Third gender

Part of a series on
Transgender topics
     
Gender identities
Health care practices
Rights and legal status
Society and culture
Events and awareness
Culture
Theory and concepts
By country
Rights
History
See also
 Category
Part of a series on the
Anthropology of kinship
Basic concepts
Descent
Linealities
Household forms and residence
Terminology
By group
Case studies
Feminist
Sexuality
Major theorists
Related articles
Social anthropology
Cultural anthropology

Third gender is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither a man or woman. It is also a social category present in societies that recognize three or more genders. The term third is usually understood to mean "other", though some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth[1] and fifth[2] genders.

The state of personally identifying as, or being identified by society as, a man, a woman, or other is usually also defined by the individual's gender identity and gender role in the particular culture in which they live.

Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders (boys/men and girls/women).[3][4][5] In cultures with a third or fourth gender, these genders may represent very different things. To Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, māhū is an intermediate state between man and woman known as "gender liminality".[6][7] Some traditional Diné Native Americans of the Southwestern United States acknowledge a spectrum of four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, and masculine man.[8] The term "third gender" has also been used to describe the hijras of South Asia[9] who have gained legal identity, fa'afafine of Polynesia, and Balkan sworn virgins.[10] A culture recognizing a third gender does not in itself mean that they were valued by that culture, and often is the result of explicit devaluation of women in that culture.[11]

While found in a number of non-Western cultures, concepts of "third", "fourth", and "fifth" gender roles are still somewhat new to mainstream Western culture and conceptual thought.[12] While mainstream Western scholars—notably anthropologists who have tried to write about the South Asian hijras or the Native American "gender variant" and two-spirit people—have often sought to understand the term "third gender" solely in the language of the modern LGBT community, other scholars—especially Indigenous scholars—stress that mainstream scholars' lack of cultural understanding and context has led to widespread misrepresentation of the people these scholars place in the third gender category, as well as misrepresentations of the cultures in question, including whether or not this concept actually applies to these cultures at all.[13][14][15][16]

  1. ^ Trumbach, Randolph (1994). London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture. In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, 111-36. New York: Zone (MIT). ISBN 978-0-942299-82-3
  2. ^ Graham, Sharyn (2001), Sulawesi's fifth gender Archived 26 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Inside Indonesia, April–June 2001.
  3. ^ Kevin L. Nadal, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender (2017, ISBN 1483384276), page 401: "Most cultures currently construct their societies based on the understanding of gender binary—the two gender categorizations (male and female). Such societies divide their population based on biological sex assigned to individuals at birth to begin the process of gender socialization."
  4. ^ Sigelman, Carol K.; Rider, Elizabeth A. (14 March 2017). Life-Span Human Development. Cengage Learning. p. 385. ISBN 978-1-337-51606-8. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  5. ^ Maddux, James E.; Winstead, Barbara A. (11 July 2019). Psychopathology: Foundations for a Contemporary Understanding. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-64787-1. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  6. ^ Besnier, Niko; Alexeyeff, Kalissa (2014). Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. p. 241. ISBN 9780824838829. JSTOR j.ctt6wqhsc.
  7. ^ Zanghellini, Aleardo (2013). "Sodomy Laws and Gender Variance in Tahiti and Hawai'i". Laws. 2 (2): 51–68. doi:10.3390/laws2020051.
  8. ^ Estrada, Gabriel S (2011). "Two Spirits, Nádleeh, and LGBTQ2 Navajo Gaze" (PDF). American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 35 (4): 167–190. doi:10.17953/aicr.35.4.x500172017344j30. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 May 2015. Retrieved 16 October 2016.
  9. ^ Agrawal, A. (1997). "Gendered Bodies: The Case of the 'Third Gender' in India". Contributions to Indian Sociology. 31 (2): 273–297. doi:10.1177/006996697031002005. S2CID 145502268.
  10. ^ Young, Antonia (2000). Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins. ISBN 1-85973-335-2
  11. ^ Holmes, Morgan (July 2004). "Locating Third Sexes" (PDF). Transformations Journal (8). ISSN 1444-3775. Archived (PDF) from the original on 16 April 2017. Retrieved 28 December 2014. recognition of third sexes and third genders is not equal to valuing the presence of those who were neither male nor female, and often hinges on the explicit devaluation of women, as with the Sambia of New Guinea, or on the valuation of female virginity at the expense of valuing female humanity, as in Polynesia.
  12. ^ McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms 2011 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York, McGraw Hill.
  13. ^ "Asia and the Pacific – ANU". Archived from the original on 24 February 2012. Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  14. ^ Pember, Mary Annette (13 October 2016). "'Two Spirit' Tradition Far From Ubiquitous Among Tribes". Rewire. Retrieved 17 October 2016. Unfortunately, depending on an oral tradition to impart our ways to future generations opened the floodgates for early non-Native explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists to write books describing Native peoples and therefore bolstering their own role as experts. These writings were and still are entrenched in the perspective of the authors who were and are mostly white men.
  15. ^ de Vries, Kylan Mattias (2009). "Berdache (Two-Spirit)". In O'Brien, Jodi (ed.). Encyclopedia of gender and society. Los Angeles: SAGE. p. 64. ISBN 9781412909167. Retrieved 6 March 2015. [Two-Spirit] implies that the individual is both male and female and that these aspects are intertwined within them. The term moves away from traditional Native American/First Nations cultural identities and meanings of sexuality and gender variance. It does not take into account the terms and meanings from individual nations and tribes. ... Although two-spirit implies to some a spiritual nature, that one holds the spirit of two, both male and female, traditional Native Americans/First Nations peoples view this as a Western concept.
  16. ^ Kehoe, Alice B. (2002). "Appropriate Terms". SAA Bulletin. Society for American Archaeology 16(2), UC-Santa Barbara. ISSN 0741-5672. Archived from the original on 5 November 2004. Retrieved 1 May 2019. At the conferences that produced the book, Two-Spirited People, I heard several First Nations people describe themselves as very much unitary, neither "male" nor "female," much less a pair in one body. Nor did they report an assumption of duality within one body as a common concept within reservation communities; rather, people confided dismay at the Western proclivity for dichotomies. Outside Indo-European-speaking societies, "gender" would not be relevant to the social personae glosses "men" and "women," and "third gender" likely would be meaningless. The unsavory word "berdache" certainly ought to be ditched (Jacobs et al. 1997:3-5), but the urban American neologism "two-spirit" can be misleading.