This weekend I watched a documentary about a group of pioneering Germans who tried to create a Utopian society on an island in the Gallapagos chain. Like many Utopian experiments this one devolved into tragedy. The film lead my girlfriend and I down a rabbit hole about the impact that other settlers and British imperialism had in Polynesia. I uncovered the fact that most Polynesian cultures embrace the idea of a “third sex.” Third sex notions are pretty much completely alien in Western society, but traditional Polynesian societies have always had a place in their cultures for individuals who don’t identify strictly as men or women.
Third gender and third sex is the concept that individuals are categorized (by their will or by social consensus) as neither man nor woman, as well as the social category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders. The term third is usually understood to mean “other”; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth,[1] fifth,[2] and “some”[3] genders. The concepts of “third”, “fourth” and “some” genders can be somewhat difficult to understand within Western conceptual categories.[4]
Although biology usually determines genetically whether a human’s biological sex is male or female (though intersex people are also born), the state of personally identifying as, or being identified by society as, belonging to neither the male or female genders is considered relative to the individual’s gender role in society, gender identity, and sexual orientation. While some western scholars have sought to understand the term third gender in terms of sexual orientation, several other scholars, especially the native non-western scholars, consider this as a misrepresentation of third genders.[5][6] To different cultures or individuals, a third gender may represent an intermediate state between man and woman, a state of being both (such as “the spirit of a man in the body of a woman”), the state of being neither (neuter), the ability to cross or swap genders, another category altogether independent of men and women. This last definition is favored by those who argue for a strict interpretation of the “third gender” concept. In any case, all of these characterizations are defining gender and not the sex that biology gives to living beings.
Here’s some background on the Ladyboys of Tahiti and the difficulties this traditionally embraced group are experiencing in the contemporary world…
The ladyboys of Tahiti from Raissa Ioussouf on Vimeo.
