1:19pm January 6, 2014

wiintersoldiier-two-spirit-is-a-trans

marchcouldbedarker:

feministwerewolf:

wiintersoldiier:

two-spirit is a trans* identity.

whether you think it’s cultural appropriate or not is irrelevant.

it is a trans* identity.

and telling a two-spirit person that can’t be their identity is transphobic.

Hi, two spirit here to tell you you are a fucking moron. it’s not…

Yo, non-indigenous tumblr:

This is your reminder that you don’t get to define identities that aren’t yours to begin with like OP.

Read feministwerewolf’s (who is a two-spirit as opposed to op) commentary.

Also more relevant stuff:

From “Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic” by Qwo-Li Driskill (http://dragonflyrising.wearetheones.info/stolen.pdf) (I bolded parts for emphasis)

The term “Two-Spirit” is a word that resists colonial definitions of who we are. It is an expression of our sexual and gender identities as sovereign from those of white GLBT movements. The coinage of the word was never meant to create a monolithic understanding of the array of Native traditions regarding what dominant European and Euroamerican traditions call “alternative” genders and sexualities. The term came into use in 1990 at a gathering of Native Queer/Two-Spirit people in Winnipeg as a means to resist the use of the word “berdache,” and also as a way to talk about our sexualities and genders from within tribal contexts in English (Jacobs et al. 2). I find myself using both the words “Queer” and “Trans” to try to translate my gendered and sexual realities for those not familiar with Native traditions, but at heart, if there is a term that could possibly describe me in English, I simply consider myself a Two-Spirit person. The process of translating Two-Spiritness with terms in white communities becomes very complex. I’m not necessarily “Queer” in Cherokee contexts, because differences are not seen in the same light as they are in Euroamerican contexts. I’m not necessarily “Transgender” in Cherokee contexts, because I’m simply the gender I am. I’m not necessarily “Gay,” because that word rests on the concept of men-loving-men, and ignores the complexity of my gender identity. It is only within the rigid gender regimes of white America that I become Trans or Queer. While homophobia, transphobia, and sex-ism are problems in Native communities, in many of our tribal realities these forms of oppression are the result of colonization and genocide that cannot accept women as leaders, or people with extra-ordinary genders and sexualities. As Native people, our erotic lives and identities have been colonized along with our homelands.

From another relevant article by Qwo-Li Driskill (Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances Between Native and Queer Studies (http://dragonflyrising.wearetheones.info/DriskillDoubleweaving.pdf))

I am choosing the term Two-Spirit, rather than other terms I could use, such as Native queer or Native trans people, for several reasons. The term Two-Spirit is a word that is intentionally complex. It is meant to be an umbrella term for Native GLBTQ people as well as a term for people who use words and concepts from their specific traditions to describe themselves. Like other umbrella terms—including queer—it risks erasing difference. But also like queer, it is meant to be inclusive, ambiguous, and fluid. Some Native GLBTQ folks have rejected the term Two-Spirit, while others have rejected terms such as gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and queer in favor of Two-Spirit or tribally specific terms. Still others move between terms depending on the specific rhetorical context. The choice to use the term Two-Spirit, as well as the numerous tribally specific terms for those who fall outside dominant Eurocentric constructions of gender and sexuality, employs what Scott Richard Lyons calls rhetorical sovereignty: “The inherent right of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse.” Further, contemporary Two-Spirit politics, arts, and movements are part of what Robert Warrior terms intellectual sovereignty, “a decision—a decision we make in our minds, in our hearts, and in our bodies—to be sovereign and to find out what that means in the process.”

There was even a graphic on tumblr about this: (http://creativenative1981.tumblr.com/post/69697297038/so-i-wanted-to-work-on-a-two-spirit-colour-wheel)

So, can we stop with the nonsense, please?

TL;DR: The term even makes any damned sense within certain cultural settings. (As much as I appreciate Qwo-Li Driskill’s work, I am still not sure that it even totally works for me conceptually in a Tutelo-Cherokee setting…though it’s still the closest fit, described that way.)

Y’all have your own very different genders and terms for them already. Show some respect and basic dignity, and stop trying to just take other people’s that don’t even fit you. That’s gross and part of a very destructive longterm pattern.

I’ll just throw in a couple more quotes from Qwo-Li’s SHAKING OUR SHELLS: Cherokee Two-Spirits Rebalancing the World:

Before European invasions and concerted efforts by missionaries to disrupt our culture, Cherokee gender systems reflected duyuktv. Two-Spirit people in the Southeast have been a target of colonial violence since the Spanish invasion. Patriarchal Spain— perpetuating an Inquisition in Europe and continuing the Inquisition in the Americas—customarily murdered gender non-conforming people. Women’s central place within Cherokee life was looked at with fascination and derision by European invaders, who mockingly labeled our nation a “petticoat government” and misinterpreted Cherokee female warriors as “amazons.”

When European invaders and missionaries began toppling Cherokee gender roles, all of duyuktv was disrupted. Before this, women had jurisdiction over their children, homes, and community agriculture. They had authority over our homelands. Colonial powers, in an effort to gain control of our landbases, toppled Cherokee women’s traditional roles as leaders and diplomats and almost destroyed our matrifocal clan system. Through violent enforcement of patriarchy, gender relationships made a dramatic shift. Rather than seeing the roles of men and women as always in duyuktv, Christian European patriarchy enforced ideas of male supremacy, rigid gender categories, and sexuality as something to be suppressed and controlled.

So now colonists’ descendants are trying to take these culture-dependent identities for themselves. Right. Y’all don’t understand what duyukdv or tohi even are, but you want to grab at things you don’t even understand and make up your own meanings that are better than ours around them. The same goes for other indigenous cultures with their own very specific understandings of gender and how the whole goddamned world fits together.

Written documentation of our past is often based on European colonists’ reactions to Cherokee gender, who thought that all of our genders were “variant.” Colonists likely saw female warriors or women in positions of leadership as living as men, even though these were acceptable—and important—roles for women in Cherokee gender systems. Trying to glean from colonial accounts which of these female-embodied people might now be called “Two-Spirit” and which were simply acting in accordance with Cherokee traditions for women is very difficult. We must remember these kinds of complexities as we continue to uncover our past and re-weave our present.

And at least for some of us, this kind of continuing mismatch in actual genders have helped us need to even come up with ways of describing ourselves, trying to interface with Euro-American (and actual European) systems where people are definitely still not ”simply the gender [they are]”. So then y’all want to lift those terms for yourselves, while often continuing to treat the people who even came up with them like crap within “your” queer and trans communities.

Yes, this is a whole collection of sore points for a lot of people. And maybe the people who are acting all butthurt that we’ve had the gall to repeatedly ask and then tell them to back off, really need to stop and think about why this may be. And walk through whole fields of Legos if they still refuse to understand why their behavior is causing problems.

(Just to make it very clear, the “y’all” here is directly referring to the folks who are causing problems and refusing to listen, usually while loudly insisting that they couldn’t possibly be racist scum.)