By my reading, the definition of berdache existed in the 1600s, and in is original European context, refers to '"passive homosexual", "catamite" or even "boy pr

By my reading, the definition of berdache existed in the 1600s, and in is original European context, refers to '"passive homosexual", "catamite" or even "boy prostitute"' (quoting Wikipedia.) Europeans didn't have a gender framework that could handle concepts outside of "male/female":"man/woman" so some re-used that French term meaning broadly to include what Europeans would now describe as transvestite, transgender, hermaphrodite, and homosexual people. See http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170933!Berdache-A_Brief_Review_of_the_Literature.pdf http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170... You can see from the examples that while "berdache"/"two-spirit" was widespread in Native American cultures, there wasn't a "traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role". In addition to "berdache" being re-used to mean non-gender-binary-conformant, the term as used in the scientific literature carried with it European prejudice which didn't reflect the native understanding: > literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the berdache as a “creature of failed biology, for example, hermaphroditism [...], or failed morals [...], or as someone not able to live up to an expected norm” (Herdt in Jacobs et al. 280). -- quoting https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b7e6f54/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2026366&diss=y https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b...