A comparative study of North American gender concepts
by: Charlie Yale
Omaha — The perceived history of gender and sex is shorter and less nuanced than one may expect. Sex is something that is assigned to one at birth and has lasting ramifications in every single interaction for the rest of one’s life, based on the presence or absence of certain genitalia, on a spectrum. Gender is the interpretation of physical and mental traits assigned to a certain location on a spectrum.
Without putting much thought into it, it’s hard to believe that gender hasn’t always been around. But its inception and definition as a concept is relatively recent development. Matter of fact, gender was a feminist concept created to distinguish physical and biological traits from sex (1). Gender itself is not innate. Sex is something that is given, and gender provides liberation. At the same time, people have deviated from the norms of “biological sex” for ages, much longer than the concept of gender has been around.
Biological sex itself is on a spectrum; many humans cannot fit under the labels of “female” or “male,” and it’s estimated that about 2% of the world is intersex. That’s about the same amount of people who have red hair. If you know a ginger, you probably know an intersex person.
Gender has been changing and shifting since its invention. We can use gender as a lens to look back at societal roles, which provides an important lens when looking at the history and liberation of women and LGBTQ+ individuals. Gender perception gives us an important look into every single aspect of life, because almost every single interaction one may have will probably be dictated by it.
Most societies, including the United States of America, view sex as an incredibly binary label. You are a man or a woman; a boy or a girl; there is no in between. It functions as an organizing principle of society, sorting people nicely into one of two labels. Growing up in America, this is something that I’ve become increasingly aware of as I’ve aged into my rebellious teen years. The conditioning of gender starts before one is born. Parents often opt to get ultrasounds; imaging tests that allow doctors to see and check the fetus for any health problems. This serves its purpose medically, but it also provides a second, seemingly more coveted answer: ultrasounds can determine whether a fetus has a penis or not.
Many parents opt to have a gender reveal for their child. This can mean, in some cases, popping a balloon to reveal blue or pink dust. “It’s a boy!” In other cases, gender reveals start forest fires. American culture prescribes so much value and worth to the question of whether a child has a penis or a vagina, and this singular biological feature determines every single social interaction a person will have from the moment they are born until the moment they pass away. Before a child is born, the parents will decorate its room in a powder blue or a light pink, and all the baby’s clothes, toys, books, bottles, and other supplies purchased thereafter will be determined by the presence of a certain type of genitalia.
Gendered socialization continues much past infancy, but it’s important to look back and see how gender got to this point in the United States in the first place. Like I explained earlier, gender is a created concept to help break free from the confines of sex. But if that were truly the case, everything I just explained would be contradictory. We are predisposed to categorize things as masculine or feminine, even with little to no predisposition of what falls underneath each of these labels. The creators of the concept of gender sought to define gender as a category to be something “far from static,” in a similar fashion to how the concept of race was developed (2). High heels were created for men, and women in the United States pioneered the beer brewing industry. Every single theme, event, or action in the history of the United States is susceptible and has been affected by our predisposed definitions of masculinity and femininity.
This is far from abnormal, as a gender binary pops up in seemingly every single culture (2). The differentiation of masculinity and femininity, though, is relative to every culture. The common thread is that they only seem to occur as opposites, no matter the situation. The only reason that they are “stable” classifications is because they are contrary to each other, not only in American society but broadly around the rest of the world. In some way, their contrarian nature compliments the existence of gender, as gender can be seen in an infinite combination of any number of traits that we will prescribe different words to because gender works on a relative basis.
Well, I feel as if I’ve tied myself into a knot. Gender in the United States is confusing and contradictory. It’s probably because we created it and force people to conform to a system that straight up isn’t meant to fit everyone possible.
Gender in the United States, as strict as it may seem, is an ever-evolving beast. Gender in the United States still adheres to a binary, as seen through how restrooms, clothes, toys, and many other units are “gendered” for “men” or “women.” But the LGBTQ+ movement has created space for non-binary and binary transgender individuals to find a spot on the spectrum. Gender neutral labels for items are becoming more common. While there are questions of whether this rise comes from true understanding and representation or consumerism (3), the inclusion of non-binary and transgender people in society is essential. The gender plane is ever shifting its multi-dimensional path, and as the ones “doing” gender, we get to sit along for the ride.
Gender, as explained earlier, is an entirely relative process. In Dinéh (Navajo) culture, there is a gender that exists falling outside of the masculine or feminine genders that are found in most other cultures. This is a phenomenon not only experienced by the Navajo, but many other indigenous tribes of the Americas subscribe to this same categorization process (with obviously nuanced differences between the cultures, but an overarching similarity of the term) called “Two-Spirit.” Two-spirit refers to a person who has both a “masculine and feminine spirit, and is a term used by some indigenous people to describe gender, sexuality, and/or spiritual identity,” (4). In Navajo culture, we see not only the definition of a gender outside the binary, but a term that intersects gender, sexuality, and spiritual identity.
At least 155 Native American tribes embrace two-spirit culture (5). Matter of fact, even tribes that lack record of a third gender does not directly disprove that third and fourth genders do not/did not exist for a multitude of reasons. For example, take Cherokee culture. There is no direct evidence that the Cherokee Tribe cultivated a two-spirit culture, but there is “nonetheless” a belief that this culture existed and exists to this day. Many indigenous tribes did not and still do not subscribe to the gender binary and the European concept of “given sex is gender,” (5). This means that terms like homosexual or heterosexual do not apply to two-spirited individuals, as these individuals often engage in sexual encounters with both women and men. The term two-spirit is interesting and all-encompassing because it not only covers gender, but it creates a category that combines gender with sexuality, two distinct but related concepts. But this doesn’t change the fact that being third gender in some capacity relied upon how the person’s “special qualities” were incorporated into the social or religious life of the tribe (5). Because two-spirited individuals are not restricted by the confines of masculinity and femininity, they fill a special “niche” within their tribe.
The precise terminology for two-spirited individuals varies among each tribe. For example, the Dinéh people use the term “nádleehí” while the Lakota use the term “winkt.” In the Zuni Tribe, two-spirited individuals were “the most intelligent” and the members of the tribe with “the strongest character,” (4).
Two-spirits often took an important role in religious life. Some tribes believed “the gender different were possessed of a special relationship with the Creator because they were seen as being able to bridge the personal and spiritual gap between men and women,” (5).
What I noticed throughout my research for my project was the constant referencing of two-spirits as “male” or “female” bodied. Even when doing an analysis of culture, it is impossible to talk about gender without relating it back to sex, even when the gender is outside of the binary.
And as always, European colonization had a negative and destructive influence on Indigenous culture, including two-spirit culture.
As Europeans imposed their own religious and social structures on the tribes, the demise of two-spirit culture resulted. Religious violence and condemnation against two-spirits ensued, causing the erosion of this important aspect of Native American culture. Our very system of gender in the United States is based off an imperialist conquest to Christianize and white-wash Native American culture. The government appointed “Indian Agents” to oversee reservations with the “overarching goal of encouraging Native Americans to adopt non-Indian culture… By the early 1880s, Indian Agents were using the Religious Crime Code to ‘aggressively attack Native sexual and marriage practices,’” (5).
Cristian missionaries tried to eradicate any trace of “third-gendered” individuals in indigenous culture, forcing two-spirits to dress and act in a way that didn’t adhere to how they identified. Transphobia, homophobia, and racism against Indigenous Peoples in the Americas stems from white Christian imperialists imposing their archaic views upon societies that simply had a different set of values and norms.
A Crow tribe elder explained “We don’t waste people the way white society does. Every person has their gift,” (5).
To an outsider, this quote perfectly points out the differences between the system of gender in the United States versus gender in Native American tribes. The United States is stuck to an extremely strict and exclusionary binary, which, speaking from personal experience, does not fit everyone that it can. I still consider myself to be a man, yet I don’t believe that there is a place for me on the American gender binary because of how the values are “enforced.” Native American gender, as an oversimplification, seems to be freer flowing and accessible to all. This is not to say that white people should identify as two-spirit; it is a strictly Native American term and outside of this use it is appropriation. But it forces us to reconsider our system -- our contract -- of gender, and ask, “Is this really what we want?”
It is not that gender roles are different amongst Native American and United States culture; that is a given since the rules of masculinity and femininity are relative. It is the fact that the concept of gender itself is relative alongside the roles that are prescribed because of it. Gender is a cultural universal in the way it is executed. Masculinity and femininity are not. They exist, in some form, in most if not all cultures, but they are only relative to each other, and they become useless in a scenario with options outside of it. The only truth of western gender is contradiction.
Works Cited:
1. The MIT Press Reader. 8 June 2022, thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-its-more-recent-than-you-may-realize/. Accessed 7 Oct. 2022.
2. Public Broadcasting Service. 30 June 2021, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/rainbow-capitalism-raises-questions-about-corporate-commitments-and-pride-months-purpose. Accessed 10 Oct. 2022.
3. Cott, Nancy. "What Is Gender History?" College Board, AP/College Board, 2005, apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-united-states-history/classroom-resources/what-is-gender-history. Accessed 10 Oct. 2022.
4. LGBTQ2S+ Health. lgbtqhealth.ca/community/two-spirit.php. Accessed 10 Oct. 2022.
5. Wilson, Trista. “Changed Embraces, Changes Embraced? Renouncing The
Heterosexist Majority In Favor Of A Return To Traditional Two-Spirit Culture.” American Indian Law Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 161–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41495705. Accessed 11 Oct. 2022
