"a certain ideology of the American native"?

George Catlin, 1835/37

     "The historical evidence before us shows that only at the turn to the twentieth century does the image of the berdache as a person who might choose his lifestyle begin to appear in the (anthropological) sources.  All the previous historical evidence portrays that figure as constructed through force by parental or tribal authority. . . .
     "A second line of evidence, that gathered among the Inuit of the far north by recent and contemporary ethnographers, provides a strikingly similar picture, though here the majority of the infants chosen for inversion were girls. . . .  In both of these huge areas, the forced conversion of children into the gender opposite to their sex was determined largely by political and familial considerations, and clearly had none but a fanciful association to the alleged 'wish' of the child. . . .
     "The third line of evidence considered the tribes of the present-day United States of America, and especially those of the Prairie and Plains.  The latter nations were, we have found, marked off clearly both the Prairie nations to the east and those to their west by the fact that only in their late teens and not as children did berdaches emerge from the visions that were a characteristic trait of this area. . . .  the all-but unanimous findings of serious students of the Plains visions . . . establish . . . that the interpretation of visions among these nations was carefully monitored by family elders, secret-society heads, and the like, to legitimate and replicate preexisting social bonds:  In the end, there was little room for the notion of free choice, and it was seldom enough claimed."

     Richard C. Trexler, "Making the American berdache:  choice or constraint?," Journal of social history 35, no. 3 (Spring 2002):  628-629 (613-636).  sipiniq is the Inuit term given here.  Interesting to me is the fact that sipi-/sipḷuq/sipyuq ("to change from male to female in the womb or during birth (of a fetus; mythical)") occurs in Wolf A. Seiler's Iñupiatun Eskimo dictionary of 2012, which focuses on the language of the NANA region of my childhood.  The headline is from p. 630.  How the Trexler thesis has fared in the twenty years since, I have not yet read enough of the literature to say.

     Along the same lines, but far more blistering, I see, is this essay from the following year:  Richard C. Trexler, "Gender subordination and political hierarchy in pre-Hispanic America," in Infamous desire: male homosexuality in colonial Latin America, ed. Peter Herman Sigal (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), 70-79_.