More Thoughts on "Two-Spirit" and its connection to racism, antisemitism, and proselytism in Europe and North America

Anti-indigenous policy and antisemitic policy have been deeply intertwined for several centuries

I received a request to elaborate on my theory for why the woman in my video response, “Chapel of the Second Spirit: Trans Translations Aren’t Translations,” sees her indigenous relatives as in need of some sort of cultural-spiritual overhaul. The answer is that her perspective is steeped in Christian colonizer culture, which is fundamentally white supremacist, antiheretic, antisemitic, and proselytic. She projects her own white perspective onto others, in order to criticize it and distance herself from it, without truly confronting and learning past it. She embodies the “view from nowhere,” while also seeking to accrue from and erase traditional cultures that refuse to conform to her modern colonizer cultural expectations.

This does not make her less Native, if she is indeed Native. I reject Frenchification as a colonial pursuit aimed at gaining command of resources and progeny. I was brought up to understand that children come from and therefore belong with mothers. Frenchification inherently objectifies children and by extension, adults. Blood quantum policy is an attempt to dilute into whiteness to spread white identity, via restricting the rights of the undiluted, the mixed, the non-white, and thereby stigmatizing their (our) existence. The colonial authorities believed that was the way to squelch cultural expression and cancel cultural identity. This way, the non-white, non-French, non-Christians could be brought into the fold, making way for the manifest destiny of the fold. She is approaching other Natives with what I’ll term the “colonizer gaze,” by analogy with the feminist concept of the “male gaze,” which females internalize in a male-dominated society.

People in America, especially the white colonizer-descended, have for centuries been raised with the impulse to colonize and keep colonizing because of the sacred and holy place expanding the Christian nation has long held for their people. It’s just their way. Christianity is a proselytic religion - “catholic” means “all-embracing” - that conceives of itself as being the obvious best way forward. If a person becomes aware of Christianity and still rejects it, this is a sign that they are inferior, sinful, and immoral. Ever since the reign of Akhenaten, an Egyptian pharoah who wrecked the temples of the heretical polytheists, universalist monotheists have just been like this.

Martin Luther famously followed a lifelong trajectory of prosemitism to antisemitism. My Lutheran school teachers taught me that this happened because his faith was weak. He could not cope with the reality that no matter what he did, most Jewish people were going to carry on with being Jewish, practicing the traditions of their mothers rather than adopting a new set of beliefs, attitudes (values), and practices. He did not trust God to have a plan for their salvation via some other mechanism than overt conversion. He did not trust that Jesus died for all. He did not respect the limits of his own power - that it was his role to preach and to produce works, to do what God asked, not to coerce and subjugate the people he was attempting to save. I was taught that when we try to exercise power that belongs to God, evil is the predictable result.

Lutherans do not worship Martin Luther. Lutherans just don’t plagiarize his work. My teachers understood he was a deeply flawed human being who, like any human, could do good only by doing what God willed for him. Faith without works is dead. The screed discussed below should have been a sign to him that something was dead about his faith. Luther saw it as his responsibility to both save and destroy the people of Ninevah, when it was neither; like Jonah, he was called only to preach.

Like the US government later did with the heathen Natives, Luther concluded that the most effective way to convert the heathen Jews would be to completely strip them of material resources and otherwise make their lives so full of pain and deprivation that they abandoned their faith and culture and submitted to Christendom. Luther had a god complex and wanted to show them his god existed by being as powerful to the Jews as God was to Martin Luther and Christ was to the Church and Man was to Wife and Parent was to Child. It is theology infused with the belief that our purpose is to learn to exist within a social dominance hierarchy above all other spiritual considerations. Church of trans has the same attitude.

But the Jews did not convert, and Luther reacted appallingly. In 1543, he published “The Jews and Their Lies,” which today is shocking in its venom, and even for its time stood out as particularly cruel and intolerant. In the 65,000-word treatise, he calls for a litany of horrors, including the destruction of synagogues, Jewish schools and homes; for rabbis to be forbidden to preach; for the stripping of legal protection of Jews on highways; for the confiscation of their money. The Jews are, wrote Luther, a “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.”

Luther arrived at his horrific conclusion via reason and religious premises. Many Christians are taught that any action other than denial of the Holy Spirit is justifiable, when they are taught that lack of conversion equals not just annihilation, but horrific torment for eternity, and are also taught God forgives nearly all sins because Jesus “paid the debt.” If a debt is paid, it was not forgiven, in my view, but I digress. Protecting a person from infinite torment justifies temporary maltreatment of non-Christians in this life, in pursuit of converting them, just as saving a person’s life justifies breaking their ribs while performing CPR.

And so that is exactly what the colonizers did in the New World. They assigned Natives the role of heathen and sometimes specifically of Jew. Adolf Hitler, in turn, was inspired by the systematic maltreatment of Natives. “Manifest destiny,” an American term coined by John O'Sullivan, contributed to German philosopher Friedrich Ratzel coining the term “lebensraum” or “living room.” The need for national lebensraum was Hitler’s pretext for invading other nations as well as eliminating targeted ethnic minorities.

Colonization was contemporaneous and subsequent to Luther’s antisemitic screed, and Luther himself was a product of Catholic antisemitism, which he tried to resist but ultimately succumbed to. Martin Luther’s theological ideas were spreading in France, though formally opposed by the Catholic crown, prior to 17th century colonization of New France. It is a logically inescapable conclusion of the core doctrine of Christianity: stripping the heathens of their material goods is morally justified if it causes them to convert to Christianity. Eliminating these heathen cultures is no great loss if it supports the growth of the Christian nation of the saved. The heathens are to be cast into the fire and burnt, lest they lead children astray. I was taught therefore that this is an example of why Christians must not “lean on our own understanding,” as we come to such conclusions with no way to reason through them. It is the wrong conclusion. But that is a faith position held by my specific church at that time.

Christianity has built into the religion the conception that Jewish authorities were responsible for conspiring to kill their dearly beloved lord and savior, failing to recognize him as (they’ve been taught) the obvious pinnacle of moral and ethical reasoning. Christians are generally taught to see themselves as sinful and wretched people, redeemed only in Christ, which provides a backdrop for how they view other religions’ adherents, who are destined for the eternal lake of fire. This foundation of religious-cultural hatred and projection set the stage for inquisitions, crusades, and colonization.

Gender ideology culture, borne of white Christian patriarchy, is capitalist and proselytic, seeking to sell to the young to secure a long-term customer, so like a sexual predator, this ideology flatters them that they are so very mature for their generation - in fact, their parents and grandparents have to age towards them and learn from them. Taking her at her word that she has this ancestry and right of cultural reconnection (as distinct from political reconnection, which heritage alone does not automatically confer any right to; status is up to individual tribes to determine in the USA), undoing the harm of embodying the white proselytic colonizer perspective is part of healing from the generational trauma of assimilation. This healing still lays ahead of her. Right now, though, her loyalty to this modern religious movement takes precedence.

Two-spirit is the TQ continuum equivalent of wearing a Pocahontas costume on Halloween. As an entity separate from specific tribal roles that may exist in some tribes and which are alleged to belong to this “umbrella term” (ad hoc undefined grab-bag pseudocategory), “two spirit” identity as it has been constructed and as I have deconstructed it, allows 2S folx to be not just indigenous, not just their own culture, but a special and sacred Native, of a class recognizable to white people and comfortably within their understanding of the racial hierarchy. It's the Turtle Island version of "I wasn't just a farmer building the pyramids in the off season in ancient Egypt; I’m the reincarnation of Cleopatra." The emphasis has been taken off of preserving and perpetuating the surviving culture, but modernizing and streamlining it in a way that facilitates gender clinic referrals, sterilization and disruption of cultural and genetic reproduction.

Two-Spirit therefore was created to be sold to modern white people who may have Native ancestry but who are otherwise predominantly steeped in the White cultural perspective of unearned superiority, where they are the center of attention, the hero of the play, and the person who is supposed to pull the sword from the stone. And if you aren’t on board with that, you are targeted for elimination, whether via violence or stigma and shame. It is their cultural right to impose their perspective on native people, especially older native people, to reinforce that no amount of seniority among the colonized confers status relative to the white colonizers.

Two-spirit does not require actually learning any challenging indigenous topics (which might make them uncomfortable!) or deferring to indigenous authority on any matter (challenging their sense of unearned racial superiority and their spiritual understanding, which includes the assumption that they are entitled, nay, required to impose it on anyone not already a member of the Chapel of the Second Spirit). The only exception is when the indigenous authority is predictable as far as the sacred teachings they're taking this two-spirit hajj to learn about. Then they can continue to fulfill their sacred role of speaking over the basic one-spirits who have no idea what this European nonsense is.