Thread by @TwisterFilm

1./ 🧵Two Spirit is a dodgy invention of the Trans Lobby. When I wrote about the trans lobby's origins in child abuse and women-hate a typically angry activist threw the notion of two spirit at me. Here's why two spirit is also steeped in misogyny & abuse.
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2./ The official story of 'two spirit' is that the term came in a dream an attendee had at the Third Native American Gay Conference in Winnipeg in 1990. The truth is Native Americans were desperate for a newly made up term. The reason was child abuse.

3./ These conferences were originally the brainchild of a group of white gay men who were disciples of Harry Hay, a founder of the gay movement who was then cast out (thank god) for his support for paedophilia. Hay had been lurking around Indian events since the late '60s.

4./ Hay argued a few descriptions of effeminate men in stories by white travellers about Native American tribes were really references to gay men he claimed were regarded as sacred. This was largely garbage. Native tribes had no single view of same sex attraction or "effeminacy".

5./ In fact effeminate men were held in contempt by the Choctaws and Papago, treated by the Seven Nations with ‘sovereign contempt’ and derided by the Sioux. White travellers called all these men berdache. This was the name the 1990 conference so wanted to replace. Why? 👉

6./ Berdache came from a Persian word meaning boy sex slave. It was a term Harry Hay loved (I wonder why) and was used throughout the book that inspired the conference; which was co-organised by the book's editor a white academic called Will Roscoe, a disciple of Hay.

7./ Roscoe met Harry Hay at a naked gathering of gay men in the Arizona desert in the 70s. Hay organised these events to mimic what he imagined were Indian sweat lodges and shamanic rituals. Hay became Roscoe's mentor and he has devoted much of his career to Hay's ideas since.

8./ Roscoe's book recognised Indian tribes had over 100 different words in many different languages to describe effeminate men or gender non conforming women. Either way berdache with its link to child abuse had to go. No tribe may have ever used two spirit but it was embraced.

9./ No one helped popularise 'two spirit' and make it academically respectable more than Roscoe's fellow anthropologist Walter L Williams. His 1992 book The Spirit and the Flesh still used berdache but he was soon urging a shift in favor of Two-Spirit.

10./ As Professor of Anthropology and Indian Studies at UCLA, Williams had the clout to push the change. No one questioned the fact he'd dedicated his book to Harry Hay. Or his strange novel about a white explorer who is captivated by a crossdressing Two Spirit shaman. As you do.

11./ Here's the thing tho. If a project is inspired by a paedophile apologist like Harry Hay who imposes a sexualised fantasy version of history on Native American cultures what are the chances it will attract dodgy men? Here's Walter L Williams after his arrest for child abuse.

12./ The man who made "two spirit" academically respectable was nothing like respectable himself. In his "research" of Native tribes in the Philippines he'd been abusing boys as young as 10. What has two spirit got to do with his criminality? Plenty.

13./ When men like Williams call an effeminate boy two spirit they claim they're talking about the boy's "gender" and he is a mix of female and male (which obviously he's not). What they are really saying is they can detect the boy's sexual orientation. There be monsters.

14./ Used for children words like 'trans' or 'two spirit' should be seen as outrageous as calling a 5 year old homosexual. Williams' book used berdache to describe "Sexual Diversity'. Changing the word to two spirit doesn't vanish the sexual. Where then is two spirit's misogyny?

15./ In his book 'Living the Spirit' Will Roscoe widened the term berdache to include gender-bending women and suggested a woman called Running Eagle as an example. Roscoe drew on exactly one source: an account published in 1919 by a white man who befriended her Blackfeet tribe.

16./ The Blackfeet told him about a remarkable woman from the early 19th century who through her martial skills became reknowned as a warrior. Running Eagle also refused to marry. As a girl the tribe nick-named her 'boy-girl'. So what? They did not believe she was not female.

17./ That's what regressive 'gender identity' ideology does. It makes any astonishing achievement by a woman in a traditionally masculine sphere not a proof women could do more if they chose and were given the chance but that they cannot have been a woman to start with.

18./ Doing that isn't just an injustice to Running Eagle herself and hundreds of other women who are now stamped with a historical cookie-cutter that robs them of individuality. It erases their People's stories. Running Eagle's father, for example, encouraged his daughter.

19./ It's a sad reflection of our culture that we allow a bullying lobby to rewrite Running Eagle's story and that of her people using lame ideas concocted by creepy white guys. I suspect Running Eagle would have known how to deal with Harry Hay and Walter Williams though. 😉

20./ As for the man who first called Running Eagle two spirit, Will Roscoe his latest book claims to reveal how Jesus and the disciples were a gay shamanic cult. It's as offensive as it is ludicrous. Much like the whole heap of hooey and hogwash that is....two spirit.