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by cato_the_elder
1518 days ago
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Unfortunately, being offended doesn't make you correct: > The neologism two-spirit was created in English, then translated into Ojibwe, in 1990 at the third annual Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, as a replacement for the offensive, anthropological term, berdache. > The primary purpose of coining a new term was to encourage the replacement of the outdated, and offensive, anthropological term berdache, which means "passive partner in sodomy, boy prostitute" (from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit#Etymology) |
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Europeans didn't have a gender framework that could handle concepts outside of "male/female":"man/woman" so some re-used that French term meaning broadly to include what Europeans would now describe as transvestite, transgender, hermaphrodite, and homosexual people. See http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170...
You can see from the examples that while "berdache"/"two-spirit" was widespread in Native American cultures, there wasn't a "traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role".
In addition to "berdache" being re-used to mean non-gender-binary-conformant, the term as used in the scientific literature carried with it European prejudice which didn't reflect the native understanding:
> literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the berdache as a “creature of failed biology, for example, hermaphroditism [...], or failed morals [...], or as someone not able to live up to an expected norm” (Herdt in Jacobs et al. 280). -- quoting https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b...