"choosing to be men, they were inadvertently strengthening gender norms by accepting the role of women as inferior."

[Frapped]

www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63904744.amp

Interesting article in the BBC.

Interesting link, thank you.

Albania is a fascinating country. I've travelled around it a bit.

Wow @Ereshkigalangcleg when was that? Sounds quite a challenging place to go to say the least.

I think it's really interesting that they put that person in the story who uses male pronouns. If that person lived in the UK they would have just called them a man.

They wouldn't write the equivalent story about young girls transitioning in the UK. Is that because Albanians are foreign so they don't get special status, or was it the only way to write a story like this where girls give up their fertility, their sexuality to be accepted in a male world?

The sworn virgins are a great example of why I’m very sceptical of non-Western European cultures being held up as wonderfully accepting of gender fluidity. The phenomenon fits squarely with you tend to see: an additional category for people who can’t fit into the traditional roles. The unusual thing here is that it isn’t a category for gay men. These additional categories themselves always appear to have their own rigid rules from the examples I’ve seen (occupations they can do, where they can live and with whom, etc.), as well as a sense of where the individuals within it relate to the binary man-woman roles.

It’s good that women had an alternative to heterosexual marriage and children that allowed them to live without persecution - much like women in pre-modern England could become a nun, I suppose. Not sure if that was also possible in rural Albania. But I don’t see any of the examples I’ve heard of as being any closer than Western Europe traditionally has been to the current view that there are 70+ genders and that a sense of gender is nothing to do with either a sexed body OR gender expression (although the latter is very inconsistent).

This is my view as an armchair anthropologist, though. I’d be genuinely very interested to hear of any cultures that traditionally recognise more than a handful of genders and allow freedom of gender expression.

Wow @Ereshkigalangcleg when was that? Sounds quite a challenging place to go to say the least.

It is a bit, yes! Not that long ago, first time I went was 2008. I recommend a visit if you're quite adventurous and resourceful, it's an inexpensive place to travel in. Didn't go deep into the mountains where they still adhere to the Kanun/blood feuds etc though.

@TheAntiGardener Yes, the feeling I get is that taking on that role was tied to a society with very specific roles. For many it was an economic choice / one they took to protect their family, because regular woman wouldn't be allowed the same opportunities. It's not a real choice, it's a pragmatic decision in a restrictive society. And absolutely enforces gender norms that say women can't do X.

I was reading about Albania with regards the migrants coming here. That was all focused on young men who want to get out and how there was nothing for them there. And the negative effect that the depopulation was having on the local economy. That article felt negative for the country, but I wonder if the men leaving might open up opportunities for women? We live in hope!

But it was interesting that this article talked about all the opportunities young Albanian women have, whereas the other one about the lack of ones for males. I'm not sure what my conclusion is - lower expectations for women / different industries that attract the sexes /just journalists nor wanting to complicate a narrative?

Really interesting thanks OP

I often thought when gi seemed to be just taking off that it could never happen in a place or time without reliable birth control, and I think your comment shows why this is.

You can have alternate sexual categories for gay men in a situation like that, without too much trouble. Except that obviously it was not something that would produce offspring, which was quite important in many cultures. So even where you had these third gender categories, they didn't do things like marry in the conventional way. And in some cases these arrangements could be used to provide sexual outlets for men that did not involve the risk of producing children the society needed to deal with. So the sexual rules for a male third gender could afford to be relatively generous in terms of behaviour, so long as it didn't interfere with things like inheritance and producing a new generation.

But the fact is that in order to let women live like men, in the past, the only real option was celibacy for those women. And so any female third gender represented an end of the line for that woman's genetic material, and the whole concept depended on her having much more strict sexual rules than both men and women living conventionally.

But you are right, none of them is anything like what gender ideology in the west claims.