Gender Around the World · 23 entries
Gender Around the World
The largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender. A term filed here does not describe an inner sense of gender. It describes a position inside a social system, with duties, a household, a place in ritual life and often a relationship with the law. Hijra is organised through a lineage of gurus and disciples and performs blessings at births and weddings. Fa'afafine is a role recognised by an extended family rather than declared against it. The literature is ethnography, colonial administration and court rulings, not psychology.
The filing rule is where the meaning lives. If a term answers the question of what somebody is inside themselves, it belongs elsewhere. If it answers the question of what position somebody holds among other people, it belongs here. That is also why the group resists a regional split: imposing a map of continents on categories that share a construction across thousands of miles of ocean, as the Pacific terms do, would separate the words that most belong together. What the group does hold in common is a warning. These are the entries most often flattened into a Western identity label, and almost every one of them has a translation note saying why that fails.
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In this category
All 23 gender around the world
23 entries
- Akava'ineAn old Cook Islands word carrying a much newer identity, shaped by Polynesian communities in Auckland and carried back to Rarotonga.
- AndrogynosA rabbinic category for a person with both sets of genitals, ruled like a man in some respects and like a woman in others. Greek word, Talmudic use.
- BaklaA Filipino gender term paired with tomboy, meaning indecisiveness in Old Tagalog, a slur by the war, and no longer one since the 1990s.
- BissuThe ritual specialists of the Bugis and the fifth gender of South Sulawesi, an office reached by initiation, with six left in Pangkep Regency in 2019.
- BurrneshaA role in the Albanian highlands taken by oath: celibacy sworn before elders in exchange for a man's standing under the Kanun. About twelve remained in 2022.
- EunuchA castrated man, and for most of history castrated by someone else. Court office, harem guard, castrato, and a disputed clinical chapter since 2022.
- Fa'afafineA Samoan role held inside an extended family, not a translation of transgender, and a morphology that repeats right across the Pacific.
- FakaleitiIn the manner of a lady, with the lady borrowed from English, naming a Tongan group far wider than any one translation will admit.
- FemminielloA Neapolitan third-gender role understood as male in a feminine part, held to bring luck, with named duties at the Montevergine and Torre Annunziata feasts.
- HijraAn organised community with a lineage system and a ritual economy, registered as a criminal tribe in 1871 and recognised as a third gender in 2014.
- KathoeyA Thai category covering trans women and effeminate men, avoided by most Thai trans women, and rendered in English by a word tourism made.
- Khawaja siraPakistan's third-gender community, named from a Mughal court title, recognised by the courts from 2009, and still arguing over what the word covers.
- MahuIn the middle, not in the manner of a woman. A Hawaiian and Tahitian healing role suppressed after 1820 and reclaimed since the 1990s.
- MetiA Nepali term for a feminine person assigned male at birth, inside the third gender recognised in 2007. The 2011 census offered it and lost the data.
- MuxeA Zapotec gender category in Juchitán, Oaxaca, defined by duty to Zapotec custom rather than by presentation, and first attested in English in 1985.
- SistergirlAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander words for gender-diverse people with a female or male spirit. Community-defined, area-specific, and not simply trans.
- TravestiA South American identity reclaimed from an insult, kept because it holds the class history and policing that activists say transgender discards.
- TumtumA rabbinic legal category for a person whose sex cannot be determined. Seventeen occurrences in the Mishnah, and a ruling term rather than a claim.
- Two-SpiritAn English umbrella coined at a 1990 Winnipeg gathering to replace berdache, closed to non-Indigenous people, and translating no older word.
- VakasalewalewaThe one Pacific category rejected by many of the Fijians it names, who find it old-fashioned and use the broader word qauri instead.
- WariaIndonesia's word for trans women, built by a minister in 1978 from woman and man, and still argued over by the scholars who describe it.
- WinkteA Lakota word contracting winyanktehca, wants to be like a woman. Not a synonym for the 1990 pan-Indigenous umbrella, and now usually meaning a gay man.
- X-genderA Japanese term from the Kansai queer scene of the 1990s, defined in a 2000 magazine glossary, and unrelated to the X on a passport.
Keep going
The other categories
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
- Distinct Nonbinary GendersThe microlabels here share one insistence, and their sources make it in almost the same words every time: this is not a partial gender, not a blend, and not a point between two poles.
- Fluid & Changing GendersGenders that move.
- Multiple GendersHolding more than one gender, at once or in alternation.
Common questions
Questions about gender around the world
Why are these not filed as identities?
Because the sources describe a social position rather than an inner sense of self. A hijra household has a guru, an initiation and an economy; a fa'afafine has work inside an extended family. Those facts are the category, and an identity framing drops all of them while keeping only the part that resembles a Western label.
Is it right to call these third genders?
Sometimes, and it is a blunt instrument. The phrase is useful for signalling that a society recognises more than two positions, and it is misleading where a culture recognises five, as the Bugis of Sulawesi do, or where the category is not a third thing but a middle one, as with mahu.
Why keep the original spellings?
Because romanisation is where search fails people, and because the diacritics carry information. This catalogue files each term under its everyday romanised form, keeps the original script in its own field, and redirects the variant spellings, so that faafafine and fa'afafine both arrive in the same place.
Were these categories invented by colonialism?
No, but colonial administration reshaped almost all of them. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 registered hijras as criminals, missionary Christianity drove the Hawaiian mahu role underground from the 1820s, and several of the words in this group carry a period of use as insults before they were reclaimed.
Do people in these categories consider themselves transgender?
Some do and many do not, and the disagreement is often internal rather than about outsiders. The entries record it either way rather than resolving it, because the answer differs by person, by generation and by whether the question is being asked at home or in a diaspora.