“We Need Soldiers, and Mothers of Soldiers”

How the State invented a gender binary to serve its own needs

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Most indigenous cultures have (or had prior to contact) somewhere between 3 and 5 genders. It seems like a no-brainer to me if you actually look at the world and the vast array of people in it. Personal autonomy is also one of the hallmarks of forager cultures and even early cities didn’t go in for a lot of top-down hierarchy. Most decisions were made by consensus of the people affected by any decision that needed to be made.

There are innumerable examples of settlements, cities, and even kingdoms from around the world where there was little to no top-down hierarchy or centralized political administration until the past few thousand years. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy (and you can’t wage large-scale war without centralized government and hierarchy).

People balanced the common good with the right to live pretty much as they wished, something that is still the ethos of modern-day foragers.

Nearly all researchers who write about hunter-gatherer bands emphasize the extraordinarily high value they place on individual autonomy. Hunter-gatherers’ sense of autonomy is different from the individualism of modern Western capitalist cultures.

Intimately tied to hunter-gatherers’ sense of autonomy is what Richard Lee (1988) has called their “fierce egalitarianism.” Egalitarianism, among hunter-gatherers, goes far beyond the western notion of equal opportunity. It means that nobody has more material goods than anyone else, that everyone’s needs are equally important, and that nobody considers himself or herself superior to others. Such equality is part and parcel of hunter-gatherers’ autonomy, as inequalities could lead those who have more to dominate those who have less. Hunter-gatherers, of course, recognize that some people are better hunters or gatherers than others, some are wiser than others, and so on, and they value such abilities. However, they react strongly against…