As we think in our own country of trans and LGBTQ rights, "Las Muxes" [pronounced 'MOO-ches'] from the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico—and specifically from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—remind us that gender is not only fluid but an unquestioned, accepted part of life in different parts of the world. Moreover, this is hardly a phenomenon that derives from our ostensibly "woke" moment, but is Indigenous and centuries old, predating Columbus' invasion of the Americas.
I am readily reminded of Two-Spirit peoples and ways of knowing and being in Native North America about which there is a growing scholarly literature (e.g., Robinson, 2020). In short, what is today considered by some to be divergent is actually native to this continent. How cool is that?
If you listen below to the YouTube video (in Spanish), you learn that las Muxes are born into male bodies, but do not identify as men. Nor do they identify as women. Nor are they transexuals, transvestites, or homosexuals. Instead, they are considered a "tercer género," or "third gender." Their dream is to marry heterosexual men which is not easily achieved.
They live dignified lives in the context of their own community and society. As expressed by one of them, their primary problem occurs with respect to Mexican government policies that disallow them to attend secondary schools and to otherwise get formally educated.
This becomes salient at the secondary level because it is by the age of 12 or 13 when they come into an awareness of their gender and schools don't allow them to dress like girls or women. Consequently, they are forced to take up roles associated with the care of the home and assisting with community festivities. They get relegated to gendered occupational roles like seamstresses, weavers, cooks, hair stylists, and so on. Moreover, the state's reinforcement of rigid gender identities constructs a specific kind of gender identity that alienates and excludes them from educational opportunities and that further lead to discrimination. sexual violence, and exploitation.
Scholars like Maria Lugones urge us in the modern era to consider gender from the perspective of how people that have been colonized, struggled historically not solely with the rigidity of gender categories introduced by Western European colonizers, but also how the introduction of race in the 1500s erased not solely the complex, situated understandings of gender throughout the Americas, but women themselves.
With echoes of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?," Indigenous notions of gender were subjected to a system of racial classification that justified slavery, conquest, and all manner or racial and sexual violence. We live today the vestiges of that horrible history to which patriarchy is obsessively invested.
Before we construe this as a battle between the sexes, let's understand that patriarchal violence is as harmful to men as it is to women, if not more so. Personally, I find this liberating and fully compatible with our most powerful religious and spiritual traditions that center notions of love and acceptance, particularly, of those deemed "other," in a shared quest for a world where all diversity is embraced simultaneously with the notion that all human beings—by virtue of being human—are intrinsically worthy of dignity and respect.
Do view the video. Thanks to Dr. Martha Lengeling for sharing.
Happy pride month!
-Angela Valenzuela
References
Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186-219.
Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742-759.
(2020) Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity, Journal of Homosexuality, 67:12, 1675-1690.
Truth, S. (1851). Speech at women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric (s), 144-146. [pdf]
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