Our forgotten history...

[Olivia P]

The essence is only the same of you make it an essence. However, gender is contingent. I prefer to understand something specfic within its own specificity. (EDIT: There is no need to bring biology into this. All the biology stuff is unproven hypotheses. While I would not dismiss that biology plays a part, saying it is the "essence" of being trans in not founded on actual evidence.)

Umm... every single part of the human experience is biology, its impossible not to bring biology into it.

It is impossible to break reality down into boxes, nature doesnt work like that, everything is interconected. If you separate things from the whole, you wont understand them.

The only way to construct a true picture and form true understanding is to observe things from the whole.

Science is the process of a never ending flow of hypotheses, forever adapting to new insights, in order to seek understanding it is extremely important to keep that in mind. Science will never get to a point where it knows everything about everything completely, the universe is unknowably  complex, jumping to conclusions because you cant accept this will just get people hurt.

[DolceFragola]

Well, saying everything is biology is either something of a truism (because of course humans are living beings, etc.) or a very strong assertion (because either it excludes environment/culture or collapses it into biology). In the meanwhile, we do know that gender is not always the same everywhere, that different cultures and groups use different categories, and that these are understood and organized differently. Even if (I won't deny that) biology is a factor, we don't know how it operates, and in any case, it depends on a specific system of gender to operate on individuals.

And what you say is exactly what I ask for: replacing trans-like experiences within their context. If we don't do that, we run into methodological issues and ethnocentric/colonialist tendencies.

All the same, you're not really answering my only positive claim: "What is more useful than looking for trans people in the past is to look for different understandings of gender, in different places and time, and to look for the transgression of this particular system by people who lived in it." It's not really that different from the OP. It's the same project, without the universalizing tendency.

[Olivia P]

All the same, you're not really answering my only positive claim: "What is more useful than looking for trans people in the past is to look for different understandings of gender, in different places and time, and to look for the transgression of this particular system by people who lived in it." It's not really that different from the OP. It's the same project, without the universalizing tendency.

All im interested in is understanding the general history throughout time of gender and sex, as ive probably demonstrated, im not letting words of today restrict myself. Prior to any of this i did a lot of reading up on ancient teachings from the buddhist tradition and other related religons, and to understand the intended meaning, a specific art is required to look through the words and understand it from the context, looking through and understanding the messages sent through symbolism and so on.

[Olivia P]

This seems to have a good collection of past cultures on gender beyond standard m or f

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/two-spirits/map.html

This one catches my eye:

Fa'afafine are biological males who have a strong feminine gender orientation, which the Samoan parents recognize quite early in childhood, and then raise them as female children or rather third gender children. Fa'afafine traditionally assume roles of family care, although they are present in many spheres of Somoan society: painter and writer Dan Taulapapa McMullin, artist and curator Shigeyuki Kihara, poet and performance artist Brian Fuata, and fashion artist Lindah Lepou are all famous fa'afafine.

Fa'afafine are not considered "gay" in Samoan culture, as they may be sexually involved with men, women, or other fa'afafine.

As does this one:

Philippines

Bakla is a Tagalog term that encompasses an array of sexual and gender identities, but especially indicated a male-born person who assumes the dress, mannerisms, and social roles of a woman. While bakla have existed as a recognized third gender for centuries, more conservative influences in recent decades has marginalized them.

The bakla actually developed their own language to use with each other, called swardspeak. It is a mixture of Filipino, English and Spanish and is spoken with a "hyperfeminized inflection."

[martiabernathey]

I like this blog a lot when it comes to a history of gender variant people.

[gennee]

Me too.

[rachel89]

I'm new to this topic, but I think transgender-ism everywhere might be the same (or maybe a few similar) neurological phenomena, but can have different expressions depending on the culture and the availability of medical interventions. I have more questions than answers though. I am curious about what impact universal access to HRT and surgery would have on gender expression in cultures that have a "third gender" concept. Do you think societies would adopt a more gender-binary cultural view and label transsexual women and men as women and men, retain the third-gender label for transsexual people, or define transsexual women and men as women and men while retaining the third-gender label for transgender, but not transsexual people?

I am also curious about how language and linguistics impacts our understanding of gender. For example both Western and Thai culture have people with male anatomy, a gay sexual orientation, and an extremely effeminate gender expression. In the U.S. these people might be called effeminate gay men, and they might be drag queens, but our culture considers them men, while in Thai culture, the same person might be called a "ladyboy" or a "kathoey" and would be defined as a third gender rather than as men or women (although many would be considered transgender/transsexual women in our culture). At least from my point of view, these are the same phenomena given different names

[Deborah]

In the west linguistics is not the limiting factor.  Religion, specifically Christianity, has defined western metaphysical understanding  for over 1700 years.  Under this system there is room for only two genders and nothing in between.

I do not see the idea of a third gender taking hold in the west anytime soon.


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[Clhoe G]

this makes me think about eunuchs, more specifically Hijras (in South Asia) where some young people go through something called nirwaan, which refers to the removal of penis, testicles and scrotum (the first type of sex change surgery known in history)

N if your looking for information about the mistreating of the lgbt community, you should take a bit of a look at Eugenics, it's something that comes from all around the globe and the most known advocate in history of eugenics was the nazis, it kinda makes me wonder what was really going on during that time.


http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunuch
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

You also might want to know eugenics is the same things the nazis practiced.

[PinkCloud]

I am sure that a ton of historical revisionism has taken place. Especially by the church, who, before science held all knowledge in their possession. We like to think we know everything about history, but everyday new facts arise about our true history, in which mankind was far more advanced than we previously thought. I do believe that a conspiracy has been forged by religious institutions of the past to repress anything that went against the patriarchy and much knowledge has been either burned or kept secret in societies. If not, we are simply oblivious about our history until the moment it was written down, before that moment we simply do not know how life took shape. So we have a gap of about 150.000+ years of unwritten history to account for. Archeology doesn't help much either, because the best it can do is to interpret a meaning from something that was nowhere defined.

[Clhoe G]

I am sure that a ton of historical revisionism has taken place. Especially by the church, who, before science held all knowledge in their possession. We like to think we know everything about history, but everyday new facts arise about our true history, in which mankind was far more advanced than we previously thought. I do believe that a conspiracy has been forged by religious institutions of the past to repress anything that went against the patriarchy and much knowledge has been either burned or kept secret in societies. If not, we are simply oblivious about our history until the moment it was written down, before that moment we simply do not know how life took shape. So we have a gap of about 150.000+ years of unwritten history to account for. Archeology doesn't help much either, because the best it can do is to interpret a meaning from something that was nowhere defined.

Not to mention some of the world's worst atrosaties known, have been committed in the name of religion.