I'm currently reading Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg, lent to me by a new friend. I just read something that the Two-Spirit poet Chrystos, from the Menominee nation, said about gender/sex in her culture which really moved me (especially the part about dreams), so here it is:
"Life among the First Nation people, before first contact, is hard to reconstruct. There's been so much abuse of traditional life by the Christian Church. But certain things have filtered down to us. Most of the nations that I know of traditionally had more than two genders. It varies from tribe to tribe. The concept of Two-Spiritedness is a rather rough translation into English of that idea. I think the English language is rigid, and the thought patterns that form it are rigid, so that gender also becomes rigid.
"The whole concept of gender is more fluid in traditional life. Those paths are not necessarily aligned with your sex, although they may be. People might choose their gender according to their dreams, for example. So even the idea your gender is something you dream about is not even a concept in Western culture - which posits you are born a certain biological sex and therefore there's a role you must step into and follow pretty rigidly for the rest of your life. That's how we got the concept of queer. Anyone who doesn't follow their assigned gender role is queer; all kinds of people are lumped together under that word."
Does being Two-Spirit determine your sexuality? I asked Chrystos. " In traditional life a Two-Spirit person can be heterosexual or what we would call a homosexual," she replied. "You could also be a person who didn't have sex with anyone and lives with the spirits. The gender fluidity is part of a larger concept, which I guess the most accurate English word for is 'tolerance.' It's a whole different way of conceiving how to be in the world with other people. We think about the world in terms of relationship, so each person is always in a matrix, rather than being seen only as an individual - which is a very different way of looking at things."
