A historical argument against the gender binary.

As a kid, UnTextbooked producer Gavin Scott loved listening to his grandfather tell stories about their people. He used to like to imagine what his home was like back before white settlers came. As much as Gavin enjoyed learning about his culture, he sometimes felt out of place as the only gay person he knew of in his small hometown. So when he had the opportunity to work on this podcast, he decided to research LGBT Native Americans to learn more about people who were like him.

He learned about “Two Spirit”, a term that was adopted in 1990 at a gathering of gay and lesbian Native Americans. “Two Spirit” is an umbrella term that encompasses many understandings of queer and gender variant identities for Native Americans. The term alludes to traditional third and fourth gender people; as in, people who were both/neither male and/or female. Many Native American cultures accepted and celebrated these people before white settlers forced assimilation.

Gavin’s research eventually brought him to an unlikely source: Sabine Lang, a German anthropologist who has studied Native American cultures for decades. In her book Men as Women, Women as Men, Sabine Lang writes about the traditional roles of “men-women” and “women-men”, as she calls them. She uses those terms in order to avoid using “Two Spirit”, a contemporary term, when discussing historical identities.