#two-spirits

It's pride season.  A couple people have posted about how "it's unnecessary" or "gives us a bad name" or "promotes promiscuity."  

First of all, we are a people based off of sexuality.  It's our nature, our gift, and our burden.  It's what makes us different.  Unlike race though, a big majority of us can hide it.  Today, I'm kinda like Mystique (Marvel) in the sense that I feel I shouldn't have to.  We don't need to conform to our assigned gender.  We can show affection to our friends without the bondage of masculinity.  It's a beautiful thing.  We can be artists, dancers, estheticians, nurses, whatever we truly want.  I have a point I think, and I'll get to it but this first:

I have a lot of mixed feelings about gender.  I come from a hispanic, catholic upbringing in a very Mexican city in Orange County, California called Santa Ana.  Everyone knew I was different growing up.  I preferred to play with my female cousins and had female friends at school.  Some adults tried to stop that behavior early.  My dad would threaten to take me to the hospital to perform a gender reassignment surgery if I kept acting like a girl, and even an elementary school teacher forbid me from hanging out with the girls making daisy chain necklaces.  I remember even thinking at an early age that maybe I was born in the wrong body. I butched up slightly, but mainly hid behind my nerdiness.  They were the numbers I could find safety in from the bullies.  

Oddly enough, my very first crush was on a girl, so much so that I even joined a co-ed soccer team cause she did.  But it wasn't til 7th grade when I had my very first crush-almost-obsession with a boy and the realization that I was going straight to hell.  I prayed and cried myself to sleep for nights.  In Mexican culture, the gender line is set with such a huge line between masculine and feminine that the only way I could rationalize my feelings was that I might be born in the wrong body... and I thought it wasn't fair... So I thought I should set myself free from my body... I really wanted to die.  So many conflicting emotions, way bigger and beyond the capability of a 12 year old's emotional maturity.  Every time I thought about killing myself or running away, the only thing that stopped me was the thought of abandoning my little sister who was only about 2-3 years old.  She's the reason I'm alive today.

Junior high was the worst experience of my life.  PLEASE children, if you're reading this, it gets better!!!  Be strong, seek guidance, join a gay straight alliance, go to your local LGBT center, and know that you're NEVER alone.  It just feels that way right now and it will be so painful but you can get through it and you will be a stronger person for it.  You don't have to come out right away if you don't want to.  I made it all the way though high school without coming out.  The best advice I can give you is to stay focus on school.

College was way easier.  I lost touch with a lot of people from high school because I still wasn't sure they'd accept me.  I joined the gay-straight alliance (GSA), became the Youth Program Coordinator for the OC LGBT Center, and fell in love for the first time with someone who loved me too, and it was like coming out of a cocoon into a world of other mariposas (forgive the pun, but it means butterfly in Spanish and is also a derogatory term for homosexuals).  I had wings.  I wanted to know everything about myself, cause I was hidden for so long.

I learned about my part Native American beliefs on homosexuality, which is beautiful.  North American tribes believed that homosexual people were born with two-spirits. Wiki: Two-Spirit People (also Two Spirit or Twospirit), is an umbrella term sometimes used for what was formerly known as berdaches i.e. Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations communities. Third gender roles historically embodied by Two-Spirit people include performing work and wearing clothing associated with both men and women. The presence of male two-spirits "was a fundamental institution among most tribal peoples." Male and female two-spirits have been "documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America, among every type of native culture." Read More:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit

Suddenly I made sense.  The nerdy-knight and fabulous-queen in my personality made sense to me in a spiritual way, and to know that I wasn't alone or the first to go through it and I had a creation story.  I wasn't an abomination.  I am natural. I am fundamental.

I learned about the Stonewall Riots, which is like our revolutionary war.  Guess who  shot first.  A man in a dress...  This is why it bothers me when people say, "Gay pride is nothing but drag queens and trannies and leather daddies and half naked men and dykes on bikes.  It's such an embarrassment and is setting our community back decades." FUCK.YOU.  It was a man in a dress and a dyke that went to battle first, not so-called "masculine men" or "straight acting men."  And even today, I think so many gay men (not all!!!) hide behind it.  Because they're still trying to live up to their dad's or their bully's or their culture's expectations of what masculine is and what a man should be and if you are, reconcile with who you are inside.  Without their voice, you'd be silenced.  Without their visibility, you'd be invisible.

The notion of heterosexuality did not exist even per se among Europeans before contact. In fact, the Germans were instrumental in inventing it in the 1860s, a new book argues.

... Its conclusions would seem to concur with and complement the sentiments expressed in Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature.

It is not that people did not historically practice heterosexuality, Blank writes, but rather they did so without thinking about it, labeling it or feeling terribly tied to it. But the migration into crowded urban centers generated a need for order.

 A Two-Spirit person in many Native American cultures believed to possess both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman in one body. They were revered by Native American people often holding roles of power. Women often became feared warriors and chiefs, and men became shamans, prophets, and spiritual leaders.

 Two-Spirits were usually discovered at a young age and given the choice to fill the role of Two-Spirit. As Two-Spirit they were usually dressed in both traditional male and female clothing and carried important roles in their tribes. The Two-Spirit men were prized as wives for their superior strength and status in the tribe. If a rival tribe were to raid a group of women in a field and one of them fought back the attacking men would run away for fear that she was a Two-Spirit and would be too strong for them to handle.

 When the Americas where colonized in the late 1400's, the Spanish invaders where surprised to find that the natives were practicing sodomy so openly, finding a Two-Spirit person in nearly every tribe, so of course, they tried to kill them all. The Two-Spirit people where burned at the stake or torn apart by dogs, their existence was punished brutally, most often by death, until they were almost stamped out of Native American cultures or even reviled by their tribes. This part of Native American culture was almost destroyed, but today LGBT Native Americans are reclaiming this integral right of their heritage by taking up the traditions of the Two-Spirit.

     Pine Leaf

 Pine Leaf was a Two-Spirit woman (a lesbian), born to the Gros Ventres tribe. She was taken prisoner by the Crow tribe and later became their chief. She grew up learning all the traditionally masculine roles of the tribe though she only wore woman's clothing while hunting or waging war on the Blackfoot Confederacy.