Third and Fourth Genders

Herewith some notes on gender complexity in various cultures, relevant to the question of gender in the Ancient Near East. (I'll add additional notes to this posting as I find more references. Last update 10 February 2018 (bit from Amazons and Military Maids).)

Wheelwright, Julie. "Introduction". In Amazons and Military Maids: women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Pandora, London; San Francisco, 1990.

"Anthropologist Claude E. Schaeffer collected oral accounts from what is now southern British Columbia, about the miraculous transformation of a Kutenai woman. She married a Quebecois fur trader in 1809 but returned to her family the following year claiming that her husband had performed an 'operation' on her. 'I am a man now,' she told her relatuves. 'We Indians did not believe the white people possessed such power from the supernaturals. I can tell you they do, greater power than we have. They changed my sex while I was with them.' Newly renamed as Kauxuma Nu Pika, which translates as 'gone to the spirits', she continued to live as a man until her death in 1837." (p xv)

Johnson, Crystal. "Napanangka: the true power of being proud". In Colouring the rainbow: blak queer and trans perspectives life stories and essays by first nations people of Australia. Edited by Dino Hodge. Mile End, SA, Wakefield Press, 2015.

"One day when I was a bit older, in my teens, I sat down with my grandmother and said to her about why she didn't mind me wearing girl's clothes. She said that there were always sistergirls [trans women] in Aboriginal culture and there always were trans people long before European settlement in Australia. And people like her tribal group - being the last tribe to be discovered in Australia - I believe her for that because she didn't come into contact with a white person until she was a teenager. In Arrente they call us 'gawarregwarre'; Luritja mob, they say like 'kungakunga,' same again, meaning like 'girl girl'; Warlpiri, they say 'karnta-pia'. The trans women at that time would join the women to do traditional women duties like cooking, collecting bush fruit, growing up the children, and making bush medicine. They'd go through women's ceremony and they'd be respected as women. They'd have relationships with men and be married because they'd be identified as straight women." (p 37)

Hollimon, Sandra. "Warfare and Gender in the Northern Plains: Osteological Evidence of Trauma Reconsidered." in Arnold, Bettina and Nancy L. Wicker (eds). Gender and the Archaeology of Death. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press, c2001.

Third and fourth genders ("Two-Spirit People") in Plains Indian society have been "extensively documented", with the emphasis on biological males who adopt feminine dress and occupations. "It appears that for some North American groups, a combination of characteristics qualified a female person as belonging to a named 'fourth gender'; these include participation in male-dominated subsistence activities such as hunting, inclusion in war parties as armed combatants, occasional and/or partial cross-dressing, sexual activity with women, and refusal to marry men."

Two-spirit men participated in war parties, and in some cultures, were considered lucky to have along. Hollimon notes that "The gender role designated 'warrior woman' can be distinguished from the occasional participation of women in war parties" - she fought often, was good at it, and it was clearly a part of her identity.In some societies, women who dreamed of "Double Woman" "were given sexual license that was unavailable to normative women" and "might obtain power to make medicines or war shields, amongst other skills."

[Tons of references. I don't want to go too berserk, but I would like to get my hands on the books Two-Spirit People (1997) and Changing Ones (1998).]

Crass, Barbara A. "Gender and Mortuary Analysis". in Arnold, Bettina and Nancy L. Wicker (eds). Gender and the Archaeology of Death. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press, c2001.

Inuit gender is amazing. For one thing, Inuit languages lack gendered pronouns. For another, the division of labour is "fluid and flexible", with men cooking and sewing and women sealing and whaling. But this is the part that blew my mind: "Personal names are considered an aspect of one of the souls (most groups believe in two) the Inuit possess... When the name of a recently deceased relative or community member is given to a newborn, the infant is believed to acquire some of the wisdom, skills, and traits of the deceased. The child becomes a living representative of the deceased person, who is often viewed as being partially reincarnated. This procedure may be repeated, resulting in the child assuming multiple gender roles..." One Inuit boy was called "stepmother" by his dad and "aunt" by his mum, "for these were their respective relationships to the woman whose soul was the boy's guardian."

Inuit clothing is gendered - for example, a woman's parka has a hood big enough to carry a child in, slung against her back - but Crass gives various examples of cross-dressing. "Among the Caribou Inuit, a child given the name of a deceased relative of the opposite sex wore the clothing of that sex." Shamans are androgynous, "occupying a shifting position between male and female. Their clothing could combine the characteristic features of both sexes".

But to get to the specific topic of this posting: "biological males who dressed, worked, and lived as females are described among the Inuit of Kodiak Island.. Often these transformers were shamans, but all gender transformers were influential. Some of them were males raised as females from infancy, either because of their 'feminine' appearance or a desire of the parents to have a daughter. Parents could designate a male child to become a shaman at birth and raise that child as a female."

Crass notes that no "female-to-male gender transformers are reported" from the Island, but also that they are sometimes "invisible" to "naive ethnographers" - such as the chap who, in 1980 in Greenland, "had an opportunity to observe two female gender transformers... but could not distinguish them from the men. They were both good sealers and clever at women's work." (Hollimon makes the same point about Plains Indians.)

(I found more examples of Inuit gender complexity in an online book review.)

Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs. Penguin, London, 1977.

In the fifties, Thesiger spent long periods of time in southern Iraq, living amongst the 'Marshmen'. These guys are still around, but they had a bastard of a time under Saddam. Some fled to Australia, where of course we treated them like criminals. *grinds teeth together* Anyway:

"'A mustarjil is born a woman,' Amara explained. 'She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man.'

'Do men accept her?'

'Certainly. We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif. When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her. We never do that for a woman. In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman.'

'Do they always wear their hair plaited?'

'Usually they shave it off like men.'

'Do mustarjils ever marry?'

'No, they sleep with women as we do.'

Once, however, we were in a village for a marriage, when the bride, to everyone's amazement, was in fact a mustarjil. In this case she had agreed to wear women's clothes and to sleep with her husband on the condition that he never asked her to do women's work. The mustarjils were much respected, and their nearest equivalent seemed to be the Amazons of antiquity.'

(Thesiger also encounters a Marsh Arab transwoman: 'I often noticed the same man washing dishes on the river bank with the women. Accepted by them, he seemed quite at home. These people were kinder to him than we would have been in our society.')

The thing about not having to do woman's work reminds me of the bridal Inanna's wriggling out of the womanly work of weaving. (Although her brother Utu promises to bring her the fully processed textiles, I'll bet he didn't have to pluck, comb, spin, braid, warp, weave, and dye them himself! I wonder who got stuck with the job?)

Note to self: find out whether 'the heart of a man', in Arabic, has the same sense of 'heart' as in English, or as in Sumerian or Egyptian: does Amara the canoeboy mean 'courage', or something more like 'mind' or 'soul'?

Stylianoudi, M.-G. Lily. "On Transvestism". in Berggreen, Brit and Nanno Marinatos (eds). Greece and Gender. Bergen, Norway, Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995.

"In some cultures, such as those of the Siberian Chukchee, the institutionalised role of shaman is provided for adult male homosexuals. These men adopt feminine dress, activities, mannerisms, become 'wives' of other men and assume the 'female' role in anal intercourse. Their social status may be high." (p 158)

The Zar possession cult of Ethiopia "is mostly a feminine cult and it is taken up by women when they wish to publicly voice opinions which ordinarily, because of their role and status, they would not be allowed to... the demons are males and some of them are fierce warriors so that the possessed woman is allowed to carry weapons or any other 'male' attributes characteristic of the demon." (p 155)

Wikan, Unni. "The Xanith: a Third Gender Role?" in Behind the veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

The xaniths of the Omani city of Sohar are common and, from Wikan's account, seem pretty well-accepted (which may seem surprising - she discusses Omani attitudes to gender and sexuality, and how the xanith fits into the picture, at length). They're men who declares themselves women, though they're not permitted to wear women's clothing; instead they wear a male dishdasha modified with the waist of a female dress. "Male clothing is white; females wear patterned cloth in bright colours; xaniths wear unpatterned cloth in pastel colours." Similarly, their hair length and style are distinct, and unlike both men and women, they go bareheaded. At the time of Wikan's study (the seventies), Omani women were strictly secluded and segregated; at meals, weddings, and so forth, xaniths are found with the women, who don't follow the usual rules of modesty with them. However, a xanith is still a man for the purposes of the law, and is referred to with masculine pronouns. Wikan's informants were certain that all xaniths are sex workers whose clients were men (legal, unlike sex work by women) although some work as domestic servants. Interestingly, some xaniths chose to return to the role of men, and some even move back and forth between their male and female roles. (Wikipedia gives the word as khanith, meaning "effeminate", and notes its use as an insult. Do note the age of this study.)

Wikan remarks: "Here, then, may be the key to an understanding of the gender system in Sohar. It is the sexual act, not the sexual organs, which is fundamentally constitutive of gender. And there is no confusion possible in this culture between the male and female role in intercourse: the man "enters", the woman "receives"; the man is active, the woman is passive. Behaviour, and not anatomy, is the basis for the Omani conceptualization of gender identity." (p 175)

 

Law, Benjamin. Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East. Collingwood, Vic. : Black Inc., 2012.

"Thailand has a long history of transsexualism. Before the 1960s, it had three gender categories: chai (masculine); ying (feminine); and kathoey, a sort of umbrella term that referred to in-betweeners - effeminate men, masculine women and people with intersex conditions. Afterwards, those categories splintered further into super-specific identities like gay, tom (masculine lesbian) and dee (feminine lesbian)." (p 51)

"Let's take a brief tour through a Beginner's Guide to Homosexual Slang in Myanmar. Repeat after me. Achauk (pronounced 'ah-chowk') is a handy, all-encompassing term for any man who has sex with other men. Use it carefully, because it's the Burmese equivalent of 'faggot'... There are three categories of achauk... Apwint ('ah-pwint', meaning 'open') are Burma's queens, who live and dress as women and are always - always - on the receiving end of anal sex." (p 207) Apwint sleep with either thange (macho, out, always on top) or (straight-acting) abone. Apwint dance at nat spirit festivals, "where apwint were revered as spirit mediums in dance ceremonies that predated Buddhism." (p 229)

The same book mentions "Jogappas, male devotees of the Hindu goddess Yellamma, [who] dressed in the saris and jewellery of married women and sexually serviced men as a display of their religious devotion."

Online:

The Eerie Beauty of Rare Alphabets, The Atlantic, August 2011: "The Buginese language spoken on Indonesian islands has five genders—feminine woman, feminine man, masculine female, masculine man, and bissu ('a gender that embodies both male and female energies, and is thus revered as mystical and wise')."

The Sacrifices of Albania's 'Sworn Virgins'

Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania

Fa'afafine - Samoan boys brought up as girls

Fa'afafine: The boys raised to be girls

Sulawesi's fifth gender (Inside Indonesia, 2 April 2001). "The Bugis acknowledge three sexes (female, male, hermaphrodite), four genders (women, men, calabai, and calalai), and a fifth meta-gender group, the bissu." | In Indonesia, Non-Binary Gender is a Centuries-Old Idea (Atlas Obscura, 18 June 2016)

Sistergirls and brotherboys unite to strengthen spirits (ABC, 21 November 2016). A gathering of gender-diverse Indigenous Australians.