- Joined
- Jun 16, 2020
I'm actually about halfway through a thesis about the berdache/"two-spirit" among Native American cultures and it's interesting what it was and what it wasn't.
To add to that:
Two-spirit is, as you said, a recent term. The term itself, as well as its predecessor "berdache" are umbrella terms for ease of communication. Tribes that had roles that fit under the term "two-spirit" are not the same as each other. In other words, a tribe may have a role for a man that lives as a woman, marries men, and plays a spiritual role, whereas another tribe may have a role for a cross-dresser. Despite the differences between these roles they would both be considered two-spirit.
All indigenous tribes had their own cultures even though some of them have been homogenized in recent times (due to assimilation, loss of tribal knowledge, etc.). So as a result, there also were tribes that were hostile towards two-spirit type roles.
You may find that some two-spirit activists insist that pre-Columbian America was a Utopia of gender-nonconforming tolerance, but that simply is not true.
Another thing I'd like to add is that frequency of two-spirit roles differed based on tribe, so while X tribe might have had 1/100 people being a two-spirit, Y tribe had 1/500 people being two-spirit.
There are still a ton of misconceptions in the alphabet community about what two-spirit is and what it isn't.
Last edited: