Parts of this article are hard to follow, but it’s an interesting take that I haven’t heard before.
Also…I had no idea that the term two spirit was that recent. You learn something new every day.
It makes sense when you realise that two-spirit isn’t what two-spirit people call themselves at home. In their own tribe’s cultural context, everybody knows the specific name for their gender and what it culturally means. Two-spirit was invented on purpose as a shorthand for describing dozens or hundreds of different things in a language people outside that one single tribe can all understand. It’s as manufactured and as broad as the sequence of letters “LGBT”, an umbrella term that arose during a specific cultural moment as part of a push for equality.
That makes a lot of sense. I’d never thought deeply about it before.
If you’d like help understanding those hard to follow parts of the article, I’d be happy to explain them in more detail. In fact, I might be able to edit the article to improve its clarity if you can tell Me what parts are lacking.
The bottom paragraph and beyond were the parts I had trouble understanding.
I really respect that you wrote an entire article by yourself, especially on such an interesting subject. It’s great to see things made by members of the community :)
Is it the part about humans having divine genders that’s confusing, or the part about gods being nonbinary and Aphrodite having a divine, nonhuman femininity?
Each paragraph makes sense but I’m having trouble understanding how they connect to the main point.
Well, I mention gods being nonbinary as a supporting point for the idea that gender is informed by religion, and I mention divinegender humans because a lot of people are tranphobic against divinegender people, and I think right after someone learns that all genders are religiously informed is the best time to tell someone about people who are often attacked for the religion in their genders.
Or from another point of view, the point of the article is “Don’t be transphobic to people with religious genders”, the fact that all genders are religious is an appeal to empathy to get people to not be transphobic, and I talk about two-spirit, bissu, and divinegender as examples of people with religious genders not to be transphobic to.
