Chapter 16. Gender, Sexuality and Anti-Oppression

GS.7: Deep Dive – Diversity of Indigenous Gender Systems: 3, 4, and 5 genders

Approximate reading time: 2 minutes

Many Indigenous nations worldwide recognise and embrace non-binary, gender-expansive systems, including three-, four-, and five-gender systems.

Three Genders

Where applicable, each nation has their own language to describe, define, and assign special roles to a third gender. For example, let’s consider the Cree, Siksika, Ktunaxa, and A:shwi tribes (Matthews-Hartwell, 2014).

  • Cree: napêw iskwêwisêhot (men who dress like women).
  • Cree: iskwêw ka napêwayat (women who dress like men).
  • Siksika (Blackfoot): aakíí’skassi (men who perform roles typically associated with women, such as basket weaving and pottery-making).
  • Ktunaxa (Kootenay): titqattek (females who take on roles traditionally characterised as masculine, including healing, hunting and warfare).
  • A:shwi (Zuni): Lhamana (a person who lives as both genders simultaneously).

Four Genders

In Ojibwe (Chippewa) society, described by Halverson (2013), the four genders are:

  • okwe (feminine female),
  • agowinini (masculine female),
  • agokwe (feminine male), and
  • inini (masculine male).

Five Genders

The Bugis, one of the three main ethnic groups in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, number around 3 million. They are predominantly Muslim, and still practise many pre-Islamic traditions, including the belief in a gender spectrum (Ibrahim, 2019).

In Bugis society, there are five recognized genders:

  • makkunrai (cisgender women),
  • oroané (cisgender men),
  • bissu (often seen as androgynous or intersex, serving as respected shamans or priests),
  • calabai (transgender women), and
  • calalai (transgender men).

This rich diversity in Bugis society highlights the complexity of gender identities.

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Introduction to Psychology: Supplemental Readings and Resources Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Motherwell McFarlane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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