Do We Have The Right…

…To use another culture’s lexicon?

Can we use “Two Spirit” or “Hijra” when we are not part of their culture?

Dancing to Eagle Spirit Society
By Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn

The two-spirited person is a native tradition that researchers have identified in some of the earliest discoveries of Native artifacts. Much evidence indicates that Native people, prior to colonization, believed in the existence of cross-gender roles, the male-female, the female-male, what we now call the two-spirited person.

In Native American culture, before the Europeans came to the America's, "two-spirit" referred to an ancient teaching. This type of cross-gender identity has been documented in over 155 tribes across Native North America (Roscoe 1988).

Just reading this it sound like “Two Spirit” refers to transgender people but it is hard to transfer ideas from one culture to another, there are so many subtle nuances that we may not understand.    

On the website Ask A White Person they say in the article “Can white people use the term ‘Two Spirit’?“

As you see from these definitions, Two Spirit is very specific to native and indigenous people. White europeans committed one of the greatest ethnic cleansings in human history when they came to North America and killed as many of the people indigenous to this land as they could. The term Two Spirit cannot be disconnected from tribal life. Additionally, most tribes have their own specific word in their language for two spirit people. First nations people in North America have come together around this term for themselves.

So I say no, we should not use the “Two Spirit” to describe a trans person because we cannot embrace or even understand the entire meaning of the words.