there are plenty of cultures with traditions of third-gender people, but they're mostly the ones that got killed off or pushed to the side - there's an interesting connection between siberian shamanism and third-gender people, for example

you were unlucky there to stumble into the separate clusterfuck of "man, natives are kind of pissed about the whole misrepresentation and genocide thing and don't like their shit being called by european names" - "bardache" is an old french word for the "bottom" in a gay relationship and it seems to be eventually derived from an arabic word for "slave"

there's a language that i'm really interested in in the canadian northwest that i knew as "slavey" or "slave" with or without an acute accent on the e - turns out the name literally comes from "esclave", or slave in french, which is a calque from cree - that's the problem with asking the wrong locals what everything is called, because the cree were like "we enslave these people, so we call them slaves" and now essentially all the academic writing about these people uses that name too

they prefer "Dene" - fun fact: lots do, including Navajo - "Diné", right?

i appreciate the fact that you're still trying to sort stuff out - despite that, i find it hard to pat you (or anyone) on the back too hard for the effort