None of you know what Two-Spirit means, you aren’t willing to educate yourselves or think critically about it, and I think it is symptom of subtle/internalised (or rather externalised) racism.
A few days ago someone posted about Two-Spirit being a "noble savage" term for trans people in Indigenous communities.
Two-Spirit is not and was never intended to be synonymous with Indigenous and trans; Yes, some Indigenous people use it as a term for Indigenous and homo/bisexual or trans, but the term was not coined with that intention and traditionally does not mean that.
The meaning of Two-spirit is dependant on the nation of the person who is two-spirit; in some nations it can refer to what non-indigenous people might refer to as gay men or women, or nonbinary people, in some nations it might refer to words that directly translate to "trans woman", or "trans man", and in some nations it does not even exist, because there was no traditional recognition of those identities.
Reading the comments on that post, I understand that some people \*have\* had experiences where the term was used to other them from their true sex, but you know this happens in non-indigenous communities with terms like nonbinary, and while there is a lot of critique here, it seems like most of you do agree that nonbinary people exist and are separate from binary trans people.
I have never met a two-spirit person who did not identify that way out of their own volition, and I have never met s two-spirit person who believes that trans people are synonymous with non-binarity or being two spirit, and I know many two spirit people. As a matter of fact, the two-spirit people in my life have been the most understanding of trans binarity vs non-binarity.
The idea that Indigenous people cannot distinguish between two-spiritedness and transness is frankly racist and not a rejection of "noble savage" ideas, but rather a perpetration of "ignoble savage" ideas.
Yes, some NON-two-spirit people might force the identity onto binary trans people who don’t identify with the label, but that is not an issue with the label itself, it is an issue with cis people misunderstanding trans identities.
The term itself was coined by two-spirit people, not white people, in my city, Winnipeg, in 1990. it was NOT "invented" as an identity in that year, just like transsex people were not invented when that term was coined, it is simply a development of language, it was coined to replace the slur "Berdache", which WAS forced onto trans and two-spirit people by \*colonizers\*, not other indigenous people.
Yes, some of the traditional terms mean "woman in a man‘s body", or "man in a woman's body", but like, that is literally what we here call ourselves like 90% of the time 😭. I am a woman stuck in a male body. That’s what I am. I am female, yes, but I am stuck in a male body and it fucking sucks.
This is not a case like in Thailand where terms like "Kathoey", "Phuying Praphet Song", "Phet Thi Sam", or "Sao Praphet Song" are forced onto trans women, not at all. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people conceptualize themselves as two-spirit.
I am truly sympathetic to those of you who are Indigenous and have suffered because of the term, but you don’t have the right to disparage people who identify with the term because of your experience. That is not up to you.
And if you are not Indigenous, especially if you are white, and you don’t have input/perspectives from both two-spirit and Indigenous people on the term, whether through research or anecdotes, you do not have a right to criticize it; You are not affected by the term at all. Non-Indigenous people cannot be two-spirit.
Again, yes, there \*are\* issues with how \*some\* use the term, but it \*is\* a term coined by and for the people who use it, it is not a term forced onto indigenous people by colonizers. Every two-spirit person I know views it as a term of empowerment because it allows them to express themselves through their own culture.
If you are non-Indigenous and you disagree, you can taste the leftover shit on my ass hair because I do not care what an uneducated colonizer thinks about Indigenous cultures/cultural perspectives.