A trans writer’s talk was banned over a drag law. So she’ll speak here instead
On the first day of Pride month, Adria Jawort was scheduled to speak at the public library in Butte, Montana. She was going to give a lecture on the history of trans and Two Spirit people in the west. She is not a drag performer. And yet the city’s top elected officials pressured the library to cancel her talk, saying it might pose a legal risk given the state’s new law against drag performers reading to children.
Perhaps naively, I thought my city would be one of the last places to censor Jawort, an Indigenous trans woman. Butte, the mining town where I grew up and now live, hasn’t voted Republican in generations. It’s the historic heart of the labor movement in the US west, a scrappy place where people pride themselves on standing up to power and protecting the less powerful. But our political landscape is changing.
Across the country, far-right politicians are waging war on the rights of queer people. In Montana, a state facing an affordability and housing crisis of historic proportions, a Republican supermajority in the legislature largely ignored the economic issues facing most residents and instead gained a national spotlight by passing laws targeting drag shows and healthcare for trans people, in debates loaded with hateful rhetoric.
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We’re in a historic moment in Montana and several other states where far-right extremists who control state governments have passed a spate of bills attacking the rights of vulnerable people. Did you see this coming in our state?
Most certainly. I jokingly call myself a “doomerette”, but I’ve testified for and against some 60-something bills in the 2021 legislative session and saw first-hand how the far-right fringe obsessed with culture wars worked to push out moderates.
While they might be offended if you call them fascists, figure, the last 2021 GOP House leader, Derek Skees, called Montana’s constitution a “socialist rag”. State Senator John Fueller said “democracy is a methodology of government that has failed as miserably as socialism” in his defense of banning books. These people are more interested in forcing their personal, authoritarian, theocratic beliefs upon the populace than governing.
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I’m interested in the actual topic of your talk that was cancelled – the history of Two Spirit people in the west. Can you tell us more about it?
Firstly, I should describe what Two Spirit is: it’s the 1990 umbrella word replacement for what anthropologists had previously called “berdache”. Let’s just say that word was an offensive, inaccurate term used to describe what we’d collectively call trans and/or gay and lesbian identities within tribes.
“Two Spirit” stems from the Ojibwe term niizh manidoowag, which means having the “Two Spirits” of male and female. Two Spirit people were considered sacred and essential to ceremonies and spirituality.
Crow tribe have what they called the badé, Lakota have winkte, my Cheyenne tribe has hemaneh – which means born male but has the heart and soul of a woman. The Navajo word naadleehi means “one who transforms” into a woman. And of course there’s also male variations.
During the late 1890s and after the Indian wars, an Indian agent acting on behalf of the government tried to get a popular badé trans woman named Finds Them And Kills Them to live as a man. She refused. The agent jailed all the badé, cut off their hair, and forced them to do manual “man’s labor”.
The Crow were shocked at this attempted conversion therapy. It was against their nature. The late second world war hero and Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow said: “The people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow agency and told the agent to leave the reservation. It was a tragedy, trying to change them.”
It was such an alien, baffling, and upsetting concept to Natives to force people to live against their nature, they were going to revolt on their behalf. They stood up for who she was.