TY - JOUR
AU - Morgan, Lynn M.
AB -  This essay offers a critical examination of how “third gender” concepts are used in popular American writing by and about transgendered people. Over the past decade there has been an increase in the popular use of cross-cultural examples to provide legitimacy to transgender movements in the United States. Descriptions of the “transgender native” are often drawn from ethnographic portrayals of gender variation written by anthropologists for American audiences. Introductory anthropology textbooks commonly cite the hijra of India, the berdache of native North America, the xanith of the Arabian peninsula, the female husbands of western Africa, and the Sambia (a pseudonym) boys of Papua New Guinea who engage in “semen transactions.”1 Such examples are often glossed together under the “third gender” rubric. “Third gender” roles and practices were once regarded by most Western readers as exotica, with little relevance to our “modern” societies. These days, however, anthropological accounts of “third gender” variation are used frequently by popular writers such as Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg, and by contributors to periodicals such as Transgender Tapestry and Transsexual News Telegraph, to buttress the argument that Western binary gender systems are neither universal nor innate. Paradoxically, this rise in popularity comes just 
TI - ROMANCING THE TRANSGENDER NATIVE: Rethinking the Use of the "Third Gender" Concept
JF - GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
DO - 10.1215/10642684-8-4-469
DA - 2002-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/duke-university-press/romancing-the-transgender-native-rethinking-the-use-of-the-third-2FpPqTj6VD
SP - 469
VL - 8
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -