Two-spirit and indigenous gender traditions

Two-spirit is a contemporary term used by some Indigenous North American people to describe gender identities that held honored places in pre-colonial communities — roles that were not simply tolerated but recognized as spiritually significant contributions to the whole. Colonialism targeted these roles deliberately, understanding that gender policing was also cultural domination. Their partial recovery is inseparable from the recovery of Indigenous sovereignty and the reclamation of a fuller understanding of what human life contains.