There has been a long tradition in many societies around the world of two-spirit people, Third Genders, etc. Many of these people were accepted in their societies under these societal doctrines. In recent years, the Trans Lobby has taken over this discussion and has decided that the two-spirit and Third Gender traditions were examples of how transgenderism has been accepted around the world for a very long time. But that’s true because the notion of two-spirit people and Third Genders generally did not apply to transsexuals.
As a good general rule, my understanding of two-spirit people, 3rd genders, etc. from my studying was that these people were generally just homosexuals.
A two-spirit Amerindian man would do woman’s chores, dress in women’s clothes, and live his life with the women. My understanding is that it was acceptable for a heterosexual Amerindian man to “marry” a two-spirit man and take him as his “wife.” No one much cared about this.
There were indeed two-spirit women also who were just lesbians. They wore men’s clothes, hunted, fished, did men’s chores, and lived their lives with the men. And a two-spirit woman might well take up with another such woman as a “wife.” They could live together as a couple.
There were quite a small number of these people, ~1-2%, so they were not much of a burden for the average tribe who regarded them as the occasional oddity which was strange but could be tolerated in small doses.
There was little to no recreational or choice homosexuality among Amerindians to my knowledge. This type of homosexuality or bisexuality is also rare among many of the more primitive groups the world round. In these societies, sex was generally freely available to both sexes from puberty on (look what Puritans we are now in comparison!), and this teenage sex never harmed a soul for thousands of years. Now suddenly it’s horribly destructive. Right.
Anyway, with free sex from puberty on more or less and marriage inevitable before 40 at least, most folks were satisfying their sexual needs, so there was no need for the sort of opportunistic homosexual behavior that arises due to lack of access to the opposite sex.
I don’t read a lot of gay writing, but I’ve still probably read more than most straights. There has been a tradition in gay historical writing dating back to the mid-19th Century of discussions about a third gender. The interpretation was always that the 3rd Gender people were simply homosexuals or gay and lesbian people. All of a sudden now this is being rewritten as these folks and the two-spirits as having always been trans, but that’s not the way I read the literature and followed the discussion.
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Robert, this depends on your definition of ‘transsexual’. I think you are using the wrong one. People like Bruce Jenner are Autogynephilic Transvestites. They are erotically attracted to themselves but, because they are heterosexual, are repulsed by their own masculinity. This causes them to create a second, pseudo-feminine character to play the role of erotic target (thus Erotic Target Location Error or ETLE). This character can become so strong it can overwhelm the host – voir Jenner, who had been under treatment for transvestism in the 1980s. These are always non-homosexual, though some may become bisexual while in the pseudo-feminine role.
But these are not transsexual, whatever they call themselves. True transsexuals are otherwise called Homosexual Transsexuals (HSTS). In fact, they do exactly fit the ‘two-spirit’ model you discuss. They’re found all over the world, but they are often hated by Western gays and feminists because they demonstrate that sexuality and gender are in fact linked. Gender is the outward expression of sexuality. But that is contrary to the feminist trope that ‘gender is just a social construct’ – it’s not, it’s a sexual construct and innate – and the New Gay Man one that ‘sexuality and gender are not related’, which is patent BS.
Essentially, transsexuals, two-spirits, hijras, kathoeys, bekis, travestis, warias, newhalfs, you name it, are, indeed, innately homosexual males who showed gender dysphoria as young as the age of 2 and who, in adolescence and adulthood, align their gender with their sexuality. Think about it: what male in his right mind, who desires to attract straight men, would appear to be a man? It’s utterly nuts, but that is what gay activists would have you believe.