Sipiniq

Where the word sipiniq comes from

The root is sipi, to split, and the splitting is literal in the accounts: a newborn whose penis and testicles are described as splitting open as it is delivered, becoming a vagina and labia. In Inuit Nunaat the concept is attested mainly in parts of the Canadian Arctic, around Igloolik and in Nunavik, and in Greenland among the Kitaamiut and the Inughuit.

Neighbouring peoples have their own vocabulary rather than this one. Tikkaliaq and nuliakaaliaq are the Iiviit words; kipijuituq is what the Netsilik Inuit called a comparable idea. No source on file dates the first recorded use of sipiniq in any of its spellings, and none names who first wrote it down.

How a child is recognised as sipiniq

The change was understood to happen either before delivery or during it. In the second case an infant who appeared male as it was born and then presented female organs would be designated male socially, and the reverse could occur. One Inuk woman described a more elaborate version. She remembered having been the soul of her mother's late father, entering her mother's uterus, becoming a male foetus, and then, at the moment of delivery, refusing to be born male and arriving physically female.

Other signs were read at birth as well. Ambiguity counted, from swelling caused by oedema through to Intersex features, and so did genitals blocked by mucus. Fused labia that later separate in infancy would present as exactly the change the word names, and that is a common sign of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is genetic; Inuit accounts hold that a woman who was or had been sipiniq was likelier to bear sipiniit children herself, which is what an inherited trait would produce. A long or difficult delivery was often put down to a sipiniq infant. Fieldwork carried out in the 1970s found two thirds of recorded sipiniit to be infants taken for male who became female and were then designated male, with the opposite direction rarer. That is a proportion of the cases recorded by one body of fieldwork, not a rate in any population: nobody has counted sipiniit, and no census or survey figure appears in any source behind this entry.

How a sipiniq child was raised

The upbringing followed the designation rather than the body, a pattern the literature calls reverse socialization. The child was given the name of a dead relative who had held that gender, taught its skills, set to its work, and dressed in garments cut for the tasks that went with it. In most cases the role lasted until puberty; in some it was kept into adulthood and past marriage.

Socially the designation gave one gender and spiritually it was often understood to give the other, and that doubling carried weight. Sipiniit were held to be unusually strong go-betweens for the natural and spiritual worlds, which made them likely candidates for the role of angakkuq, the shaman or spiritual leader. Sipiniit often married one another and could equally marry people who were not sipiniit, which is the clearest evidence that the category described a role and not a sexuality.

Why anthropologists disagree about sipiniq

Much of the early scholarly work is the French anthropologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure's, from the late 1970s onward, and his framing has been argued with ever since. He described the concept as perinatal transsexuality, a gender transition occurring in the womb or at the moment of birth. He also noted a raised rate of what was then called female pseudohermaphroditism among the Inuit, and then set a limit on his own suggestion: sterility was usual in that group and unusual among sipiniit, which leaves the physical account covering few of the cases at best.

Demographic, economic and psychological explanations have all been tried. One holds that the designation balanced the sexes in a household whose children were otherwise all of one kind. Saladin d'Anglure rejected that class of argument as impoverishing the Inuit reality, and put forward instead an ideological account: the ideal Inuit family was a male and female couple with a brother and sister pair, a microcosm of the balanced order of the universe, and reverse socialization restored the balance when a family did not match the ideal.

Betty Kobayashi Issenman, a Canadian anthropologist, reads the designation differently again: a spiritual practice, the child taking in the spirit of a dead relative, rather than a sign that the child was Transgender. Those three readings, the physical, the structural and the spiritual, are the state of the argument, and none of the sources on file settles it. What they agree on is the practice: the name, the clothing, the work and the standing between worlds.

Why sipiniq appears in English umbrella lists

English glossaries habitually file sipiniq under two-spirit, and Wiktionary's translation table lists the Inuktitut word among the terms it offers for that gloss. The umbrella is younger than the category by a wide margin and it was made for a different purpose.

Two-Spirit was developed across five conferences of First Nations people and announced in 1990 at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg; Albert McLeod, Myra Laramee and Wesley Thomas are among those credited with developing it. In 1993 a group of anthropologists and Native people issued guidelines urging scholars to drop berdache and to use either tribally specific terms or the new umbrella. Two-spirit was created as a tool for political organising across nations, is not meant to be a standalone identity, and carries the expectation that a two-spirit person holds a traditional gender role from their own specific culture.

Whether an Inuit category belongs under an umbrella built for that purpose is not addressed anywhere in the sources on file. What can be said is narrower: sipiniq is a word in Inuktitut with its own root, its own regional distribution and its own neighbouring terms, and a glossary that offers it as a translation of an English coinage of 1990 is describing the umbrella rather than the word.