Culture-Specific Genders
Culture-Specific Genders · 41 entries
These are gender categories belonging to particular peoples and languages, and they are not translations of anything. Hijra is not the South Asian word for non-binary, Two-Spirit is a pan-Indigenous English term coined at a 1990 gathering in Winnipeg rather than an ancient one, and Bakla carries obligations and a standing in law that no English label carries. Each entry names the specific people or language community the word belongs to, never a continent, and says what the role involves rather than which Western category it approximates.
Where a community has published guidance on how it wishes to be described, the entry leads with that guidance instead of burying it in a footnote. Several of these categories were criminalised under colonial law and are documented mostly through the records of the people criminalising them, which is a fact about the sources rather than about the role, and the entries say which is which. Some are living, some are revived, some survive only in a written record. Bissu and Muxe are read very differently inside their own communities than in the anthropology written about them, and the entries hold both readings open.
Of this kind
All 41 culture-specific genders
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 kinds of term
- Gender IdentitiesWhat a person is, as against how they present. Every identity term in the catalogue, with the record behind it.53
- Gender ExpressionPresentation, not identity. The distinction that most confused searches about this vocabulary are about.11
- PronounsThe table first, then the sentences. Every set in all five forms, with the date it was first recorded.9
- Concepts and TerminologyThe words that appear inside the definitions of other words, with their defining documents named.8
Common questions
Questions about culture-specific genders
What is a third gender?
A recognised social category that is neither man nor woman within the culture that names it. The phrase is a comparative convenience rather than a shared identity: the roles it groups together have different histories, obligations and legal standings, and the entries describe each on its own terms rather than as versions of one another.
Are culture-specific genders the same as being non-binary?
No, and treating them as equivalent misdescribes both. A culture-specific category is a social role with its own history, community structures and often a place in religious or legal practice. Non-binary is an identity term from English-speaking gender vocabulary. A person may hold one, both or neither, and mapping one onto the other flattens what makes each documented.
Can anybody use these terms for themselves?
That depends on the term and on the community, and the catalogue records what the community has said rather than deciding for it. Two-spirit is explicitly not available to non-Indigenous people, and its entry leads with that. Where no such guidance exists, the entry says the record is silent instead of implying permission.
Why do so many entries describe colonial suppression?
Because it is what the sources document. Roles that had standing before colonisation were criminalised under imported law across South Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, and much of the surviving written record was produced by the administrations doing the criminalising. Each entry says who wrote the record it rests on, because that shapes what the record contains.