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Tonight I am going to talk about two things in which I am not actually an expert: Gender identity issues and Native American cultures. Don't worry I probably won't do anything too horrible.

Every once in a while I see a meme like this cross my feed.

As you can see from the watermark, this is something that pops up occasionally in the liberal community primarily, and I think I have a problem with it.

First, it's inaccurate, it lumps Native Americans into one homogeneous culture, rather than acknowledging that they were a diverse group of independent tribes and organizations composed of a vast number of belief systems and cultures spanning a huge continent. While it is true that some tribes did indeed acknowledge genders outside the binary, it is far from clear that it was all Native Americans, and it is also not clear that those people were truly revered. I feel like it is doing any culture a disservice when you assume that they can't be just as much of an asshole as your own, and my guess is that bigotry of various forms is universal, though perhaps expressed in different ways than we do in the modern United States anyway.
That said, it may at this point be truly impossible to find out exactly what beliefs most of those cultures had, and specifically how much they honored those beliefs, due to the incredibly determined genocidal push that the Europeans brought to America, stories and knowledge from that period largely just don't exist anymore.

Also, to my understanding trans is not in fact a gender in and of itself, so calling being trans the "fifth" gender is inaccurate at best, so that doesn't quite work either. But usually these memes that I have seen usually just list the "two-spirit" stuff, using it as an argument for accepting trans folks in modern times.

Now I don't have a problem with accepting trans folks today, far from it, but two-spirit is not the same as trans by a long stretch, two-spirit is kind of it's own thing and similar beliefs are found all over the world, call a two-spirit person trans and they will probably sigh heavily and tell you that you are wrong. It's also not really an identity you can claim unless you are a member of one the the Native American cultures that have that cultural practice.

So, it's not really accurate, and can be kind of offensive really, but there is a more subtle problem with this image and those like it, and that is the whole "noble savage" idea. While the obvious context of these memes is "This idea has been around for a while" unsaid but quite present is the subtext of "If this primitive culture has the idea down, why can't we?" Did you catch the judgement in that statement? While pushing for equality for one group, it subtly normalizes the inequality of another.

The point is, it's icky, I don't feel like it helps anyone's cause to fetishize another culture, particularly when you aren't even getting it right in the first place. Gender issues tend to vary by culture and co-opting terms, inaccurately at that, doesn't even pass the message that was intended anyway.