Found this exceptionalism today:
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Say it with me: cultures with a third gender are/were typically ones that felt the need to create a new category for gay/GNC people because they had rigid gender stereotypes. Indigenous tribes viewing gay men as "not men" and therefor in need of a separate gender is not the same as teenagers on Tumblr renaming themselves "Kai" and going by "they/them." The idea that who someone fucks or what they do for a living changes their gender is pretty un-woke when you actually think about it.
Let's take a closer look at these examples (some of which are misspelled.) Māhū were biologically male-- they were men who performed "feminine" tasks still considered to be inappropriate for women. For the longest time, the term was believed to just be the Hawaiian word for homosexual (it isn't-- it's more like a description of profession.) Faʻafafine is literally the exact same thing, but in Samoa instead of Hawaii. It's an adjective that literally just translates to "effeminate" (wow, such third gender, much abolition of gender roles.) "Hijra" is just the Hindi word for "eunuch" which people in modern times have appropriated to apply to Tumblr genders. The only one of these that really holds water as being analogous to modern day troons and genderspecials is the five genders the Bugis people have, which are basically male, female, FTM, MTF, and "Bissu." Hmm, that's funny, I thought considering trannies to be a separate gender from normal men and women is wrong, but I guess TRAs are willing to overlook that so long as they can use this obscure culture to prove a point.
Notice how the argument being made by this meme basically amounts to "well, ethnic minorities do it, so if you object to it you're RACIST!!1!" I shouldn't have to say why that's absurd. Even setting aside the fact that these cultures all have third genders
as a result of rigid gender stereotypes, something shouldn't just be okay because it happens to be practiced by a persecuted group. For instance, there are cultures out there that practice FGM. Does that mean the culture is evil, or that its people are? No. However, culture should never be used as an excuse to infringe on other peoples' human rights, and FGM is very much that. You can disagree with certain inhumane practices in a culture without hating or disenfranchising an entire ethnic group.
Also, if we're going to use Tumblrina logic to fight Tumblrina logic-- stop using brown people as props or points of argumentation. Whens the last time ANYONE in this thread encountered a genderspecial that wasn't lily-white? The only "two spirit" person I can think of is Kent Monkman, who goes by "he" and is by all accounts just a gay man (and also never even lived an a reservation.) Also, yeah, the "two spirit" thing is once again just like the Māhū-- a third "gender" that was mostly created because they needed "female" equivalents in ceremonies that women were forbidden from participating in. I fail to see how that's progressive, but people took it and ran with it and now it's just another term for genderspecial.
