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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3517 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Not everyone's local norms are the same, otherwise we could just call them universal norms. Traditional southeast Asian culture was relatively accepting of gay and "spiritually trans" individuals, usually in a religious context (the stuff the woke left says about "two-spirit" priests in indigenous societies is not in fact completely made up, though they take it way too far in assuming they were exactly like modern trans people). The country in that region least affected culturally by either western colonialism or the expansion of Islam is Thailand, and they also began modernizing early enough to profit first from curious westerners through prostitution and sex tourism.

In the case of Taiwan though it is in fact mostly due to recent western cultural influence. Young people there, who overwhelmingly support independence from China, are influenced by leftist anti-colonialist narratives coming out of the US, which have brought with them a lot of baggage ranging from environmentalist opposition to nuclear power, being anti-military (this position is both more complicated than it seems for contingent historical reasons, but also exactly as dumb as it seems for a group whose very existence threatens war with a superpower), promotion of aboriginal culture and languages, support for LGBT rights, and most recently its own me too movement.

I'm curious about the two spirit as know next to nothing about indigenous American cultures. Taking from Paul Vaseys commentary on the fa'afine and some experience of Samoan culture I would assume other cultures have related versions, ie a way to resolve homosexuality and male feminity as a third way distinct from traditional and actually pretty restrictive gender roles. This is pretty far removed of the born in the wrong body narrative, the body is accepted as what it is. What's the case with two-spirit, I know from tv-history these cultures have ideas around spirit animals, but assume this is in the realm of metaphor/the imaginal. It strikes me that it would be maladaptive for an indigenous culture to sway too much from tangible realities so I'm suspicious how alike these ideas really are to the current ideas, which I put in the realm of luxury gnosticism.

My understanding is that the two-spirit thing was real, but not all that widespread -- and looked more like "camp bitch" than "fabulous magic-person".

Just a category to put guys in who were no good at the manly-man stuff, but (obviously) no good at the 'bearing children' part of being a woman.

Making such people useful and feeling like they have a place to fill is probably pretty adaptive -- but I get the distinct impression that none of this meant that they were treated all that great.

The closest continuing equivalent to the two-spirits today are the Hijras, AFAIK, and they don’t seem to be treated particularly well.

Hijras are cunts who normally make a living by extortion, demanding money as bribes on the pain of making sexually embarrassing comments, groping you or causing a fuss at events. They get treated accordingly.

It seems plausible that two spirits were often the same thing back in the day- certainly nobody who remembers them is still alive.

That would have been my guess about it. I suspect that the cooption of indigenous cultures by the gender ideology lobby is almost entirely sophistry and really a form of neo-colonisation. I suspect what these cultures really teach us are different models of acceptance of gender nonconformity, which we could actually learn from.

I did find some references at one point, but it was awhile ago (around the dawning of WWtrans) and will probably be hard to pick out with search engines these days -- the primary sources for the phenomenon as I recall are pretty contested and heavily weighted towards early European exoticism. Certainly nothing pattern matches to this in the groups I'm familiar with as of the 19th/early 20th centuries.

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