Sexuality As Williams puts it, "If Europeans and their descendant nations of North America accept something as normal, then anything different is seen as abnormal. Such a view ignores the great diversity of human existence," (73). One of the fundamental aspects of human existence is gender; another is sexuality. These two primary issues color the way people see the world, create identity, and communicate with others. Gender impacts social status and access to power. Dichotomizing sexuality and gender is dangerous, mainly because dualism is artificial. Very few women fulfill the stereotypical Barbie-like female role identity; and very few men correspond to their G.I. Joe counterpart. Most people do occupy a comfortable spot on the gender continuum. Yet when questioned about gender and sexuality, most people are tagged as male or as female. The growing interest in transgender has raised important questions about the flexibility of gender. Transgender individuals have a hard time being accepted for who they are, because European and North...

Continuum thinking alone is more flexible than rigid dualistic thinking. Therefore, viewing individual gender and sexuality on a continuum is more conducive to flexible and open-minded thinking. Boys and girls in school would not be teased for their lack of conformity to the proscribed gender roles and norms drilled into their consciousness since early childhood. Girls who wear blue and boys who wear pink, for example, would not be considered strange and worthy of bullying.
Native American cultures tend to have flexible concepts of gender and sexuality, especially compared with European cultures. The berdache is a gender category that is as valid as male or female. A berdache does not need to defend behavior, or to squeeze artificially into dualistic categories. Instead, a berdache is…