Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Cross-Culturally

Biological characteristics — chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitalia, secondary sex traits; anthropologists treat it as a continuum that cultures sort, not a simple binary.

The culturally constructed meanings, roles, expectations, and identities that a society attaches to bodies.

Patterns of desire, erotic practice, and the identities built around them.

Conditions like congenital adrenal hyperplasia, androgen insensitivity, and 5-alpha-reductase deficiency show biology supplies variation while culture supplies the filing system — e.g., mid-20th-century U.S. surgical assignment of intersex infants.

Pan-Indian term for recognized Native North American roles combining or crossing male and female labor, dress, and ritual functions; the Zuni lhamana We'wha (Washington, D.C., 1886) is best documented.

North Indian communities, typically assigned male at birth, living as a distinct gender with ritual authority to bless births and weddings; legally recognized as a third gender in India since 2014.

Samoan gender category meaning 'in the manner of a woman' — socially expected members of families, tied to family labor obligations, not treated as deviants.

Muxe: esteemed Zapotec third-gender niche in Juchitán, southern Mexico. Bissu: androgynous ritual specialists among the Bugis of Sulawesi, who recognize five gender categories.

'Transgender' comes from a specific 20th-century Western medical and political history; hijra identity involves ritual duty, gharana households, and caste, while fa'afafine involves Samoan family labor — translating flattens the differences we study.

Third-gender status is not automatically prestigious: many hijras face poverty and violence, and the British Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and missionary suppression of Two-Spirit roles criminalized or destroyed these positions.

Ritualized same-sex practices as an expected phase of male initiation, after which men married women — fitting neither 'gay' nor 'straight' as identity labels.

That 'the homosexual' as a kind of person is a nineteenth-century European invention; before that there were acts, not sexual identities.