The Native Americans understood this transgender thing through their Two Spirit traditions. You'd get eg men living their whole lives as women, because that was their calling, yet they would be buried as men. We have forgotten what it is to be called by an archetype, or rather a Spirit, which is a gift: instead we want to possess it and literalise it, and that easily turns the gift into a curse. We literalise it through surgery and hormones. We have to be one thing or the other.
Transwomen, as Germaine Greer dared to say, are not women. And nor are transmen men. There is a much more interesting journey to be had if we can trust nature instead of trying to 'correct' her. Nor is it indigenous to insist that others see us the way we decide, instead of the way the collective decides. The self is relational amongst indigenous people, rather than autonomous, as it is in our world. This is where we can learn from indigenous attitudes.
And here's another thing: for some people, gender is fluid. For most, it is not. Their gender is simply the biological sex they were born, and they are happy with that. This is observable, it is a pragmatic truth. Yet recently I ended up in a wrangle twice with people who wanted to insist that gender is fluid, full stop. That is ideology, it is not pragmatic, nor is it the 'progressive thinking' that they think it is. And I don't appreciate the dogmatism either. That alone makes them wrong. Gender is fluid for some people, but not for most people. If you grew up on a farm like I did, you see biologically determined behaviour first hand.
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