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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mean Eyed Cat" data-source="post: 3675207" data-attributes="member: 4564">Actually, I appeared to have used the archaic term berdache which is still being thrown around amongst anthropologists.  It came from the French, a loan word from an Arabic word for "male prostitute".  Early French trappers and explorers used the word when they encountered homosexual men within Indian tribes.  It appears to have first been used with the Illinois tribe.  Among Native Americans, they like the term "Two Spirits" better - implying a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit living in the same body.As for its prevalence among other cultures, a broader term might be "third gender" -- a category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders.  For example, there are the Hijra in India, the Muxe among Mexico's Zapotec peoples, the Mangaiko among the Mbo of Africa, and possibly the eunuchs of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean world.And than we have a whole different tribal phenomena amongst the Keraki and Sambia of Papua New Guinea.  Young men would enter into a homosexual relationship with an unmarried male warrior as part of their rites of passage into manhood.  Sometimes this rite could last for years.  Once completed, they ceased all homosexual contact and assumed sexual desires for women. Again, a very interesting theory.  I don't know much about the biological perspective.  However, while these biological factors might come into play, from an anthropological perspective, I also believe there is probably some cultural [environmental] conditioning.  Most of that depends on how much the culture defines the role and what it considers acceptable [as demonstrated by those examples I listed above].    And I agree that most societies have traditionally associated magic and mysticism with females more than with males.  Again, from an anthropological  viewpoint, shamanism as it is [or was] practiced throughout the world tends to have more women than men.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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