Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.
On the “berdache” thing,
A couple points to note about “gender roles” in indigenous cultures:
The most important distinction between indigenous cultures and modern Western culture is the deep social and psychological distinction between collectivism and individualism. Virtually all indigenous cultures were (and are, in the case of those that still exist) collectivist, which is to say that everyone within them was/is raised to conceive of themself as a part of a whole — that the tribe or community itself consists of the “individual” and that each of us serves a small role within it. In a tribal collective, we are only a small part of the “person” that is conceptualized as the shared sense of connectedness with the collective. In a deep psychological sense, the tribe itself is the “individual” and one’s sense of purpose and accomplishment in life is derived from serving the tribe — ably and nobly doing one’s duty to the collective.
In this context, males and females in indigenous North America were designated right from birth into two separate channels of upbringing, to prepare them for the limited menu of roles available to women within the collective such as foraging, housekeeping, and child-rearing, and the limited menu of roles available to men within the collective such as hunting, governing, and tribal defence/warfare. So-called “third gender” roles such as berdache represented males whose demeanors were deemed ill-fit to serve the roles of hunters, governors, or warriors, because these men failed to socialize into the aggressive masculine behaviour profile and social role that males were expected to perform. In the modern context, we recognize these males to have been feminine, and most likely homosexual, men, but in the context of collectivism, they failed to meet the utilitarian standards associated with manhood, so they failed to be categorized as men at all.
But, indigenous cultures being very efficient with their resources, rather than exiling or executing feminine young men, they often found alternate uses for them within the collective. If a young male was perceived to be failing to sufficiently masculinize himself during his upbringing, he was re-categorized as a “berdache” — a separate “gender role” from both the masculine “man” gender role and the feminine “woman” one (he surely wasn’t a woman either, because he couldn’t bear children) — and he was given an alternative “third menu” of roles he could serve within the collective. This menu consisted generally of being put in charge of rituals and spiritualism — he became the village shaman — or he was assigned an alternative kind of household management — something akin to a “spinster aunt” who helps with childraising and other duties within a sibling’s household. Berdaches’ costume options were designated as separate from men’s, too, and they were generally more in line with the costumery typically prescribed to females within the tribe.
So feminine men were given a “special” status within many indigenous tribes (at least the resource-conserving ones that don’t simply choose to quietly execute the “runt” gay males instead), and they were often treated as extra spiritual and more in touch with the supernatural world. (This practice has even carried over somewhat into the modern Western world, for example with many feminine homosexual men going into the clergy because they couldn’t bring themselves to marry and settle into a straight household, or find any other comfort within the straight social roles that society makes available to men.)
To some degree, gender stereotype defying females also got designated as “third gender” or “berdache” and they, too, were given a small alternative menu of social roles they could perform within their indigenous tribes. But that was a less common occurrence because, alas, many tribes wanted to make sure every adult capable of bearing children (i.e., every female) got slotted into the social role that made that happen.
Another important distinction about “berdache” is that it wasn’t a choice that any male or female could freely make: these were collectivist cultures in which free individual choice was so limited as to be almost an alien concept. Males were desginated “berdache” by collective consensus (or decree by the tribal chief or council), by virtue of demonstrating their inability to live up to masculine “gender roles” (and to a lesser degree females were designated berdache by demonstrating an inability to live up to feminine gender roles) and demonstrating their suitability for the spiritual one instead.
It’s a common misunderstanding among people who have been raised in the modern individualist context that the existence of “berdache” in the North American indigenous past is proof that people back then were more free to “gender express” than they are today. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Modern cultural individualism is founded in the Enlightenment principle of individual freedom, which strives to dispose of the concept altogether that any one of us is born into a limited menu of roles designed to serve the tribe or clan or fiefdom we were born into. Individualism stems from a much more advanced, more complex, and more large-scale organization of society, which posits that if we all coordinate en masse and offer more social mobility to everyone, that each individual may find his or her way to the role in life that best satisfies their own personal desires, and that they may set their own life goals as a result. A pauper could in principle become President; a woman could become a firefighter; the son of a railroad tycoon could find his bliss as a Spanish Flamenco guitar teacher or whatever. And feminine males and masculine females are free to pursue whatever goals they like, because in a big enough society, there will always be a role for them that maximizes their chances at satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
The trajectory of liberalism in the West has been mostly to make strides toward such an ideal world. That is, until transgender ideology came along, which represents a massive lurch back towards the idea of assigned “gender roles” at birth and strict social categories based on sex.
Transgender ideology is a terrible conflation of the strict division of sex in terms of its role in human reproduction and sexuality (in which context sex is indeed fixed and unchangeable), with the old outdated strict division of sex in terms of limited assigned roles within small tribal communities that struggled to survive in harsh environments. It’s an absolute wrong turn. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the foundational principles of the Enlightenment, of humanism, and of progress itself.
