Some characteristics of male berdache roles are paralleled in similar roles for females--in particular, mixed-gender activities, religious associations, and sexuality. However, a broader frame of reference is needed to appreciate the diversity of women's lives in the native North America. At least three patterns of role variation can be identified, of which a named, alternative gender identity is just one.

Throughout the region from New England to the Southeast that was occupied by Algonkian-speakers, women sometimes became chiefs through kinship or marital connections. The Spaniards and English referred to them as "queens." In New England, Algonkian queens, or sunksquaw, were key figures in native uprising known as King Philip's War from 1675-1676. They were not, however, reported to have cross-dressed, and they married men.

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A second pattern of native women's gender difference can be seen in the informal but widespread participation of women in hunting and warfare. In the strife-torn Plains, women's participation in war parties--and their frequent success--was such that distinct societies existed for women who had counted "coup" (killed or otherwise bested an enemy). Some Plains women, such as Running Eagle, or Pitamakan, of the Piegan, and Woman Chief of the Crows, who led war parties and married four women, earned places of honor in tribal memory.

In the East and Plains, only the Algonkian-speaking Illinois and Cheyenne are known to have had female berdaches, called ickoue ne kioussa among the former (women, according to a French report, who "will not hear of a husband, through a principle of debauchery"), and hetanemane'o, among the latter. It is in the Far West--the Columbian Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, and California--that female berdaches were most common.

Alternative gender females, women chiefs, and women warriors were prominent figures in some tribes. Qánqon, the Kutenai female berdache, or títqattek, was a mysterious but central player in the opening of the Northwest to the fur trade at a time when the British and Americans vied for control of the region.

The Apache woman warrior and shaman Lozen, and her female lover, fought with Geronimo's band in the 1880s in an episode of armed resistance to colonialism in North America. As Eve Ball reported her brother Victorio as saying, "Strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy, Lozen is a shield to her people."

Woman Chief, Running Eagle, Qánqon, along with male berdaches like Hastíín Klah and Osch-Tisch, all hold similar places in tribal memory. These berdaches represent an enduring cultural legacy of native North America.

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

Cross-dressers have often been misunderstood and maligned, especially in societies with rigid gender roles.

Beginning in the 1960s increasing numbers of ethnographers have conducted research on glbtq issues, spurred by the premise that studies of diverse sexualities are crucial to understanding human behavior and culture.

In North American Indian cultures, mixed-gender individuals were depicted in a variety of art forms and, in many tribes, were themselves among the most accomplished artists of their communities.

From the two-spirits of traditional culture to contemporary writers, Native North Americans have produced a considerable body of gay and lesbian literature.

A distinctive American narrative genre that has developed over more than two centuries, the Western is now consumed worldwide; characteristically depicting homosocial relationships, it is also frequently suffused with homoeroticism.

Among the first American women to study anthropology, Ruth Benedict rose to the top of her profession; her "patterns of culture" theory explains human behavior and concepts of deviance as cultural constructs.

Both male and female berdaches (or two-spirit persons), common among Native American tribal cultures, were characterized by gender variation sanctioned by supernatural dreams and visions.