Two-Spirit People:Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality.

This compilations of articles on Native American's gender identities begins with the definition of berdache and two-spirited peoples. The goal of these papers is to unpack the way in which we define gender identities and how these can change with time and across cultures. Berdache has been used to refer to special gender roles in Native American cultures including gender variance, or the ability to have multiple genders and to change over a lifetime. When expressed publicly, many of these people were ostracized from their reservations but berdache gave them a unique identity and form of strength in numbers. This became problematic after a while and some chose to drop the term in order to distance themselves from the white, gay community synonymous with the AIDS epidemic at that time. Two-spirited became a way for Native Americans to describe themselves as identifying with one or more gender identities.

Throughout the book we are asked to reflect on how we, as a society, have created definitions for individuals identities and feel the right to use these definitions freely despite whether or not we truly understand the meaning, as the example of the Kaska girl in Guy Goulet's article suggested. Another example is of the Navajo people who have their own gender identities and roles that are unique to the Navajo; these are the reasons, among others, that genders can not be exclusive to any type of sexuality and that we must strive to see past our own socially constructed terminology.