A Navajo two-spirit couple is seen in this historic photo from the collection of the Museum of New Mexico. Photo by Bosque Redondo, 1866.
Do I need to state the obvious again? Biologists keep telling everyone that sex and gender are a lot more complex and diverse than the binary bill of goods the ideologues try to sell you. Now let’s add another scientific discipline shouting the truth at the public, with Archaeologists for Trans Liberation.
Human biology extends beyond and between “Male” and “Female”
The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.
Identifying and understanding past people’s conceptions and experiences of gender is not straightforward. The further back one goes, the fewer and more fragmented the traces of people’s lives become and the more complicated it is to interpret and understand them. We work from scraps to construct narratives that are messy, ragged and rarely twine together.
It’s a very thorough article, and well referenced. I especially appreciate the bits we mere biologists don’t know as much about.
Our current social organization, based around strict lines delineating gender, primary sex characteristics, and sexuality, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged as part of European hegemonic colonialism and serves to enforce and maintain capitalist norms in the home and wider society (Monaghan 2015). An imposed and rigid gender binary regulates reproduction (a concern of nationalist states), breaks down Indigenous and non-European kin connections and families (perpetuating genocide), and positions the household as a site of capitalist surplus accumulation (through regulated social roles and relations of (re)production) (Morgensen 2010, 2012).
Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies critics such as Deborah Miranda (2010) and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) have documented the ways in which colonial governments engaged in violent projects of gender normalization targeting Indigenous individuals and communities. Daniel Justice (2010) draws on archaeological materials as resources for inspiring queer Cherokee worldviews, politics, and modes of belonging. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, in her academic writing (2018) and public scholarship (Wilber, Small-Rodriguez and Keene 2019), explores the way binary structures colonised bodies and beds, breaking and distorting traditional kin relations.
Such practices seem to have been a regular or even necessary force in sustaining European colonial violence across the globe. Religious strictures against ‘sodomy’ (which often glossed a range of non-heteronormative sex practices) were frequently used by European colonial and religious authorities to punish gender nonconforming individuals in Africa and South America. Epprecht notes that the British South African Company was particularly enthusiastic in prosecuting “homosexual crimes” during its first year of occupation of Zimbabwe, suggesting the commonplace nature of non-heteronormative relationships prior to Colonization, and “[indicating] a reflexive defense of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity by the homophobic representatives of the colonial state” (Epprecht 1998: 217). British colonial sodomy laws, despite no longer being in place in the U.K., remain on the books in many colonised countries, and continue to drive state violence and acts of bigotry against queer and gender diverse people (Sanders 2009; Semugoma 2012).
That does explain why so many of the status quo warriors are vehement in their denial of the science.
Related, 1,000-year-old remains in Finland may be non-binary iron age leader:
Gardeła might be extrapolating a bit too far from one sample, perhaps better to say the individual was seems to have been accepted or at least respected in their society?
I’m reminded of a story by E. M. Forster (A Passage to India,
Maurice, and the remarkable early science fiction story “The Machine Stops”).
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/13/archives/the-life-to-come.html
++++++
The Life To Come
By Eudora Welty
May 13, 1973
“The Life to Come” is the title of a short story that was
written 70 years ago by E. M. Forster and is receiving its first
publication today. The author himself valued it: it “came more
from my heart than anything else I have been able to turn out,”
containing “a great deal of sorrow and passion that I have
myself experienced.” But because the sorrow and passion had
a homosexual nature, the story has gone unpublished. . .
+++++
+++++
Love had been born somewhere in the forest, of what quality only the
future could decide. Trivial or immortal, it had been born to two
human bodies as a midnight cry. Impossible to tell whence the cry
had come, so dark was the forest. Or into what worlds it would echo,
so vast was the forest. Love had been born for good or evil, for
a long life or a short.
There was hidden among the undergrowth of that wild region a
small native hut. Here, after the cry had died away, a light
was kindled. It shone upon the pagan limbs and the golden
ruffled hair of a young man. . . [H]e caught sight of a book on
the floor, and he dropped beside it with a dramatic moan. . .
For the book in question was his Holy Bible. . . “Oh, what have
I done?” . . .
[T]he other missionaries. . . saw at once from his face that
he had failed. Nor had they expected otherwise. The Roman Catholics,
far more expert than themselves, had failed to convert Vithobai,
the wildest, strongest, most stubborn of all the inland chiefs.
And Paul Pinmay (for this was the young man’s name) was at that
time a very young man indeed, and had partly been sent in order
that he might discover his own limitations. He was inclined
to be impatient and headstrong, he knew little of the language
and still less of native psychology, and indeed he disdained
to study this last, declaring in his naïve way that human
nature is the same all over the world. . .
And he recalled Vithobai, Vithobai the unapproachable, coming
into his hut out of the darkness and smiling at him. Oh how
delighted he had been! Oh how surprised! He had scarcely
recognized the sardonic chief in this gracious and bare-limbed
boy, whose only ornaments were scarlet flowers. Vithobai had
laid all formality aside. “I have come secretly,” were his
first words. “I wish to hear more about this god whose name
is love.” . . . “Come to Christ!” he had cried, and Vithobai
had said “Is that your name?” He explained No, his name was
not Christ, although he had the fortune to be called Paul after
a great apostle. . . [A]nd they sat together upon the couch
that was almost a throne. . . and spoke of the love of Christ
and of our love for each other in Christ. . . Vithobai
said, “This is the first time I have heard such words, I
like them,” and drew closer. . . And he saw how intelligent
the boy was and how handsome. . . and then imprinted a kiss
on his forehead and drew him to Abraham’s bosom. And Vithobai
had lain in it gladly — too gladly and too long — and had
extinguished the lamp. And God alone saw them after that. . .
+++++
It all ends rather tragically, as you might expect.
— E. M. Forster, “The Life to Come” in The Life to Come:
And Other Stories (1987)
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Come-Other-Stories/dp/0393304426
https://gaymensbookclubbristol.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/the-life-to-come-and-other-stories-e-m-forster/
There’s also the fact that as far back as we can go, there have been societies and groups within them that did not fit into a strict and immutable gender binary. I’m reluctant to use the word “transgender” for the way people outside of modern western societies saw things, but there’s clear evidence of people taking on the roles of a sex they were not assigned at birth (to use the modern terminology.) The worship of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (a.k.a. Ishtar) in the third millenium BC apparently involved men temporarily or permanently taking on the role of women. Leslie Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors has a large section describing non-cis gender through history.
If anything, Western culture is unusual among cultures in not having any socially approved forms of non-cis gender.
Re blf at 1:
When I read a Finnish news report of the Suontaka* grave analysis, the main finding was supposedly that the buried person was karyotyped XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), and their gender is therefore even more unclear than previously thought.
Initial analysis of the grave in 1968 concluded that the person was “likely a woman with some unusual grave items”. There were only a few decayed fragments of bone, so no anatomical cues, and the recent DNA analysis was only barely possible. A Klinefelter individual would have appeared male at birth, possibly intersex in adulthood. The person could have identified as a woman, man or not quite either, though I guess in any case there was as least some bending of usual gender expression.
For what it’s worth, I’m not aware of any third gender recognition or gender bending being reflected in Finnish folklore. In 11th century, Christianity was just beginning to influence the culture in southern Finland, and almost no written record exists until 16th century.
*Name of a village in Hattula municipality; Vesitorninmäki is the name of a hill that indicates more precise location.
Because it bears repeating:
If anything, Western culture is unusual among cultures in not having any socially approved forms of non-cis gender.
I have heard African religious leaders saying that talk of LGBTQ rights is a recent western import and they’ll keep their own traditions, thank you so very much.
I can’t help seeing a parallel with the people complaining bitterly about “woke leftists” “rewriting history” by challenging white supremacist propaganda from the 1920s