A History of Transgender People, Volume III

The intense West African sun beats down on the Bandiagara Escarpment in central Mali. Against the escarpment’s face, tucked in the shadow of a large outcropping, is a village that; if one saw only a photograph, one could be forgiven for assuming it was an old Hopi or Anasazi village in the American Sonora. However, this village is inhabited by a people called the Dogon. The Hogon, the spiritual elder of the village, tells a story:

This is not their home. Not originally.

According to the Dogon themselves, and archaeology seems to support this; they originally lived in the region today called Mande, southwest of the contemporary capital city of Bamako. A thousand years ago, they resisted forceful Islamization, electing instead to retain their traditional religion. They were not permitted to stay within the dar al-Islam and fled the region, likely mingling with similarly displaced groups and settling in the first village along the escarpment primarily because it was a very defensible position (the escarpment is 500 m tall on average). The name of this first village was Kani-Na. In the intervening centuries, the Dogon spread up the Escarpment and across the midlands of the country, and steadfastly kept their traditional religion.

In 1931, the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule began living with the Dogon people. In 1946, an elder of the Dogon taught Griaule about their religion.

[Historiographical Note: the source for these stories is a speaker of the Dogon languages, which are of indeterminate origin, but possibly a branch of the Niger-Congo language family. This was given to a Frenchman, and translated into our Germanic tongue. There is clearly something lost in translation in the source material, and the wording is extremely confusing. I am doing my best to faithfully recreate the story in a clear and engaging way. I apologize for any inconsistencies or peculiarities of grammar that may arise from this.]

The key spiritual figures [in the Dogon religion] are the twins Nummo and Nommo. In the Dogon conception, these twins were the same person. This is critical to understanding the Dogon conception of gender. In the beginning, everything was dual birth. One twin male, one twin female. Everything is born with this duality, and given a twin soul, encapsulated in both bodies. This is symbolized by androgyny, the blending of the masculine and the feminine. This was the ideal world, the world before.

But all was only well in the world for so long.

"The jackal was alone from birth," said Ogotemmêli [the elder], "and because of this he did more things than can be told."

This cataclysmic birth ruined everything. Because of the birth of the single-sexed male Jackal, who was born without a soul, all humans eventually had to be turned into single-sexed beings. This was to prevent a being like the Jackal from ever being born on Earth again.

"The Nummo foresaw that the original rule of twin births was bound to disappear, and that errors might result comparable to those of the jackal, whose birth was single. Because of his solitary state, the first son of God acted as he did."

The Dogon practice ritual circumcision. In their view, when the Nummo forced single-birth onto humans, we retained a bit of our essence as dual creatures, which they see reflected in human genitalia. To wit, a clitoris is considered “male” and a foreskin is considered “female.” The removal of the second sex and soul from humans is what the ritual of circumcision represents in the Dogon religion. "The dual soul is a danger; a man should be male, and a woman female. Circumcision and excision are once again the remedy."

Dogon males were primarily associated with the single-sexed (and soulless) male Jackal and the Sigui festival, which was associated with death on the Earth. It was held once every sixty years and allegedly celebrated the white dwarf star, Sirius B. The colour white was a symbol of males. The ritual language, "Sigi so" or "language of the Sigui", which was taught to male dignitaries of the Society of the Masks ("awa"), was considered a poor language, and only contained about a quarter of the vocabulary of "Dogo so," the Dogon word for their demotic language. The "Sigi so" was used to tell the story of creation of the universe, of human life, and the advent of death on the Earth, during funeral ceremonies and the rites of the "end of mourning" ("dama").

The Dogon myth denotes a view of the gender binary that is rather revolutionary in that it treats the gender binary as it exists now as a deeply unfair burden that must be carried by both men and women. Neither can be both male and female again, as this would endanger the world. Because of the pre-Jackal nature of humanity, the birth of twins is considered good luck and a reminder of what once was, but androgyny is considered a dangerous ideal. Many indigenous myths bear the common thread of some cosmic injustice, however it is rare that the injustice results in the male/female sexual dichotomy that these faiths tend to reinforce.

Moving to the southeast, in what is now Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Côte d'Ivoire; one encounters the Dagaaba people. Shanna Collins writes in Medium that:

Shaman Malidoma Somé of the Dagaaba says that gender to the tribe is not dependent upon sexual anatomy. “It is purely energetic. In that context, one who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is.”

She also mentions several pre-Christian and pre-Islam (inarguably the earliest influence on west Africa) traditional religions accepted transgender people much as did various native American tribes, who felt that the “two-spirit” individual had a greater spiritual connection to the divine, and often served as shamans or priests/priestesses.

In perhaps an even more interesting case, Collins recounts Brian MacDermot’s experience living with the Nuer people in Ethiopia:

“He encountered an individual among the Nuer people of Ethiopia who not only appeared in feminine dress, and acted as female, but was actually regarded as having become a woman. No physical change of sex had transpired, yet this person was free to occupy a feminine identity and role, even to the extent that marriage to a man was permissible. MacDermot was informed that the prophet of Deng had consulted the spirits and then declared the change in this individual’s status, which the people accepted. Here transpired an outcome more certain and favorable than many individuals who actually undergo sexual assignment surgery and legal identity change experience in our culture (which so commonly and arrogantly perceives itself as more enlightened).

East Africa, it seems, has a more relaxed attitude toward gender identity, as the Amhara and Otero peoples generally have room for a third gender or non-binary expressions, whereas this is a taboo subject in many others across the interior and west of Africa.

The arrival and suffocating contemporary influence of Christianity and Islam on the continent has made it yet another incredibly dangerous place to live beyond the anatomical binary, but trans people continue to be born and in some places, even thrive.

In the next installment, we will discuss legends and attitudes of Viking Age Scandinavians toward gender variance.

If you have not caught up, please also take a moment to read Volume I, regarding pre-classical examples of attitudes toward transgender people...

...And volume II, an exploration of classical attitudes toward a subject upon which they were deeply ambivalent: