Gender Around the World
Gender Around the World · 41 entries
This is 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 turns on that difference. 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.
In this category
All 41 gender around the world
41 entries
- Akava'ineAn old Cook Islands word now carrying a much newer identity, shaped by Polynesian communities in New Zealand and carried back home 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.
- ApwintThe Burmese word for people assigned male at birth who live openly as women, paired with apone for those who do not, and counted by nobody yet.
- AylonitA rabbinic category assigned at eighteen or twenty, glossed in the Talmud as ram-like, and argued to be borrowed from the description of the eunuch.
- BabaylanThe shamanic office of the pre-colonial Philippines, held mostly by women and by asog, and documented by Spanish chroniclers from 1569 onward.
- BaklaA Filipino gender term paired with tomboy, meaning indecisiveness in Old Tagalog, a slur by the time of the war, and no longer one since the 1990s.
- BinabinaaineA Gilbertese word borrowed into Tuvaluan for a third-gender role recognised in later childhood, glossed as becoming a woman and counted by nobody.
- 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.
- ChibadosDiviners of the Ndongo who lived as women, advised on war and buried the dead, and whose entire surviving record was written by the Portuguese.
- EnareeScythian diviners who lived as women and read the future in plaited linden bark, known only through the Greek writers who disapproved of them.
- 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 gender role held inside an extended family, not a translation of transgender, and a morphology that repeats right across the Pacific.
- Fa'afatamaSamoans assigned female at birth who live in the manner of a man, counted as a fourth gender by some sources and a third by others, and never counted at all.
- FakafifineNiue's word for people assigned male at birth with a feminine expression, and the final F in an acronym a Niuean activist assembled in 2011.
- FakaleitiIn the manner of a lady, with the lady borrowed from English, naming a Tongan group far wider than any single translation is willing to 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.
- GalaLamentation priests of Inanna in Sumer, singing in eme-sal, the dialect of female gods. Proverbs call them effeminate; the ledgers give them wives.
- GalliSelf-castrated priests of Cybele in yellow women's dress and jewellery, adopted by Rome in 204 BCE and last recorded at her temple in AD 390.
- 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 that tourism made.
- KhanithAn Omani and Emirati social position between men's and women's roles, held with a man's legal rights, and reversible through marriage and public proof.
- 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 again 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.
- NádleehíThe Diné word translates as changing one, not feminine male. Four genders, a creation story, and a category the two-spirit umbrella covers imperfectly.
- PalopaA Tok Pisin word taken from Jennifer Lopez and dated to about 2005, adopted in Port Moresby in place of English words heard as stigmatising.
- RaeraeA Tahitian category that appeared in the 1960s, defined against the older māhū role by presentation, by medical transition and by the city of Papeete.
- SarisA rabbinic category for a person assigned male at birth who develops no male characteristics, split by cause, with a different marriage rule for each.
- SipiniqAn Inuit category for a child held to have changed sex at the moment of birth, then raised as the sex they were first, by name, clothing and work.
- SistergirlAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander words for gender-diverse people with a female or male spirit. Community-defined, area-specific, and wider than trans.
- TranspinayA Tagalog blend of trans and Pinay, coined by a Filipino trans organisation to separate trans women from bakla. No source dates its first use.
- 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, not 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 that it names, who find it old-fashioned and use the broader word qauri in its place.
- WariaIndonesia's word for trans women, built by a government minister in 1978 out of woman and man, and still argued over by the scholars who describe it.
- WhakawahineA te reo Māori word built from whaka- and wahine, defined by New Zealand glossaries rather than scholarship, with no article on English Wikipedia.
- 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 out of the Kansai queer scene of the 1990s, defined in a magazine glossary in the year 2000, and unrelated to the X on a passport.
Keep going
The other categories
- Pronouns & Forms of AddressThe words in this group do not name a kind of person.
- Gender Expression & PresentationWhat these gender expression terms report is presentation, stance and the scene a person comes from, rather than an answer to the question of what their gender is. [[butch]] is the clearest case: Wikipedia files it inside the lesbian subculture, with its own traits, behaviours and styles, and the word grew out of working-class bar culture in the 1940s, not out of any theory of identity. [[genderpunk|Genderpunk]] and gender bending belong here for a related reason, since both describe an active stance against a norm.
- 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.
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 without resolving it, because the answer differs by person, by generation and by whether the question is being asked at home or in a diaspora.