Jane:
>Except of course for those who are absolutely, definitely, women and proud
>of it, and their bedpartners (male, and proud of it) are pretty convinced,
>too!
But why would somebody who is "absolutely, definitely" a woman be comfortable taking part in the religious rites of Orlanth the Allfather, and flying up to Karulinornan with the other men instead of going into the earth with her sisters? And why would the men accept her among them?
>"Doing a man's job" does not mean "being a man" in every sense including
>sexual, even in magical and mythical Glorantha. (I'll ask my husband to
>check, but so far he seems quite convinced that, despite being a computer
>geek, I'm female.)
But you weren't brought up to believe in the Storm Tribe religion. We know that the Heortlings strictly assign particular occupations to one gender or the other: if you want to be a combat medic (like the characters in M*A*S*H, say) then clearly your soul has received a calling from Ernalda/Bevara. Which means your soul is female, even if your body isn't. You, on the other hand, received the call from Orlanthgeek, patriarch of computers - so you must have a male soul.
Yes, I know it sounds silly (or worse) by our own standards; but if 21st century Western sexual philosophy applied to Glorantha then they'd let women just initiate to Orlanth/Destor, or men to Ernalda/Skovara, with no complications...
>(Though making them capable of taking the male role in sex sounds
>tricky?)
I think the phrase "a gay man trapped in a woman's body" needs to be
used here. :)
>Possibly we do need a version/subcult of Vinga that caters for the "men in
>female bodies" idea, and quite possibly some Orlanthi think of this as the
>norm. And I think we also need a version of Nandan that's just "men who
>do a woman's job", since that seems to me to be be far more likely to happen
>than full trans-sexuality.
Slightly changing tack, I do think it might be best to not think in absolutes. All worshippers of Vinga might have "male souls" in some technical sense - and mutatis mutandis for Nandans. But they are unlikely to be _completely_ male. Where we might discuss it in terms of the Kinsey scale, a Gloranthan would talk about the Mixed world and the comparison with Theist, Animist and Wizardly souls/spitits/essences.
Somebody who joins Vinga for a few years, then re-dyes her hair again, initiates to Ernalda and has children clearly had a mostly-female soul with some small elements of maleness. The man who joins Nandan because he enjoys pottery likewise. But the man who pursues the Nandan heroquest to allow hir to bear children clearly had an almost completly female soul (and, in effect, has "Concentrated hir gender"). One could assume that Vinga (or a hero cult of hers) has a similar heroquest for women who wish to father children on another woman...
Stephen
(PS I don't know if I need to spell this out, but to be safe, I will
say that I'm speculating about Gloranthan beliefs here, not describing
my own real-world beliefs!)
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