”Third gender” concepts purport to challenge Western gender ideology but instead reify them by homogenizing diverse and fungible identities and categories into a monolithic, primitive Other against which Western norms are understood as uniquely developed and differentiated.
references
- The primordial location. “Third gender” societies are accorded a primordial, foundational location in our thinking, as though they underlay or predated Western gender formulations.
- Reductionism and exclusionism. The “third gender” concept lumps all nonnormative gender variations into one category, limiting our understandings of the range and diversity of gender ideologies and practices.
- Typological errors. By identifying “third gender” types, the concept ignores the diversity of experience within categories and glosses over the often contentious processes through which social formations, relations, and hierarchies are created, lived, negotiated, and changed.
- Inconsistent use of the culture concept. Does culture facilitate or delimit social change?
- The West versus the rest. “Third gender” concepts may isolate the West, for analytic purposes, from other societies, thereby reinforcing our ethnocentric assumptions; inhibiting us from forging alliances across national or cultural borders; and inducing us to focus on diversity between cultures while ignoring diversity, or the complexities of social change, within them.
⤷ Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan, Romancing the Transgender Native