American Indian traditionalists, even today, tend to see a person's basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Rather than emphasising the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts.
Both the Spanish settlers in Latin America and the English colonists in North America condemned them as 'sodomites'. Because these androgynous males were commonly married to a masculine man, or had sex with men, and the masculine females had feminine women as wives, the term berdache had a clear homosexual connotation. The most common term to define such persons today is to refer to them as 'two-spirit' people, but in the past feminine males were sometimes referred to as 'berdache' by early French explorers in North America, who adapted a Persian word 'bardaj', meaning an intimate male friend.
N ative Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect.
