#third gender

Sworn Virgins of Albania

“Sworn Virgin” is the term given to a biological female in the Balkans who has chosen to take on the social identity of a man for life. As a tradition dating back hundreds of years, this was sometimes necessary in a society that lived within tribal clans, followed the Kanun, an archaic code of law, and maintained an oppressive rule over the female gender. Young girls were commonly forced into arranged marriages with much older men in distant villages. The freedom to vote, drive, earn money or own property was traditionally the exclusive province of men. A family suddenly without a patriarch or male heir would find themselves in jeopardy of losing everything. As an alternative, a daughter could become a Sworn Virgin, or “burnesha”, elevating her to the status of a man and granting her all the rights and privileges of any man. In order to manifest the transition such a woman cut her hair, donned male clothing and sometimes even changed her name. Most importantly of all, she took a vow of celibacy to remain chaste for life. As modernization inches towards the small villages nestled in the Albanian Alps, this archaic tradition is increasingly seen as obsolete. Only a handful of Sworn Virgins remain. As a portrait photographer with an interest in subjects that innately speak to the diversity of the human experience, I was fascinated with this story. This is historically one of the few examples of socially accepted gender change and it is rapidly disappearing. My desire to record the sacrifice, context and experience of these women/men set me on course to seek out some of the last burnesha. I was rewarded with a small collection of people who possess an indescribable amount 0f strength and pride, value their family honor above all else, and have few regrets for all they have sacrificed. Furthermore, their absolute transition is accepted, posited and taken without question by the people among whom they live. Photographing them was my greatest privilege.

Supriya Ganesh

Gender: Non binary - Third gender (she/they)

Sexuality: Queer

DOB: 16 December 1997

Ethnicity: Indian - Tamil

Nationality: American

Throughout all of history, gender has existed far beyond the binary. Third gender, two-spirit, and other gender non-conforming people have encapsulated the spirit of ‘nonbinary’ for millennia before the term existed!

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A Galla priest, 2nd Century

Eunuch itself has historically had a very broad usage, either by ignorant people with lacking words to describe what they're hearing about or witnessing, or out of bias and wilful disinterest to actually present it through the eyes of the people they're writing about; outside of the literal castrated male, it has also been used for intersex people, indigenous gender diverse people, ancient third gender people like the Gallae, Assinnu, Hijra, Kinnar—though the two latter exist today aswell—Gala, Kurgarra, Galatura, etc... other examples with the broadening or very tightly bent usage of gender, sex, sexuality words is how colonisers would often call indigenous two spirit or otherwise gender variant people "hermaphrodites" just based on the clothing, occupation, gender role etc they had... "Impotent" is another word that was historically used on gender variant, & asexual people, such as how the Anarya of the Scythians were called.

It is known through many sources that the Gallae addressed eachother as sister and mother, and that they grew their hair out, spoke in a higher tone of voice, and wore both heavy makeup and traditionally women's jewelery and clothing; jet jewellery, generally associated with women, has also been found in two graves in Catterick & Hungate in the UK, where several shrines and figurines of and to Kybele / Magna Mater have also been excavated; these two graves were additionally verified to contain individuals who were described as "biological males", yet the grave goods in all regards even besides the jewelry was what would have been seen as female thus. Not all of the Gallae were gender diverse or variant—some were also cis women—but a good chunk of them were. The priests of the deity Atargatis or Ataratheh functioned very similarly, also calling eachother girls. More on them can be found in greater quantity within De Dea Syria or On The Syrian Goddess, trad. ascribed to Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE), and The Golden Ass by Apuleius (1st Century CE). I will make an extensive post on them this month, and also broader ancient Roman gender transgressions and the hidden underworld of molles, tribades, pathics, cinaedi, viragos etc... In many ways parallels the 1700s mollies & tommies community in Britain.

As said, erstwhile, several graves have been found in Britain associated with the Gallae, described & often reported as "males buried fully as female, with their rites & grave goods" and with feminine necklaces, bracelets or even in full dresses, fabric very much degraded but still often somewhat recognisable... Also a little cool detail: A new technique in use by Swedish archaeologists for just a few years has found ways to recover both fiber and colour from clothing in ways that were not possible before, and this has many very excited!! So keep an eye out for that, and how it may be used to further gender archaeology and trans+ archaeology, which has shown more and more third gender and otherwise gender variant burials in prehistoric Europe notably been found, such as in Hungary, Germany, & Czechia. But later in the Roman era in Britain, Catterick and Hungate are two locations of these burials occurring; a shrine to Kybele has also been found by Hadrian's wall, and votive figurines to her have even been found in the Netherlands. It is not known for sure if any Celtic tribes had gender variance as an accepted part of their cultures, as we lack much info in that regard, and also owing to that Europe was spectrum-wise romanised to various degrees and then Christianised, so we lack crucial sources from the relevant eras... secret underground communities did exist in ancient Rome, medieval Europe of queer folks, but your punishment was ofc being burnt alive so not many were exactly willing and excited to write an autobiography.

Cybele was also worshipped in Caria, and it is recorded how Artemisia I of Caria made a sacrifice in the company of "eunuchs" to her (Mother Of The Gods) before seeking to conquer Latmus... The off-hand comment was by the rhetorician Polyaenus, a Roman-Macedonian author, so his cultural bias must be accounted for aswell as the general broad historical usages of the word 'eunuch'... "Artemisia planted soldiers in ambush near Latmus; and herself, with a numerous train of women, eunuchs and musicians, celebrated a sacrifice at the grove of the Mother of the Gods, which was about seven stades distant from the city" -Polyaenus in his Stratagems

Another name for her was Matar Kubileya / Kubeleya Mother, perhaps "Mountain Mother"; worship was also extant in ancient Greece and overall much of Europe. Main place of worship in Phrygia was Pessinus, where the sacred needle of Kybele was kept, conical black stone, later moved to Rome during the second punic wars when an Oracle urged them to worship her, which they did. The needle was later taken by the empress* Elagabalus* to her personal temple and was kept there until excavations in 1730 led by a priest supposedly found it—or some workers did—where it was then said to have been tossed out of ignorance into a spoils pile because they didn't know what it was besides a black rock.

The public worship of Cybele or Magna Mater persevered longer than most other when Christianity became widespread within the Roman Empire, but was finally outlawed in the 390s... Private, secretive worship is estimated to have remained possibly up to the 500s in rural areas; it is also known that groups of people attempted to hold rituals for Kybele after the ban, aswell as gather for protests to the closure of her temples, which were subsequently squashed.

Curiously, there is a temple Maetreum of Cybele in New York, having opened in the 1990s :) they have been known to have helped dozens of women in dire straits when they've needed escape or housing due to being in precarious situations like abusive relationships...

There was also mention on their Facebook page of them offering sanctuary to trans refugees, and especially due to the recent political climate.

Woo, pagans! 🌺 Coming in clutch!

"In their very temples can be seen disgraceful things: men letting themselves be handled as women, and flaunting the transformation of their sex; they confess with supreme disgrace what they have suffered." -Firmicus Maternus, 4th century.

The poet Catullus also wrote a looooong text dedicated to the god, and her gender variant priesthood... who were generally looked down upon by the general Roman populace because of what would in Roman eyes have been gender nonconformity.

Meter Oreias Cybele with her two lions and tambour

I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

Estrogen is making me more romance-repulsed lmfao

Third gender alt pride flag

[pt: Third gender alt pride flag. end pt.]

Color meanings:

burgundy brown: culture. crimson: spirituality. amber: happiness. pineapple white: pride and awareness. pinky coral: love and joy. orangish salmon: the identity and history of culture to which you belong.

tag-list: @radiomogai, @imoga-pride, @boingogender, @daybreakthing, @discrophy, @themogaidragon, @acronym-chaos, @colablob, @rwuffles, @charlie-lottie.

free to use. no credit needed, but it would be appreciated.