QT: If all these "third genders" around the world, throughout history, in all these different cultures are transgender, then where are all the gay people?

submitted by SnowAssMan from (self.GCdebatesQT)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]SnowAssMan[S] 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

What does 5% vs 50/50 mean though? If you can fall in love with both men & women then surely you're 100% bisexual. If you can only fall for one, you're 0% bisexual. Where is there even a possibility of a spectrum there? I suspect that straight people just think if they watched gay porn once & didn't hate it, all of a sudden they don't consider themselves fully straight – if that was the metric, no one would be fully gay either. The difference is gay people don't think of themselves as a little straight if they were to ever watch straight porn for instance. The porn example is just an example, there are probably equivalent examples of these so-called breaches in heterosexuality that supposedly justify a bisexual self-categorisation.

It's only homophobic nowadays, when both partners are more than likely homosexuals. In the olden days lesbian-lesbian relationships would have been unlikely & the further back you go the less likely it would have been possible. Populations were just too small.

The fact that many societies only treat effeminate gay men & masculine lesbians as gay & not the "straight acting" ones, seems to confirm this origin of "third gender" as homosexual in origin. There are societies that label all gay people a "third gender", but then differentiate between the gender conforming & cross-gender conforming ones.

[–]VioletRemihomosexual female (aka - lesbian) 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Agreeing with this.

There are societies that label all gay people a "third gender", but then differentiate between the gender conforming & cross-gender conforming ones.

Most "third genders" in cultures I know are always very strongly patriarchic societies, and third gender are always gay, weak or infertile men who have less rights or power than men, but more than women. In most cases it is something like "to not shame males with you being not manly enough - we will say you aren't really a man". Women never got such "thrid gender" group (except few islamic countries, but there it is different, I'll explain later). Mostly women were pretending to be men in cases when women wanted to be free from oppression, or to learn science or to work on some jobs (like surgeon) which were forbidden for women to work. Other case is when lesbians were trying to live together, and only way was if they moved to new place and one was pretending to be a man on public ("Sea Purple" nice movie with this part, thought it was forced there). In those Islamic countries I've mentioned before - when husband of woman died, and she has no sons, no brother and no father alive, then she can inherit what her husband owned, but she must try look masculine, wear masculine clothing and never marry or date men ever again.