Third gender
Third gender or third sex is an identity recognizing individuals categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither a man nor a woman. Many gender systems around the world include three or more genders, deriving the concept either from the traditional, historical recognition of such individuals or from its modern development in the LGBTQ community, which can include third gender people as a non-binary identity. The term third is usually understood to mean "other", though some societies use the concept to encompass fourth and fifth genders.
The state of personally identifying as, or being identified by society as, a man, a woman, or other is usually also defined by the individual's gender identity and gender role in the particular culture in which they live.
Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders. In cultures with a third or fourth gender, these genders may represent very different things. To Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, māhū is an intermediate state between man and woman known as "gender liminality", part of a wider MVPFAFF spectrum. Many Indigenous North American traditions recognize third or fourth gender people in a variety of ceremonial roles, sometimes categorized in the modern day under the umbrella identity of Two-Spirit to reflect the spiritual and Indigenous contexts of such practices. The term "third gender" has also been used to describe the hijras of South Asia, the fa'afafine of Polynesia, and the sworn virgins of the Balkans. Third gender traditions can arise to fulfill ritual or religious roles to emphasize a positive social status, however a culture recognizing a third gender does not in itself mean that they were valued by that culture, with some practices developing as direct reactions to the devaluation of women in one's culture.
While found in a number of non-Western cultures, concepts of "third", "fourth", and "fifth" gender roles are still somewhat new to mainstream Western culture and conceptual thought. While mainstream Western scholars—notably anthropologists who have tried to write about the South Asian hijras or the Native American "gender variant" and two-spirit people—have often sought to understand the term "third gender" solely in the language of the modern LGBT community, other scholars—especially Indigenous scholars—stress that mainstream scholars' lack of cultural understanding and context has led to widespread misrepresentation of the people these scholars place in the third gender category, as well as misrepresentations of the cultures in question, including whether or not this concept actually applies to these cultures at all.
Sex and gender
Since at least the 1970s, anthropologists have described gender categories in some cultures which they could not adequately explain using a two-gender framework. At the same time, feminists began to draw a distinction between sex and gender.Anthropologist Michael G. Peletz believes our notions of different types of genders deeply affect our lives and reflect our values in society. In Peletz' book, "Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia", he describes:
Transgender people and third gender
Gender may be recognized and organized differently in different cultures. In some non-Western cultures, gender may not be seen as binary, or people may be seen as being able to cross freely between male and female, or to exist in a state that is in-between, or neither. In some cultures, being third gender may be associated with the gift of being able to mediate between the world of the spirits and the world of humans. For cultures with these spiritual beliefs, it is generally seen as a positive thing, though some third gender people have also been accused of witchcraft and persecuted. In most western cultures, people who did not conform to heteronormative ideals were often seen as sick, disordered, or insufficiently formed. However, as of 2013, individuals who live in countries where the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is used, being labeled as disordered for being transgender would no longer occur due to the manual's update. Instead, a new diagnosis was announced called gender dysphoria. This new diagnosis highlights the distress a transgender person may experience rather than labels individuals who identify with a third gender as sick or disordered.The Indigenous māhū of Hawaii are seen as embodying an intermediate state between man and woman, known as "gender liminality". Some traditional Dineh of the Southwestern US recognize a spectrum of four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man. The term "third gender" has also been used to describe the hijras of South Asia who have gained legal identity, the fa'afafine of Polynesia, and the Albanian sworn virgins.
In some indigenous communities in Africa, a woman can be recognized as a "female husband" who enjoys all the privileges of men and is recognized as such, but whose femaleness, while not openly acknowledged, is not forgotten either.
The hijras of South Asia are one of the most recognized groups of third gender people. Some western commentators have theorized that this could be a result of the Hindu belief in reincarnation, in which gender, sex, and even species can change from lifetime to lifetime, perhaps allowing for a more fluid interpretation. There are other cultures in which the third gender is seen as an intermediate state of being rather than as a movement from one conventional sex to the other.
In a study of people in the United States who thought themselves to be members of a third gender, Ingrid M. Sell found that they typically felt different from the age of 5. Because of both peer and parental pressure, those growing up with the most ambiguous appearances had the most troubled childhoods and difficulties later in life. Sell also discovered similarities between the third genders of the East and those of the West. Nearly half of those interviewed were healers or in the medical profession. Many of them, again like their Eastern counterparts, were artistic, and several were able to make a living from their artistic abilities. The capacity to mediate between men and women was a common skill, and third genders were oftentimes thought to possess an unusually wide perspective and the ability to understand both sides. A notable result of Sell's study is that 93% of the third genders interviewed, again like their Eastern counterparts, reported "paranormal"-type abilities.
In recent years, some Western societies have begun to recognize non-binary or genderqueer identities. Some years after Alex MacFarlane, Australian Norrie May-Welby was recognized as having unspecified status. In 2016, an Oregon circuit court ruled that a resident, Elisa Rae Shupe, could legally change gender to non-binary.
The Open Society Foundations published a report, License to Be Yourself in May 2014, documenting "some of the world's most progressive and rights-based laws and policies that enable trans people to change their gender identity on official documents". The report comments on the recognition of third classifications, stating:
The document also quotes Mauro Cabral of GATE:
The report concludes that two or three options are insufficient: "A more inclusive approach would be to increase options for people to self-define their sex and gender identity."
Third gender and sexual orientation
Before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there was no common non-derogatory vocabulary in modern English for non-heterosexuality; terms such as "third gender" trace back to the 1860s.One such term, Uranian, was used in the 19th century for a person of a third sex—originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men. Its definition was later extended to cover homosexual gender variant females and a number of other sexual types. It is believed to be an English adaptation of the German word Urning, which was first published by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of five booklets that were collected under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe. Ulrich developed his terminology before the first public use of the term "homosexual", which appeared in 1869 in a pamphlet published anonymously by Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Ulrich is widely regarded as one of the pioneering theorists who advocated for the natural occurrence of same-sex attraction, and he believed that such an orientation does not warrant criminalization. The word Uranian was derived by Ulrichs from the Greek goddess Aphrodite Urania, who was created out of the god Uranus' testicles. German lesbian activist Anna Rüling used the term in a 1904 speech, "What Interest Does the Women's Movement Have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?"
According to some scholars, the West is trying to reinterpret and redefine ancient third-gender identities to fit the Western concept of sexual orientation. In Redefining Fa'afafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa, Johanna Schmidt argues that the Western attempts to reinterpret fa'afafine, the third gender in Samoan culture, make it have more to do with sexual orientation than gender. She also argues that this is actually changing the nature of fa'afafine itself, and making it more "homosexual".
A Samoan fa'afafine said, "But I would like to pursue a master's degree with a paper on homosexuality from a Samoan perspective that would be written for educational purposes because I believe some of the stuff that has been written about us is quite wrong."
In How to become a Berdache: Toward a unified analysis of gender diversity, Will Roscoe, using an anthropological term Indigenous people have always found offensive, writes that "this pattern can be traced from the earliest accounts of the Spaniards to present-day ethnographies. What has been written about berdaches reflects more the influence of existing Western discourses on gender, sexuality and the Other than what observers actually witnessed."
According to Towle and Morgan:
Western scholars often do not make a distinction between people of the third gender and males; they are often lumped together. The scholars usually use gender roles as a way to explain sexual relations between the third gender and males. For example, when analyzing the non-normative sex gender categories in Theravada Buddhism, Peter A. Jackson says it appears that within early Buddhist communities, men who engaged in receptive anal sex were seen as feminized and were thought to be hermaphrodites. In contrast, men who engaged in oral sex were not seen as crossing sex/gender boundaries, but rather as engaging in abnormal sexual practices without threatening their masculine gendered existence.
Some writers suggest that a third gender emerged around 1700 in England: the male sodomite. According to these writers, this was marked by the emergence of a subculture of effeminate males and their meeting places, as well as a marked increase in hostility towards effeminate or homosexual males. People described themselves as members of a third sex in Europe from at least the 1860s with the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and continuing in the late nineteenth century with Magnus Hirschfeld, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Aimée Duc and others. These writers described themselves and those like them as being of an "inverted" or "intermediate" sex and experiencing homosexual desire, and their writing argued for social acceptance of such sexual intermediates. Many cited precedents from classical Greek and Sanskrit literature.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the term "third sex" was a common descriptor for homosexuals and gender nonconformists, but after the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and a growing separation of the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity, the term fell out of favor among LGBT communities and the wider public. With the renewed exploration of gender that feminism, the modern transgender movement, and queer theory has fostered, some in the contemporary West have begun to describe themselves as a third sex again. Other modern identities that cover similar ground include pangender, bigender, genderqueer, androgyne, intergender, "other gender" and "differently gendered".