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The gender binary (also known as gender binarism) [1] [2] [3] is the classification of gender into two distinct forms of masculine and feminine, whether by social system, cultural belief, or both simultaneously. [A] Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders (boys/men and girls/women). [4] [5] [6]
Two-spirit (also known as two spirit or occasionally twospirited) [a] is a contemporary pan-Indian umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional third-gender (or other gender-variant) social role in their communities.
In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language. Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory. [ 3 ] According to Ferdinand de Saussure , the binary opposition is the means by which the units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined in ...
[29] [a] These have been described as "spirits", [32] or "spiritual beings", [33] while the scholar of religion Theresa S. Smith called them "the power beings of the Ojibwe cosmos". [5] The most powerful of these manitouk were the four winds, the underwater serpents, the thunderbirds, the owners of various animal species, the windigo, and ...
Mukhannath (مُخَنَّث; plural mukhannathun (مُخَنَّثون); "effeminate ones", "ones who resemble women") was a term used in Classical Arabic and Islamic literature to describe gender-variant people, and it has typically referred to effeminate men or people with ambiguous sexual characteristics, who appeared feminine and functioned sexually or socially in roles typically carried ...
The word is also used as a synonym for sex, and the balance between these usages has shifted over time. [10] [11] [12] In the mid-20th century, a terminological distinction in modern English (known as the sex and gender distinction) between biological sex and gender began to develop in the academic areas of psychology, sociology, sexology, and ...
Transfeminine is a term for any person, binary or non-binary, who was assigned male at birth and has a predominantly feminine gender identity or presentation. [66] Transmasculine refers to a person, binary or non-binary, who was assigned female at birth who has a predominantly masculine gender identity or presentation.
A culture recognizing a third gender does not in itself mean that they were valued by that culture, and often is the result of explicit devaluation of women in that culture. [ 11 ] While found in a number of non-Western cultures, concepts of "third", "fourth", and "fifth" gender roles are still somewhat new to mainstream Western culture and ...