Parts of this article are hard to follow, but it's an interesting take that I haven't heard before.
Also...I had no idea that the term two spirit was that recent. You learn something new every day.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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It makes sense when you realise that two-spirit isn't what two-spirit people call themselves at home. In their own tribe's cultural context, everybody knows the specific name for their gender and what it culturally means. Two-spirit was invented on purpose as a shorthand for describing dozens or hundreds of different things in a language people outside that one single tribe can all understand. It's as manufactured and as broad as the sequence of letters "LGBT", an umbrella term that arose during a specific cultural moment as part of a push for equality.
That makes a lot of sense. I'd never thought deeply about it before.
If you'd like help understanding those hard to follow parts of the article, I'd be happy to explain them in more detail. In fact, I might be able to edit the article to improve its clarity if you can tell Me what parts are lacking.
The bottom paragraph and beyond were the parts I had trouble understanding.
I really respect that you wrote an entire article by yourself, especially on such an interesting subject. It's great to see things made by members of the community :)
Is it the part about humans having divine genders that's confusing, or the part about gods being nonbinary and Aphrodite having a divine, nonhuman femininity?
Each paragraph makes sense but I'm having trouble understanding how they connect to the main point.
Well, I mention gods being nonbinary as a supporting point for the idea that gender is informed by religion, and I mention divinegender humans because a lot of people are tranphobic against divinegender people, and I think right after someone learns that all genders are religiously informed is the best time to tell someone about people who are often attacked for the religion in their genders.
Or from another point of view, the point of the article is "Don't be transphobic to people with religious genders", the fact that all genders are religious is an appeal to empathy to get people to not be transphobic, and I talk about two-spirit, bissu, and divinegender as examples of people with religious genders not to be transphobic to.
Hmm, what you said makes sense. How exactly does worship hierarchy relate to that? Isn't your point to respect the religions of trans people no matter what?
I'm referencing these three paragraphs. I realized I selected the wrong ones previously.
Ps. Thanks for taking the time to respond and clarify
Oh, plenty of people see a divinegender person and decide to go all "Your gender is an unjust hierarchy because all gods think they're better than everyone and no anarchist or god-fearing christian would ever respect your gender". I'm just mythbusting the most common complaint about what I'm saying, which is to not be transphobic. I never considered that someone would be unfamiliar enough with deiphobic tropes to see that section as a non-sequitur. Interesting.
I have never come across any of this in mainstream trans discourse. Is there a specific social media platform that these discussions take place on?
Discord, mostly. A bit of it leaks onto Xitter as well. I actually got involved in a bunch of discourse yesterday. Someone who had previously been accepting of My pronouns suddenly decided to debate Me about them and say I have no right to control the language other people use to refer to Me. https://imgur.com/a/bs5zXTM
Generally discussions about these fringe queer topics will be more common on more personal social media, and less common on less personal media. That's because people with fringe queer identities feel safer being themselves in a more personal environment, and in a less personal environment, dominant social attitudes are more powerful, so on a reddit-like platform divinegender people just get downvoted to oblivion.
I did not mean to use the wrong pronouns to refer to You earlier, sorry. I imagine the majority of people just don't understand it, and so won't respect or accept it at all.
If you don't mind me asking, how does being divinegender relate to Your pronoun usage? How do Your pronouns work verbally? I'm genuinely curious about this.
Wow, you're being really trans accepting. Thank you so much.
Well, three years ago I realised I was goddessgender (this is a subset of divinegender), and My goddess-mother told Me I should try capitalised pronouns. I tried them, and they gave Me gender euphoria, so I kept them. As for verbally? Most people can neither pronounce nor hear the difference, so I'm not picky about it at all.
I only ever had one problem with pronoun capitalisation being spoken. I had this ex girlfriend who was hiding My gender from her other partners because she was scared they were going to be transphobic about it. So she took advantage of their inability to hear the difference and let them think she was using lowercase pronouns. I didn't consent to being put back in the closet by her, and considered it misgendering, since it's dishonest about My pronouns. It had a lot to do with why we broke up.