I understand how this option can appeal to some people… but the presentation of it as “recognition to gay and transgender people” strikes me as a bit odd. Most gay men and lesbians I’ve known have been pretty clear about identifying as men and women respectively–that is, in accord with their physiological birth gender, just, you know, gay. And my understanding is that transgender folks typically identify as the opposite of their (apparent) birth gender–as a man or a woman, not a third category.
Apparently some Nepalese activists are very pleased, and congratulations to them I suppose, but does this really appeal to most gay people? Is it just a curious minor step in a longer and larger process?
They keep pushing for this in Thailand too, but there’s been nothing official yet. I’ve heard of some schools setting aside “third sex” restrooms, and a new airline that’s starting up is specifically hiring transgendered air hostesses (I have a thread on that somewhere here).
Sexuality is very cultural, and Nepal (and other areas) have a totally different construct of these things that doesn’t map on to our ideas of “gay” and “straight” easily. It’s a just a different way of thinking of these things. FWIW, They probably think our way of categorizing sexuality is odd, unintuitive and incomplete. Who says our society has the only true way of understanding homosexuality?
The “third gender” has a lot of history behind it and has been a distinct social concept for a long, long time. It’s a concept we just plain don’t have, and it doesn’t make sense to map it to either our own gay people or our own transgendered people. It is it’s own thing, but dealing with sexuality in Nepal wouldn’t be complete without addressing it.
even sven has it right. This is about gender, not sex. The difference is that sex is a biological notion–females produce larger gametes than males–whereas gender is socially constructed. Different societies are going to have pretty different notions of what masculinity and femininity mean, and you really have to understand what those are before you can make sense of stuff like this.
Styles of sexual expression are very cultural. But one’s own personal sexual impulse is innate, is it not? If one’s attractions were learned culturally, that would mean that homosexuality and so forth could be instilled or prevented in individuals by factors of nurture; we don’t believe that, right?
It does not map to 21st-century western models of gender at all. It could never work in the US.
“Third gender,” in Sanskrit tritiya prakrti, is an old Hindu classification based on making babies. People aren’t men or women unless they’re heterosexual and make babies. Everybody from the various categories of LGBTQ is classified “third gender.”
But in the gender models known to contemporary westerners, gay men and trans men are men. Lesbians and trans women are women. Bisexuals are men or women, respectively. This much is called “the binary” and it’s controversial in the LGBTQ and feminist spheres. So the binary has been augmented by accepting genderqueer/gender-free/bigender and other such non-binary identities. The worldview embracing both the binary and non-binary categories is, I think, the mainstream of progressive thinking on gender. On one side, non-progressive people believe in only the binary. On the other side, more radical thinkers believe the binary should be exterminated.
But none of this maps to the Hindu model of three genders.