Tracing Transgender from Shamanism to Neurodiversity

Transgender identity is something that shouldn’t be socially stigmatized. People who simply consider it unnatural or a fad tend to be ignorant of the long history of transgender people who have been reported since the earliest civilizations in Sumer in texts from 4.500 years ago. So, transgender goes back to at least the dawn of civilization and perhaps even the mesolithic (transition to farming) or even longer.

From the point of view of evolutionary psychology transgender identity is somewhat of a riddle, as transgender people generally tend not to have offspring and consequently, there shouldn’t be any transgender genes to pass on. And yet twin studies suggest that genetics does indeed play a role in gender dysphoria, which provides an interesting paradox for scientists to solve.

Polish anthropologist named Maria Antonina Czaplicka did fieldwork among Siberian populations and found an intriguing connection between transgender and shamanism: among the Palaeo-Siberians, women receive the gift of shamanizing more often than men and the men who practised shamanism were feminized and wore female dresses.

The woman is by nature a shaman, declared a Chukchee shaman to Bogoras. ...

Taking into account the present prominent position of female shamans among many Siberian tribes and their place in traditions, together with certain feminine attributes of the male shaman (such as dress, habits, privileges) and certain linguistic similarities between the names for male and female shamans, many scientists (Troshchanski, Bogoras, Stadling) have been led to express the opinion that in former days, only female shamans existed and that the male shaman is a later development which has to some extent supplanted them. (source)

Now, this isn’t very surprising from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. Shamanism has all the hallmarks of the caregiving evolutionary role, something that is typically associated with women, however, can also be psychologically present in men. Carl Jung used the term “anima” to describe this phenomenon. This caregiving role includes

• Spiritual healing (religious ceremonies, etc.)
• Physical healing (herbal remedies, etc.)
• Mediating conflicts (high empathy)
• Predicting outcomes of hunts, discontent, etc. (prophecies)

These are exactly the roles of shamans and I share the view that deep in our hunter-gatherer past these roles were more or less exclusive to women. Many hunter-gatherer societies, like the Hadza, don’t have shamans, which provides strong indications that shamans were not universal in our hunter-gatherer past.

Shamans become shamans in their late teens to early 20s, about the same age range that schizophrenia is typically diagnosed (17-25) in men. Every shaman started with a crisis similar to what psychotic people or people with gender dysphoria go through. This would firmly tie shamanism to a perceived lower reproductive potential which leads to a change of reproductive strategy (e.g. increased helping of related genes - even though this idea is somewhat controversial).

If this hypothesis is correct trans women should be related to this shamanic profile. We should therefore be able to make some predictions about trans women that are derived from this profile: interest in herbal and alternative medicine as well as veganism, high empathy, highly affected by conflict, highly spiritual (e.g. interest in astrology, witchcraft or mysticism), and having uncanny powers to predict outcomes of social interaction, often not believed or misunderstood by others (Cassandra Syndrome).

A central paradox remains: if these transgender shamans don’t reproduce, where does the genetic component come from? I have developed a model of evolutionary personality profiles based on subsistence strategies:

From this model we can predict that people with a hunter-gatherer profile are more likely to identify with the opposite gender: gatherer men (NF temperament) as trans women and hunter women (NT temperament) as trans men. Of course, F-men (caregiving/prosocial profile) and T-women (provisioning) are more likely to suffer from gender dysphoria in general. However, hunter-gatherers are extremely egalitarian, even in regard to gender, which increases this likelihood.

Here are two famous examples:

Trans men, like Elliot Page, have been much rarer in history than trans women. There are plausible evolutionary reasons for that. Men have a higher risk of remaining childless than women. In traditional societies “old spinsters” hardly existed. This is in stark contrast with many women nowadays who opt out of the mating market altogether as they find it hard to reconcile their instincts with societal expectations and therefore tend to be happier alone rather than in a relationship they find too constraining. Not only do hunter-gatherer women enjoy the freedom to leave an unhappy relationship whenever they want to but they also get a lot of help with child-rearing from the father and the members of the band in general (alloparenting). Our modern lifestyle, which locks mum’s into apartments with their newborns wouldn’t, therefore, be very attractive to hunter-gather women. Once again, if this hypothesis is correct we should find that hunter women would be least inclined to have children and be overrepresented in the LGBTQ+ community.

I have also argued that these hunter-gatherer type people are often the same as neurodiverse people (ASD, ADHD, gifted, etc.). In fact, anybody familiar with neurodiversity will be aware of the high rates of transgender people among them:

People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are, according to the largest study yet to examine the connection [641,860 self-reported individuals]. Gender-diverse people are also more likely to report autism traits and to suspect they have undiagnosed autism.” (source)

Trans men, in particular, have a masculinized hunter-profile which often shows the following traits:

• Challenges with social skills

• High IQ (especially divergent thinking)
• STEM skills instead of language/fine arts skills

For more on my hypothesis check out my book: The hunter-gatherer neurotribe: gifted, geeks, aspies and other aliens in this world