitrary.  There is no anatomical reason why men should knit and women not, or vice versa.

Can human beings get along without gender -- without, that is, assigning a halo of behaviors to each biological sex?  I doubt it; if we could, we probably would have done so already.  The reproductive difference between males and females is natural, and gender conservatives like to appeal to that.  We are born from female bodies, not male, and until recently, only women could nurse infants (though not always the same women who gave them birth).  But human beings assign gender to traits and behaviors that go far beyond those very limited basic ones, and they cling just as fiercely to them.  The assignment of gender apparently starts in infancy, and what we learn that early is often very difficult to unlearn later.  Unlearn it we must, though, and we must protect children from other children's fantasies about what boys and girls should be.  The same goes for adults, of course.  Unfortunately, most adults' hearts aren't into providing that protection most of the time.

I've referred to We'wha with masculine pronouns in this post partly because Roscoe did, but mainly to try to bring the gender dissonance of a lhamana into greater relief.  To call him "she" would make his adoption of women's clothing and work seem more "natural" to Euro-Americans, by defining his sex according to the work he did.  But his family and neighbors knew perfectly well that he was male.  The role of a lhamana is not, as far as I can tell, to be a woman, but to be a male living as a woman, and that's an important difference.  I'm also thinking of Ursula K Le Guin's line "The King was pregnant," from The Left Hand of Darkness.  Set on a planet whose dominant intelligent species is sexually neutral for most of the time, but become male or female for brief periods of time: the same person might sire children or bear them at different times of life.  Le Guin has said she loved writing that sentence.

In her contribution to Two Spirit People the anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood complains that Roscoe "calls We'wha 'he' despite the fact that We'wha lived as a woman and was perceived as a woman by Western anthropologists" (285); I wouldn't have thought that Western anthropologists' perceptions had any authority in this case, since their inability to comprehend American Indian cultures is precisely what's being criticized in this work.  While We'wha "lived as a woman," he wasn't a woman in his own society, he was a "man-woman."  (A woman doesn't "live as a woman," she is a woman.)  To categorize him as a woman would be to surrender to Western categories, not to respect Zuni ones.

As an analytic classification, gender needs to go.  As Lynda said, whatever a female does is feminine; whatever a male does is masculine.  It isn't easy to shed the illusions we construct about gendered essences, but that is a serious thinker's job.

And Never Mark Twain Shall Meet

I've finally begun reading Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality,* after owning my copy for fifteen years.  (I have other still-unread books I've owned longer.)  It's a well-known book, collecting work by Indian and non-Indian writers, most but not all of them academics, and it's often cited in other works, so it's long past time I read it myself.  So far it's interesting, but of course I still argue with some of the writers' assumptions.

Co-editor Sabine Lang's "Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities," for example, draws on the literature and on Lang's own fieldwork.  She begins by disavowing the term "berdache", which was long used by anthropologists to refer to "alteratively gendered people of either sex" in favor of "two-spirit," and to her credit she announces her intention, that whenever "talking about gender variance in a particular tribe, the terms existing in that tribe will be used" (100).

Lang points out that, though "the role of womanly, two-spirit males in Native American cultures (i.e., American Indian and Inuit-Eskimo) has long been viewed as institutionalized (male) homosexuality", "quite a number of reports mention 'berdache' males living with women or who had sexual relationships with women," and these reports have "been downplayed or overlooked by most writers."  She reminds the reader that "(to my knowledge) most anthropologists who collected data on the lives and sexual relationships of 'berdaches' never talked to a two-spirit person but interviewed members of a given tribe who were knowledgeable as far as their tribe's culture was concerned and were willing to cooperate" (102).  (This failure to talk to two-spirit Indians was already changing by the time Two-Spirit People was published in the 1990s: Lang, Will Roscoe, Sue-Ellen Jacobs and other anthropologists met and interviewed two-spirit people.)

So Lang argues, for good reasons, that

the traditional two-spirit roles ... are apparently not defined in terms of sexual preference; they are defined in terms of gender according to the way a given Native American culture constructs gender and gender roles, as well as appropriate sexual behavior relating to those roles.  Cultural constructions of gender and gender roles varied, and still vary, widely in Native American cultures given the diversity among these cultures. ...

Thus, in many native American cultures there existed -- and in a number of instances still exists -- three or four genders: women, men, two-spirit/womanly males, and, less frequently, two-spirit/manly females.  In each Native American culture that acknowledges multiple genders there also exist specific words to refer to people who are of a gender other than woman or man. ...

These terms do not refer to sexual behavior even though certain kinds of sexual behavior may be considered culturally appropriate for an individual belonging to any gender category [103].

This is all good, and should be known by people of varying backgrounds who still, to this day, equate gender variance among American Indians with homosexuality or gayness, or who talk as though all Indian cultures had the same pan-Indian concept of two-spirit.  ("Two-spirit" is a new word, coined around 1990 by Native American sex/gender variant activists as a substitute for berdache.  Like any such blanket term, it has an unfortunate tendency in use to erase historical and cultural differences.)  But there are problems.

Lang implicitly contrasts the various two-spirit "roles" with other constructions of gender and erotic variance, especially "homosexual," "gay," and "lesbian."  But many of the terms used by European Americans to refer to people who relate erotically to others of their own sex do not "refer to sexual behavior" either.  "Gay" and "lesbian," most obviously, but also older terms popular and clinical: "invert," "pansy," "dyke," "fairy," even "queer."  The older terms especially are based on gendered behavior first, with erotic behavior at most implied, just as Lang says of the Native American terms she lists.  The pansy or fairy was characterized as an effeminate man, given to certain styles of dress (including but not limited to cross-dressing) with a tendency to work in certain occupations (hair-dresser, interior decoration, shop clerk, hairdresser, etc.) and a tendency to want to be penetrated by a "normal" male.  The dyke is a masculine woman, characterized by her manner of dress and her hairstyle, likely to work in male-associated jobs like truck-driving, and drawn to feminine women.  Even the cliched description of the invert, the soul of a woman in the body of a man, refers primarily to gender and not to sexual behavior, and has spiritual connotations not so different from those that supposedly characterize the two-spirit.

So, when Lang goes on to say that

In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between two men or two women -- two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender [104]

-- she's flat wrong.  Her use of the blind passive ("is defined as") is a giveaway: Just who is doing the defining?  I'd really like to know.  Just about the only people I know who define homosexuality in these terms are Western or Western-trained academics like Lang, and they do so solely to distance themselves from that definition.  She can't mean biologists or psychologists, since they overwhelmingly conceptualize homosexuality in terms of inversion.  At the grass-roots level, most American gay people I know of agree that there's some kind of connection between homosexuality and inversion.  The respectability-minded gay people I call Homo-Americans, when they're in public-relations mode, insist that we are and should be gender conformists -- but when they want to raise money for their organizations, they put on drag shows.  And remember the gay male clone who told the gay sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."  So it's hard to be sure, when some avowedly manly gay men throw tantrums over figure skaters, that the same guys don't have a Dolly Parton costume in their closets for those private moments, or enjoy lip-synching with Dianna Agron.  William S. Burroughs "was notoriously dismissive of pansies, fags, and swish" and once raved to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac that "All complete swish fairies should be killed, not as traitors to the cause of queerness, but for selling out the human race to the forces of negation and death"**  -- but in the 1980s documentary Burroughs Allen Ginsberg affably reminisced with Old Bull Burroughs about their youthful drag personae; I believe Burroughs was The Countess.  But maybe he wasn't a complete swish fairy.

So what could Lang have meant?  My point is not that homosexuality really, essentially does equal inversion, it's that there is no such thing as the Western definition of homosexuality: there are several.  They coexist, however uneasily, and interpenetrate.  But the inversion model is prominent among them, and probably dominant (or hegemonic, as they say).

A few pages later, Lang writes,

Because most anthropological researchers classified relationships between two-spirit males and men and two-spirit females and women as homosexual, when doing fieldwork in North American cultures they failed to look for relationships involving two persons of the same sex and the same gender.  Thus, hardly anything is known about the way homosexual relations in the Western sense were seen in Native American cultures at a time when two-spirit roles were still largely intact and about concepts of homosexuality that may have existed in American Indian cultures before the massive impact of Western influences.  It seems, however, that there was generally no way to acknowledge a sexual relationship between two men formally, or between two women formally, the way various kinds of heterogender relationships (woman and man, male two-spirit and man, or female two-spirit and woman) were acknowledged formally [106-7].

If non-Indian anthropologists defined homosexuality as sex between two individuals of the same sex and same gender, then why did they classify relationships between a two-spirit male and a social man as "homosexual"?  On Lang's assumptions, they should have regarded it as something totally foreign to their culture, looked (apparently in vain) for homogender homosexuality, and concluded that there was no "homosexuality" in American Indian cultures.  Instead, Lang says, they looked at two-spirits and classified them as "homosexual."  This makes no sense, on Lang's assumptions.  It makes plenty of sense, however, if we recognize that the dominant "Western" model of The Homosexual was the invert, and the model of "homosexual" relationships was heterogender.  Indeed, Will Roscoe has shown*** that the doctors who constructed the European medical model of inversion drew on American Indian "berdaches" as one of their historical inspirations.

Suddenly Lang is concerned to discover evidence of homogender homoeroticism among the Indians.  I think it is a safe bet that social males did sometimes have sex with one another and even form enduring bonds with one another, as did social females.  This also happened in the West despite the dominance of the inversion model.  But homogender relations were, as Lang admits, rendered invisible by a conceptual model that refused to admit their existence, and other writers in Two-Spirit People offer evidence that homogender sex was usually proscribed among the Indians, whether between social males/females or between same-gender two-spirits.

Lang herself writes that among the Shoshoni, "The only sexual relationship that is considered inappropriate is between two taina wa'ippe [i.e., two-spirits].  Such a relationship seems to be viewed as incestuous because male taina wa'ippe regard each other as 'sisters'" (106).  But the rejection of sexual relations between inverts is worldwide, with terms like "incest," "lesbianism," and even "cannibalism" used to express their abhorrence of the very idea.  Annick Prieur reports in her study of Mexico City vestidas that she has "also heard jotas comment with disgust at the sight of two mustache-wearing men kissing each other, seeing it as something "abnormal." ****  Yet Mexico is a "Western" culture.

Despite all the evidence of variety and difference within cultures, even dissident anthropologists and sociologists have an amazingly difficult time recognizing that societies aren't uniform or monolithic.  I don't know what to do about this resistance, but it's a problem: it distorts not only their understanding of other cultures, but of their own.

------------------------
* Edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

** Quoted in Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (Manchester, 2010), 171-2.

*** In Roscoe, "Was We'Wha a Homosexual? Native American Survivance and the Two-Spirit Tradition," GLQ (1995) 2(3), 193-235, esp. 215.

**** Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago, 1998), 149.