The term two-spirit is recent — coined in 1990 at a gathering of indigenous LGBTQ people in Winnipeg — but the phenomena it names are old. Across the indigenous nations of North America, more than 130 distinct gender systems were documented by anthropologists, missionaries, and colonial administrators between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, with most of those nations recognizing at least three and sometimes four or five socially distinct genders. The Lakota had the winkte. The Navajo had the nádleehi. The Zuni had the lhamana. The Crow had the boté. The Mojave had the alyha and the hwame. The Cheyenne had the heemaneh. Each nation had its own term, its own ceremonial location, its own pattern of partnership, and its own relationship between gender role and erotic life.
Two-spirit is therefore not a single category but an umbrella term — a contemporary indigenous-led coalition word — for a set of distinct traditions sharing certain family resemblances. In most of these traditions, the person who later came to be called two-spirit was identified in childhood or adolescence through some combination of dream, vision, or behavioral indication. They might take up the work and dress associated with another gender; they might combine elements of multiple genders; they might hold ceremonial roles that only they could perform. Crucially, in many traditions they were considered spiritually powerful precisely because they bridged worlds that other people could not. They were healers, name-givers, mediators of disputes, keepers of certain ceremonies, and often the people who buried the dead.
Their partnerships followed their gender role rather than their birth sex. A nádleehi person who had taken up the social position of a woman would partner with men in the social position of men, and the relationship would be considered a heterosexual partnership in the local gender map even though the two persons were of the same birth sex. This is the point at which Western categories break down most thoroughly. The indigenous map of gender did not divide humans into male and female with deviants on the margins. It divided humans into multiple gender categories with the third and fourth often holding particular sacred functions, and partnership followed the categories.
The first law works here as a recovery of unity that colonial violence tried to fracture. Two-spirit people belonged inside their nations as full, valued, often sacred members. The colonial project — Spanish, French, English, American, Canadian — recognized this immediately as a profound threat to its own gender binary and proceeded to attempt the systematic elimination of the role. Will Roscoe and Sabine Lang have documented the specific mechanisms: the Spanish set dogs on cross-dressing Timucuans in Florida in the sixteenth century; the U.S. Indian Service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pressured agency heads to cut the hair of winkte and force them into men's work; boarding schools beat children for any deviation from imposed gender norms; missionaries equated two-spirit roles with sodomy and pressed for their criminalization. The role was not allowed to die a natural death. It was driven into silence by deliberate force.
What survived did so in fragments, often in the memories of elders who had known the old ones and were waiting for a generation that might want to remember. Beverly Little Thunder, a Lakota two-spirit elder, has written about the slow process of reclamation from the 1970s onward, as indigenous LGBTQ people began returning to their nations, asking elders for the old terms, and re-learning ceremonial roles that had nearly disappeared. The reclamation has been uneven. Some traditions are recovered with documentary depth. Others survive only in name. A few have re-emerged with new ceremonial vigor.
For the romantic lens at collective scale, two-spirit traditions are evidence of a fundamental point: gender and erotic partnership are culturally constructed, and the construction can be more or less spacious. Many indigenous nations of North America built spacious constructions, with room for persons who did not fit the binary and with ceremonial honor for the place where the binary blurred. The colonial regime imposed a narrow construction and called it nature. Recovering the indigenous maps is not a matter of identity politics but of historical accuracy. The Manual treats them as primary evidence of what is possible when a culture decides that love and gender are larger than two boxes.