IDSNews.com – David A. Nosko
Former IU gender studies student moves to reservation
IU and Bloomington are often seen as a “safe place” for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Hoosiers but Western culture does not allow any room for the human imagination in terms of gender identity, said former IU gender studies and anthropology graduate student and Navajo “Two-Spirit” Wesley Thomas.
“If a child is in its mother’s womb we don’t say is that child a male or female. We give it a gender identity by saying is that a boy or a girl because the two define one another in Western culture,” he said.
Thomas taught a sixteen-week gender identity class for six years before deciding to move back to the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico at the end of the spring semester because he “could never get comfortable at IU.”
“Colonialism has forced a lot of American Indians away from their traditions,” Thomas said. “In Native communities 100 years ago it was a multi-gendered society,” Thomas said while parked at a gas station somewhere on the road between Bloomington and the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. “In Western culture you are either stuck with one or the other — you’re either a man or a woman, nothing else. In Native American society there were even five genders that you could find. Wherever your comfort zone is, that is the gender identity that you have. It is a foreign concept for Western people who are from the Western culture — it has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes it worse form to even think outside that box.”