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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3929 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I'm curious about the two spirit as know next to nothing about indigenous American cultures. Taking from Paul Vaseys commentary on the fa'afine and some experience of Samoan culture I would assume other cultures have related versions, ie a way to resolve homosexuality and male feminity as a third way distinct from traditional and actually pretty restrictive gender roles. This is pretty far removed of the born in the wrong body narrative, the body is accepted as what it is. What's the case with two-spirit, I know from tv-history these cultures have ideas around spirit animals, but assume this is in the realm of metaphor/the imaginal. It strikes me that it would be maladaptive for an indigenous culture to sway too much from tangible realities so I'm suspicious how alike these ideas really are to the current ideas, which I put in the realm of luxury gnosticism.

My understanding is that the two-spirit thing was real, but not all that widespread -- and looked more like "camp bitch" than "fabulous magic-person".

Just a category to put guys in who were no good at the manly-man stuff, but (obviously) no good at the 'bearing children' part of being a woman.

Making such people useful and feeling like they have a place to fill is probably pretty adaptive -- but I get the distinct impression that none of this meant that they were treated all that great.

The closest continuing equivalent to the two-spirits today are the Hijras, AFAIK, and they don’t seem to be treated particularly well.

Hijras are cunts who normally make a living by extortion, demanding money as bribes on the pain of making sexually embarrassing comments, groping you or causing a fuss at events. They get treated accordingly.

It seems plausible that two spirits were often the same thing back in the day- certainly nobody who remembers them is still alive.

That would have been my guess about it. I suspect that the cooption of indigenous cultures by the gender ideology lobby is almost entirely sophistry and really a form of neo-colonisation. I suspect what these cultures really teach us are different models of acceptance of gender nonconformity, which we could actually learn from.

I did find some references at one point, but it was awhile ago (around the dawning of WWtrans) and will probably be hard to pick out with search engines these days -- the primary sources for the phenomenon as I recall are pretty contested and heavily weighted towards early European exoticism. Certainly nothing pattern matches to this in the groups I'm familiar with as of the 19th/early 20th centuries.

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