What “third gender” means — and what it doesn’t
“Third gender” is an etic term. It is the analyst’s comparative label, given its current shape by Gilbert Herdt’s Third Sex, Third Gender (1994). The emic terms — the ones the people themselves use — are hijra, muxe, bissu, burrnesha, nádleehí. Use the local term whenever you have it; the umbrella is scaffolding for comparison, not a name anyone is called.
They are not variants of one another. That is what the four dots on the board are for. A bissu holds a sacred office. A burrnesha holds a position in a household and an inheritance. A fa’afafine holds a set of obligations to the extended family. Comparing them is legitimate anthropology; collapsing them into one global category is not.
“Third” does not mean third in rank, or third in time. It means an additional named category. Several systems here name a fourth and a fifth, and nothing about them is transitional or incomplete.
Legal recognition is not social acceptance. Courts across South Asia have created formal categories — Nepal (2007), India’s NALSA judgment (2014), Bangladesh (2013), Pakistan’s Transgender Persons Act (2018) — while exclusion from housing and formal employment continues. The two variables move independently and have to be reported separately.
Four things to get right.
1. Gender is not sexual orientation. These are separate variables, and the local systems draw their lines in their own places. Samoans generally describe fa’afafine as a gender category, not as a statement about desire. Mapping any of these onto imported vocabulary is the fastest way to misreport them.
2. “Berdache” is a colonial slur. It was rejected at an Indigenous gathering in Winnipeg in 1990, where Two-Spirit was adopted as a contemporary English umbrella. Two-Spirit is not an ancient role and not a single one — it covers nádleehí among the Diné, winkte among the Lakota, ikwekaazo and ininiikaazo among the Anishinaabe and many others, each with its own duties and history. The specific nation’s term is always the accurate one.
3. The tidy counts are partly ours. Carolyn Epple has argued that “four Navajo genders” imposes a Western grid on Diné understandings that do not sort that way. Read every number on this board as an ethnographer’s summary open to challenge, not as a census result.
4. These histories include suppression. Colonial administration, mission schooling and imported law drove many of these roles underground, and several are being actively reclaimed by the communities concerned. None of this belongs in the past tense: these are living people in living societies, and the traditions with the fewest practitioners left are the ones whose members are working hardest to keep them.