Third gender

It is filed here as a concept rather than an identity because almost nobody says I am third gender. It is a description applied from outside, by scholars and by institutions, to categories that have their own names.

What the phrase third gender covers

Wiktionary marks the term as anthropology and defines it as a category present in societies that recognise three or more genders, neither male nor female. Wikipedia adds the gloss on the numeral: third is usually understood to mean other, which is why the same framework stretches to fourth and fifth positions without renaming itself. Whether somebody occupies such a position is settled by gender identity and gender role in the particular culture, not by a body.

There is no official definition, and LGBTQ Nation is direct about why: the phrase covers a broad group of people who may or may not want to be associated with it. It is also not a synonym for being transgender. Vox, quoted in the same article, puts the distinction plainly: trans people are not part of a third gender, they are men and women. Some Non-binary people accept the label and many do not.

Western legal systems have begun to make room for the category on their own terms, which complicates the vocabulary further. Alex MacFarlane and then the Australian Norrie May-Welby were recognised as holding an unspecified status, and the marker most jurisdictions have settled on is an X, a slot without a name. LGBTQ Nation notes that the X marker is offered to intersex and non-binary people in some countries and that not all of either group wants it.

One further caution belongs in the definition, ahead of the criticism. Wikipedia states that a culture recognising a third gender does not by itself mean the culture valued the people in it, and notes that some such practices developed as reactions to the devaluation of women. Recognition and respect are separate findings, and the phrase carries only the first.

Where the term third gender came from

The framework is younger than the categories it describes. Since at least the 1970s, in Wikipedia's dating of it, anthropologists have been describing gender categories they could not explain with a two-gender framework. No source on file dates the phrase itself to a year. Feminist scholarship was drawing the distinction between sex and social gender in the same years, and the two developments made each other usable.

The anthropologist Michael G. Peletz set out the widest version of the frame in Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia, where gender designates five sets of phenomena: females and femininity; males and masculinity; androgynes and intersex people; transgender people, who by his definition cross normative boundaries; and unsexed or ungendered people such as eunuchs. The list is a fair summary of what the literature had accumulated by then and of how loosely it was held together.

What the framing gets right

The finding is real and it is not small. Most cultures use a gender binary, a substantial number do not, and the ones that do not are spread across every inhabited continent. The PBS map that accompanies Two Spirits runs to dozens of entries on six continents, from Burrnesha in Albania and femminiello in Naples to Kathoey in Thailand, Bissu in Indonesia, winkte among the Lakota and quariwarmi among the Inca. Harvard's Religion and Public Life project notes that people of non-binary gender expression have held roles in Hindu society for more than two thousand years. India recognised hijras as a third gender in 2014, and Meti and Khawaja sira carry the Nepali and Pakistani rulings with their dates.

The PBS text names two features that recur across the material. The first is that many Indigenous terms for these positions contain both the word for man and the word for woman in their construction. The second is that the role is often that of a religious specialist, healer or spiritual worker rather than a private identity, which is the part the Western vocabulary has no equivalent for at all.

That second feature has a consequence the sources are careful with. Wikipedia notes that in cultures holding these beliefs the ability to mediate between the world of spirits and the world of humans is generally read as a good thing, and that some third gender people have nevertheless been accused of witchcraft and persecuted.

The categories are not only historical. Yuki Kihara, a Japanese-Samoan fa'afafine artist, held a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and represented New Zealand at the 2021 Venice Biennale, appearing as a representative of a nation and of nothing else. In the other direction, Ingrid M. Sell's study of people in the United States who considered themselves members of a third gender found that they typically felt different from the age of five, that nearly half worked as healers or in medicine, that many made a living from artistic work, and that 93 per cent reported abilities they described as paranormal. Sell read the last as a similarity between the third genders of East and West, and made no claim about either.

What the framing gets wrong

The arithmetic is the problem. Calling something the third gender fixes man and woman as the first two, which makes every other position an addition to a Western baseline rather than a part of a system in its own right. LGBTQ Nation puts the objection as a question its supporters cannot answer: if there is a third gender, which gender is first and which is second.

The counts themselves do not cooperate.

Māhū means an intermediate state, a middle with no number attached, and several of the categories described this way are defined by role and function, with no position on any list. There is a practical objection as well as a conceptual one: LGBTQ Nation records the argument that a third gender category gives institutions a way to place trans people outside the categories they belong to, the proposal for separate sporting classifications being the example most often given.

The strongest form of the objection comes from inside the material. Wikipedia records Indigenous scholars arguing that mainstream scholarship's lack of cultural context has produced widespread misrepresentation both of the people placed in the category and of the cultures they belong to, including on the question of whether the concept applies at all. It quotes a participant at the conferences behind the book Two-Spirited People reporting First Nations people describing themselves as unitary rather than as a pair in one body, and observing that outside Indo-European-speaking societies the word gender would not be relevant and third gender would likely be meaningless.

Why anthropology abandoned the word berdache

The literature's own history makes the case. The word that third gender replaced in North American anthropology was berdache, a term taken from the language of the colonisers, applied by non-Native writers, and also used of boys sold into sexual servitude. Kyle De Vries describes it as a derogatory term created by Europeans and perpetuated by anthropologists to define people who varied from Western norms. Mary Annette Pember's account explains the mechanism: reliance on oral tradition left the field open to explorers, missionaries and anthropologists who wrote the books and thereby became the experts, with the result that widely different traditions across more than five hundred living Native American communities were homogenised under English-language names.

Two-spirit was proposed in 1990 by Myra Laramee at the third Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, by Indigenous people specifically to replace berdache. Its own reception is instructive: it has been useful for intertribal organising, it is not based in traditional terms, and nations with ceremonial roles for gender-variant people generally use names in their own languages and have rejected the newer word as Western in shape. The outside name has been wrong before, and the replacement is contested by the same argument.

How this catalogue uses it

The specific words are the entries. Third gender is a concept page that explains the comparative frame, records the objection to it, and links the categories without absorbing them. A reader who arrives here looking for hijra, muxe or bissu is sent to those entries, where the people, the language and the region are named, because that is the level at which the material is accurate.

Where a community has named itself collectively, as the Pacific did with MVPFAFF, that name is preferred to this one, and Two-Spirit is the same case in North America. The phrase is kept because searches for it are real and because the comparative point it makes is real. It is not used as a translation of anything.