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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Can someone remind me what the “2S”

2S is for Two-Spirit. I don't know exactly what it is, but I think I heard it's some sort of double-gender thing that some indigenous people of somewhere, I think, have or had.

Specifically it's supposed to be used by Native American/First Nations people, some of whose tribes were reportedly accepting of transgender people before the term was invented.

Obviously, X to doubt. It seems like most examples of ‘gender bending in other cultures’ were harshly stigmatized.

It's got an interesting history actually because it's a completely made up neologism made in the 1990s that's pretending to be some ancestral traditional thing.

It's about similar to people who claim various historical figures to be "nonbinary", "trans" or "gay" even as none of those words existed then or would have any relation to people's conceptualization of themselves then.

It's a classic radical tactic really: reframing history in political terms to generate historiography for a novel political movement. Cultural Marxists, or whatever they are called now, inherited this from their communist, and therefore historicist, forefathers.

What it does is play on the idea that all indigenous Americans were living in perfect harmony in a single cohesive society, noble savages that loved everyone until disrupted by the colonizers.

Of course, they were no such thing. Consider the Aztecs:

Mexica law punished sodomy with the gallows, impalement for the active homosexual, extraction of the entrails through the anal orifice for the passive homosexual, and death by garrote for the lesbians.

Interesting. It seems they never came upon an atrocity they didn’t like.

death by garrote for the lesbians.

In mexica culture, this is how one shows great respect and clemency.

impalement for the active homosexual, extraction of the entrails through the anal orifice for the passive homosexual

I see what they did there.

Lesbians get short shrift yet again though - couldn't they choke them on their own tongues or cut them in half with giant scissors or something?

My guess is that the concept of scissoring predated actual real scissors, so this particular ironic execution might have been beyond the ken of these people.

Yeah yeah, men always have an excuse.