Gender-variant identities worldwide: Difference between revisions

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* '''Name of identity:''' sistergirl and brotherboy

* '''Culture:''' Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities

* '''Role in society:'''  

In Australia, Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities recognize identities called sistergirl (analogous to trans woman) and brotherboy (analogous to trans man).<ref>http://www.atsaq.com/files/Supporting%20Transgender%20and%20Sistergirl%20Web%20verision.pdf</ref>

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* '''Name of identity:''' Yimpininni. Less traditionally, rendered in English as Sistagirl.

* '''Culture:''' Tiwi Island culture

* '''Role in society:'''  

In Tiwi Island culture, "Sistagirl", traditionally ''Yimpininni'', is an identity analogous to trans woman.<ref>https://aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/bindi-cole-and-the-sistagirls/</ref>

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{{main|Fa'afafine}}

* '''Name of identity:''' Fa'afafine, meaning "in the manner of a woman" in Samoa<ref name=":1">Wade, Lisa & Myra Marz Ferree.  ''Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions.''  New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.</ref>.

* '''Culture:''' Samoa

* '''Role in society:''' Faʻafafine are known for their hard work and dedication to the family, in the Samoan tradition of ''tautua'' or service to family. Ideas of the family in Samoa and Polynesia are markedly different from Western constructions, and include all the members of a ''sa'', or communal family within the ''faʻamatai'' family systems.<ref>Saleimoa Vaai, Samoa Faa-matai and the Rule of Law (Apia: The National University of Samoa Le Papa-I-Galagala, 1999).</ref> Traditionally, faʻafafine follow the training of the women's daily work in an ''Aiga'' (Samoan family group).<ref>Danielsson, B., T. Danielsson, and R. Pierson. 1978. Polynesia's third sex: The gay life starts in the kitchen. Pacific Islands Monthly 49:10–13.</ref>

{{#if:1|{{#section:List of nonbinary identities|Fa'afafineDefinition}}}}

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* '''Name of identity:''' Whakawahine and Wakatane

* '''Culture:''' New Zealand Māori

* '''Role in society:'''  

In New Zealand, the Maori culture recognizes transgender identities called Whakawahine (feminine and AMAB) and Wakatane (masculine and AFAB).{{Citation needed}}

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{{main|Māhū}}

* '''Name of identity:''' māhū (meaning "in the middle")

* '''Culture:''' the Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) and Maohi (Tahitian) cultures

* '''Role in society:'''  

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* '''Name of identity:''' Akava'ine. According to the Cook Islands Maori dictionary (1995) 'akava'ine comes from the prefix ''aka'' ("to be or to behave like") and ''va'ine'' ("woman"),<ref name="BuseTaringa1995">{{cite book|author1=Jasper Buse|author2=Raututi Taringa|title=Cook Islands Maori Dictionary|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AT2ENAHoS28C&pg=PA51|accessdate=27 July 2013|year=1995|isbn=978-0-7286-0230-4|page=51}}</ref> or simply, "to behave as a woman".<ref name="BuseTaringa1995"/><ref name="Alexeyeff2009">{{cite book|author=Kalissa Alexeyeff|title=Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender, and Cook Islands Globalization|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SdmBdhq6l-gC&pg=PT105|accessdate=27 July 2013|year=2009|publisher=University of Hawaii Press|isbn=978-0-8248-3244-5|page=105}}</ref>)

* '''Culture:''' Cook Islands Māori

* '''Role in society:''' work that is traditionally women's work, especially sewing. Some ''akava'ine'' take part in the making of ''tivaevae'' (quilts), an activity traditionally done by the women of the community.<ref name="LittleMcAnany2011">{{cite book|author1=Walter E. Little|author2=Patricia Ann McAnany|title=Textile Economies: Power and Value from the Local to the Transnational|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=woPmXQOU4hUC&pg=PA72|accessdate=27 July 2013|date=16 October 2011|publisher=Rowman Altamira|isbn=978-0-7591-2061-7|page=72}}</ref>

In the Cook Islands, some people who do not fit the Western gender binary are called akava'ine.<ref name=":1" />

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* '''Name of identity:''' Burrnesha, meaning "sworn virgins"

* '''Culture:''' Albania

* '''Role in society:''' most roles that otherwise only men are allowed to do

In Albania, the Burrnesha are AFAB people with a masculine gender expression and role. This tradition goes back to at least the 1400s, and is still practiced.{{Citation needed}}

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* '''Name of identity:''' Femminello, meaning "little man-woman"

* '''Culture:''' Italy

* '''Role in society:'''  

In Italy, the Femminello are AMAB people with a feminine gender expression.{{Citation needed}}

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<section begin=GallaeStats />

* '''Name of identity:''' Gallae. Contemporaries who were not Gallae called them by masculine words, Galloi or Galli (plural), or Gallus (singular). Some historians interpret the Gallae as transgender, by modern terms, and think they would have called themselves by the feminine Gallae (plural) and Galla (singular).<ref>Kirsten Cronn-Mills, ''Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices'' (2014, {{ISBN|0761390227}}), page 39</ref><ref>Teresa Hornsby, Deryn Guest, ''Transgender, Intersex and Biblical Interpretation'' (2016, {{ISBN|0884141551}}), page 47</ref><ref name="seabrook gallae about">Laura Anne Seabrook, "About this comic." ''Tales of the Gallae.'' http://totg-mirror.thecomicseries.com/about/</ref> The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD) says their name comes from the Gallus river in Phrygia;<ref>Maarten J. Vermaseren, ''Cybele and Attis: the myth and the cult'', translated by A. M. H. Lemmers,  London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, p.85, referencing Ovid, ''Fasti'' IV.9</ref> "gallus" itself means chicken or rooster.

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A significant portion of the ancient priesthood of the goddess Cybele and her consort Attis were Gallae. This tradition began in Phrygia (where Turkey is today, part of Asia Minor), 2,300 years ago.<ref name="kaldera 174" /> After 205 BCE, it spread throughout the Roman Empire, as far north as London.<ref name="kaldera 174" /> The Gallae were AMAB eunuchs. They wore bright-colored feminine sacerdotal clothing, hairstyles or wigs, makeup, and jewelry, and used feminine mannerisms in their speech. There were other priests and priestesses of Cybele who were not eunuchs, but ordinary men, and other priestesses who were cisgender or transmasculine Amazonian warrior women,<ref name="kaldera 174" /> so it would not have been necessary to become a Gallae or a eunuch simply in order to become a priest of Cybele. The Gallae were not ascetic but hedonistic, so castration was not about stopping sexual desires. Some Gallae would marry men, and others would marry women, so castration was not simply about being a man attracted to men. The ways of the Gallae were more consistent with transgender people who had suffered gender dysphoria, which they relieved by voluntary castration, as the available form of [[bottom surgery|sex reassignment surgery]].<ref name="kaldera 174" />

The Gallae lived together in the ''metro'on'' temple compounds, which they tended, and cared for the statue of Cybele. They called one another by familial titles like Mother and Sister. They spent much of their time traveling in order to beg for charity, in exchange for which they told fortunes and blessed homes.<ref name="Maarten J. Vermaseren 1977, p.97" /><ref name="kaldera 174" /> They were believed to have spiritual powers: that they could bring rain, and exorcise evil spirits. The Roman public viewed them with a mixture of awe and contempt, seeing them as practicing shocking foreign customs, so they were just as often honored as they were harassed and politically persecuted. They were not allowed to be Roman citizens, and vice versa.  

The Gallae practiced annual celebrations representing the death and rebirth of the god Attis. Their best-known holiday was the Day of Blood (''Dies Sanguinis'') on March 24, in which the Gallae would dance around a felled and decorated pine tree. The Gallae were known for wild dancing, during which they whipped themselves and one another until they reached an altered state of consciousness. They were also known for playing loud music with drums, flutes, and cymbals. (One possible origin of the word "cymbal" is that it comes from their goddess Cybele.) Then their initiates would publicly, ritually castrate themselves on the temple steps, by means of potsherds in their own hands. This was to show that their castration was voluntary. They would throw the severed genitals into the cheering crowd, which were good luck to catch. Whatever family caught them would return thanks for the blessing by caring for the initiate while she healed.<ref name="kaldera 174" /> Afterward, the initiate's lower belly was tattooed, and the healed wound dressed with gold leaf.<ref name="seabrook gallae about" />  

Due to being criminalized, persecuted, and exterminated by the Christians, the Gallae were gone by the 6th century CE. Today, some trans women and worshipers of Cybele call themselves Gallae, and [http://gallae.com one of their modern temples is in New York]. Laura Anne Seabrook, a trans woman and follower of Cybele who considers herself a modern gallae, created an educational web-comic, [http://totg-mirror.thecomicseries.com/about/ Tales of the Galli]. Her comic is a work of historical fiction about Gallae in ancient Rome, based on her extensive historical research.

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* '''Name of identity:''' Enarees, Enareis, or Anarieis (ἐναρής).<ref name="enarees phillips">Phillips, E. D. “The Scythian Domination in Western Asia: Its Record in History, Scripture and Archaeology.” World Archaeology, vol. 4, no. 2, 1972, pp. 129–130. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/123971. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.</ref> The ancient Greek historian Herodotus said this means "men-women" or "effeminates."<ref name="enarees phillips" /> Some modern historians notice that it does not look like a Scythian word, but seems to have been from Greek for "Accursed."<ref name="enarees west">West, Stephanie. “Introducing the Scythians: Herodotus on Koumiss (4.2).” ''Museum Helveticum'', vol. 56, no. 2, 1999, pp. 83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24821090. Accessed 13 Jan. 2020.</ref> It is not known today what the Enarees called themselves.

* '''Culture:''' The Scythians, who were Eurasian nomadic horseriders. They lived in regions that are now the modern-day countries of Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, and neighboring countries. They had contact with many more, due to their use of the Silk Road.<ref name="Beckwith58">{{harvnb|Beckwith|2009|pp=58–70}}</ref>

* '''Role in society:''' Priests of the goddess Artimpasa, also called Argimpasa, who the Greeks thought correlated with their goddess Aphrodite. Artimpasa also had AFAB priestesses.<ref name="enarees cassells">Conner, Sparks, and Sparks. ''Cassell's Encyclopedia of queer myth, symbol, and spirit, covering gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender lore.'' 1997. P. 70. </ref> The enarees told the future, and did women's work.<ref name="enarees phillips" />

The Enarees were gender-variant priests of the ancient Scythian people. The 5th century Greek medical anthology, "Hippocratic Corpus," said that the Enarees wore women's styles of clothing, used feminine mannerisms in their speech, and did women's work.<ref name="enarees phillips" /> Pseudo-Hippocrates said the Scythians believe the cause of their femininity is divine, but he theorized that they became so due to injuring their genitals from continous horse riding,<ref>{{cite wikisource |author=Hippocrates |title=On Airs, Waters, Places |wslink=On Airs, Waters, Places#Part XXII |at=Part XXII}}</ref> and from wearing trousers<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Chiasson|first=Charles|date=2001|title=Scythian Androgyny and Environmental Determinism in Herodotus and the Hippocratic πϵρὶ ἀϵ́ρων ὑδάτων τóπων|journal=Syllecta Classica|language=en|volume=12|issue=1|pages=33–73|doi=10.1353/syl.2001.0007|issn=2160-5157}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Minns|first=Ellis|title=Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1913|isbn=9781108024877|location=|pages=45–6}}</ref> (which was seen as an odd foreign custom to the toga-wearing Greeks). Archaeologist Ellis Minns (1874 - 1953) said Ovid may be partly right, because bareback horse riding has been known to cause damage to the testicles resulting in loss of the ability to have an erection or ejaculate, even for modern-day riders.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Minns|first=Ellis|title=Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1913|isbn=9781108024877|location=|pages=45–6}}</ref> Riding injures alone do not account for the femininity of Enarees, which seem to be part of the cross-cultural tradition of cross-dressing shamans.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/148/abstract/neither-men-nor-women-failure-western-binary-systems|title=(N)either Men (n)or Women? The Failure of Western Binary Systems|last=Hart|first=Rachel|date=|website=Society for Classical Studies|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-01-28}}</ref>

In her PhD thesis about trans history and spirituality, trans woman Helen Savage noted another way that the importance of horses in Scythian culture may have led to the Enarees' discovery of another method of gender transition: "The Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to the borders of the Scythian steppe in the first century BC, provides a tantalising hint of the practice there of drinking mare's urine, a substance so high in oestrogens that it is still used as the source of a proprietary drug, 'premarin', widely used still for hormone replacement therapy -- and to feminise male-to-female transsexuals."<ref name="enarees savage 74">Helen Savage. (2006) "Changing sex? : transsexuality and Christian theology." Doctoral thesis, Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3364/</ref> The Enarees may have practiced the world's earliest-known hormone therapy for trans-feminine people. The practice of using mare's urine for oestrogen therapy was lost for hundreds of years, until being independently discovered by scientists in the 1930s CE.<ref name="SchachterMarrian1938">{{cite journal|last1=Schachter|first1=B.|last2=Marrian|first2=G. F.|title=The isolation of estrone sulfate from the urine of pregnant mares|journal=Journal of Biological Chemistry|volume=126|year=1938|pages=663–669}}</ref> This discovery was developed into Premarin in the 1940s, the first commercial oestrogen replacement drug in Western medicine,<ref name=MDD>Jim Kling  October 2000 [http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v03/i08/html/kling.html The Strange Case of Premarin] Modern Drug Discovery (3):8 46–52</ref> and still one of the most widely used today. The Enarees may also have used their herbal knowledge to influence their hormone balance. Present-day intersex trans man and shaman Raven Kaldera notes that the Enarees "ate a lot of licorice root - so popular among them that the Greeks to whom they exported it referred to it as 'the Scythian root' - which is also an anti-androgen."<ref name="enarees kaldera">Raven Kaldera. "Ergi: The Way of the Third." ''Northern-Tradition Shamanism.'' https://web.archive.org/web/20130501152328/http://www.northernshamanism.org/shamanic-techniques/gender-sexuality/ergi-the-way-of-the-third.html</ref> Between all these treatments, the Enarees could have had the most medically advanced physical transition in the ancient world.  

According to Herodotus, outsiders said that in the 7th century BCE, a band of Scythians had plundered a temple to Aphrodite Urania, a Greek goddess born from the severed genitals of the god Uranus. As punishment, that goddess had cursed the Enarees with "a female disease," that is, that the Enarees wanted to become women. Other parts of Herodotus's description do not support this, so it seems the Scythians themselves did not tell this legend, and did not see the Enarees' condition as punishment.<ref name="enarees phillips" /> Herodotus described the method of fortune-telling that the Enarees practiced:  

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There are many diviners among the Scythians, who divine by means of many willow wands as I will show. They bring great bundles of wands, which they lay on the ground and unfasten, and utter their divinations as they lay the rods down one by one; and while still speaking, they gather up the rods once more and place them together again; this manner of divination is hereditary among them. The Enarees, who are hermaphrodites [sic, this does not necessarily mean intersex, as it is a common mistranslation for words about all kinds of gender variance], say that Aphrodite [that is, Artimpasa] gave them the art of divination, which they practise by means of lime-tree bark. They cut this bark into three portions, and prophesy while they braid and unbraid these in their fingers.<ref>Herodotus, ''The Histories'' [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hdt.%204.67&lang=original IV. 67]</ref>

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The Enarees' divination method is a form of divination by casting sticks (rhabdomancy), and sounds especially similar to the process of I Ching divination in China by means of casting fifty yarrow stalks. The I Ching diviner then picks up the stalks and puts them between certain fingers. This process generates random numbers, just as casting dice does. These numbers are then used to look up a divinatory meaning. The I Ching dates back to between the 10th and 4th centuries BCE,<ref>{{cite book|last=Nylan|first=Michael|title=The Five "Confucian" Classics|date=2001|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|isbn=0-300-13033-3}}</ref> the same period the Scythians lived, who were connected to China via the Silk Road.<ref name="Beckwith58" /> These similarities could have involved cultural contact.

Though Enarees are the best-known example, Scythians accepted a wide range of gender variance other than these priests. Some Scythians were masculine warriors who were AFAB. Archaeologists have found Scythian burials that may be Enarees, or other gender variant people from their culture. Some from the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE in Sibera are remains of what are thought to be AMAB people with female decorations and utensils.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Ustinova|first=Yulia|url=https://books.google.ca/books?id=ARyeneZne9gC|title=The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God|publisher=Brill|year=1999|isbn=978-90-04-11231-5|location=|pages=78|language=en}}</ref> The grave of a Scythian priestess near the Bug River in eastern Europe could be an Enaree.  The grave includes what are typically women's grave goods. Archaeologists differ about whether the remains are that of an AMAB or AFAB person, which is not always clear from skeletal structure alone.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Taylor|first=Timothy|title=The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture|publisher=Bantam Books|year=1997|isbn=978-0553375275|location=|pages=214}}</ref>

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* '''Names of identities:''' Zachar, Nekeivah, Androgynos, Tumtum, Ay’lonit, and Saris, each with a different meaning. See below.

* '''Culture:''' Judaism

* '''Role in society:''' Each of the six genders has its own roles and prohibitions under Judaic law.

{{#section-h:Gender variance in spirituality|The six genders in classical Judaism}}

*[[Nonbinary gender outside of the transgender community]]

*[[List of nonbinary identities]]

*[[Gender variance in spirituality]]

* [http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/two-spirits/map.html PBS: A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures]. This is an interactive world map showing the locations of dozens of cultures that recognize nonbinary genders.

* Herdt, Gilbert H. ''Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History''. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

* Nanda, Serena. ''Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations''. Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 2000. Print.

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[[Category:Gender-variant identities worldwide]][[Category:Spirituality]]