Culture-Specific Genders · 23 entries
Culture-Specific Genders
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 23 culture-specific genders
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 kinds of term
- Gender IdentitiesWhat a person is, as against how they present. Every identity term in the catalogue, with the record behind it.51
- Gender ExpressionPresentation, not identity. The distinction that most confused searches about this vocabulary are really about.5
- Concepts and TerminologyThe words that appear inside the definitions of other words, with their defining documents named.3
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.