This topic has given us a chance to discuss two spirit identities and trans identities. While we were in London we visited The Museum of Transology, it's a mobile museum which is collecting and preserving the histories and identities of trans, non binary and intersex people.
As we looked at the exhibition Iona was excited to talk about identity and how she feels about gender. She was pleased to see that there was a museum just for "people like us" and she clearly felt really connected to the idea.
I explained that trans identities have existed forever, that we have a cultural history as rich and deep as any other. We talked about two spirit people in Native American traditions and how they were venerated and were often shamans or healers. I watched a couple of excellent videos, you can see them below. I didn't share all of them with Iona as I felt they had some quite difficult content, but used them to further my own understanding.
During colonisation the honour was stripped from these identities and western gender roles, homophobia and mysogony impacted the community in a terrible way. Only in recent times (the first recent use of two spirit as an identity was probably in 1990) have native people started to reclaim these identities and to embody them.
We talked about intersectionality and how coming from two (or more) places where you may be oppressed or victimised increases your vulnerability. So you may be a woman, a trans woman and a woman of colour and all of those identities are affected by cultural stereotypes, mysogony and transphobia. There is a really super diagram of intersecting identities here.
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