Gender Diversity in Polite Society

There are powwows, and then there are powwows that are a beacon of light for Mankind. THIS was one of them.

I wasn’t there, but I wish that I could have been.

I’m a female, through and through, (though not particularly girly) and have no question or doubt about my own gender identity. On the other hand, I have wonderfully sweet and intelligent family members who are an alter-gender identity and they are raising children who are just as normal, healthy, rambunctious, loving and intelligent as any other children I’ve encountered.

We bristle at the designation of certain qualities being inherently “masculine” (i.e., assertive, dominant) and others being “feminine” (i.e., intuitive, caring). What shifts that paradigm, though, is the understanding that those polarities can be completely divorced from our construct of gender and that we all contain myriad, often dynamic, combinations of both.

Deganit Nuur, a certified herbalist, licensed acupuncturist, and one of our favorite intuitives, knows this well. She’s witnessed the interplay of feminine and masculine energy in thousands of healing sessions, and she says they roughly fall into four personality archetypes.

I’m going to be going to more powwows in the future, and especially those that celebrate gender diversity, because it will be a refreshing change from how “Americans” have tended to treat our own alter-gendered communities.