Transgender Navajo searches for safe spot

IU and Bloomington are often seen as a "safe place" for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Hoosiers but Western culture does not allow any room for the human imagination in terms of gender identity, said former IU gender studies graduate student, anthropology professor and Navajo "Two-Spirit" Wesley Thomas.\n"If a child is in its mother's womb we don't say is that child a male or female. We give it a gender identity by saying is that a boy or a girl because the two define one another in Western culture," he said. \nThomas taught a sixteen-week gender identity class for six years before deciding to move back to the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico at the end of the spring semester because he "could never get comfortable at IU." \n"Colonialism has forced a lot of American Indians away from their traditions," Thomas said. "In Native communities 100 years ago it was a multi-gendered society," Thomas said while parked at a gas station somewhere on the road between Bloomington and the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. "In Western culture you are either stuck with one or the other -- you're either a man or a woman, nothing else. In Native American society there were even five genders that you could find. Wherever your comfort zone is, that is the gender identity that you have. It is a foreign concept for Western people who are from the Western culture -- it has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes it worse form to even think outside that box."\nAccording to a booklet titled "Made in God's Image" by Ann Thompson Cook, former CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and distributed by Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Washington, variations in sexual identity and gender can cause human beings in Western culture a lifetime of "invisibility, stigma and shame."\n"Variations are completely normal but our continual search for order -- and our discomfort with ambiguity and paradox -- makes us want to label everything," Cook wrote. "We think that if we don't understand something, it must be antithetical to God. We develop and enforce rules and traditions and laws, and then we justify them as the 'natural order,' forgetting that we humans made up the rules.\n"With gender, the rules are handed to us the moment we're born, the moment our sex is declared, the moment our family begins to raise us as a boy or girl -- long before we ever learn to talk."\nThomas said the Navajo people acknowledge at least four gender identities based on the prescriptions of their matriarchal society: the first is that of a heterosexual woman; next is that of a heterosexual man; next is a biological male that functions in the role of either girl or woman; and last is that of a female-bodied man. He said he is a "third gender" because gender identity has nothing to with sexual identity, although many community members in Bloomington \nconsidered him "gay."\n"Because of acculturation and assimilation, a lot of Native people have lost their culture," Thomas said. They have lost quite a few of their multi-gender status. Native people evaluate you on the basis of what you can give to the community. That is important, your role as part of your gender identity in actively participating in reciprocity. They don't give a damn who you sleep with."\nAccording to Cook's booklet, a human being's "physical sex" is often identified in terms of genitals but a person's unique blend of chromosomes, hormones and physical characteristics is as plentiful as the many shapes, sizes and colors of humanity.\n"Gender identity is a person's internal understanding of their own true gender. Most people never question or contradict their assigned sex," Cook wrote. "Some children, however, know from a very young age that their assigned gender and apparent physical sex are wrong for them, that they are really the other gender. Gender role is what society says is appropriate for males and females, including dress, behavior, and other activities such as using a particular \nrestroom."\nAssigned gender roles are specific to any given culture, as exemplified in women being allowed to drive in the United States but not in other countries, and men in other cultures being allowed to show affection toward one another but not in America, according to Cook's booklet. Gender presentation is the way people express their gender roles outwardly through style and mannerisms, and a person's perceived gender is how someone appears to others.\n"Transgender is an umbrella term that refers to a wide range of people whose gender identity, role and expression vary from what our culture considers 'normal' or appropriate for someone with a particular sex assignment," Cook wrote. "Transgender people have the same range of sexual orientations as the population as a whole. Remember, gender identity is who we know ourselves to be on the continuum that includes male and female and much in between. Sexual orientation, however, is about our pattern of romantic and sexual attraction to other people."\nStrict norms of gender identity and sexual orientation within Western culture have caused many problems for Native people and international others, especially for those community members whose own culture does not place human beings into the gender box of "man or woman" and the sexual orientation box of "straight or gay." \nThomas said many third and fourth gender Native Americans left their reservations between the 1950s and 1980s in search of a comfortable, safe place for themselves but returned later to find even more confusion regarding gender roles and sexual orientation because their many tribes had adopted Western standards for identification. He said the combination of Native community beliefs and Western gay and lesbian identities resulted in the term Two-Spirit as an umbrella label for community members not comfortable with either seeing themselves as a man or a woman.\n"Just a handful of tribes still have access to their language and these ideas are understood in those tribal languages," Thomas said. "It's been really hard trying to convey this message in English because when you talk about a man there is an automatic assumption that man is a male. But in using a tribal language, for example in Navajo, they are very androgynous. When you say a man, you sort of wait for the other shoe to fall -- is that man a female in a \nmale body?"\nFor more information on Two-Spirits, Thomas started a Web site that is found at www.indiana.edu/~glbt under the subhead \n"Diversity"