How Culture Defines Gender and Sexuality: A Global Perspective

Across cultures, the ideas of “man” and “woman” rarely stop at biology. They are shaped by religion, kinship structures, colonial histories, and everyday social practice. What looks natural in one society – like a strict male/female binary – can look limiting or even strange in another, where a third gender has held a recognised social role for centuries. To study sexuality without studying culture is to miss the script that tells people how to desire, who to marry, and which bodies count as legitimate.

Why culture, not biology, writes the script
Cultural diversity in gender identities
Hijras in India
Fa’afafine in Samoa
Cultural control of sexuality
The Madonna-Whore syndrome in Christian cultures
Regulating female sexuality in Hindu and Islamic traditions
Kinship and sexuality
The hijra kinship system
New kinship from assisted reproduction
What this comparative view reveals

Why culture, not biology, writes the script

Biological sex describes chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy. Gender, by contrast, is a social arrangement – a set of expectations attached to those bodies. Sexuality, the patterns of desire and intimacy, is shaped by the same forces. Anthropologists have long argued that what counts as “masculine,” “feminine,” or even “sexual” varies sharply across societies. A practice that is sacred in one place may be criminalised in another.

This is why a global lens matters. When students are taught that gender is only “male and female” and sexuality only “heterosexual,” they inherit one cultural model – largely Western, largely Christian, largely shaped by 19th-century colonial law – and mistake it for the human default. Looking outside that frame reveals the real diversity of human arrangements.

Cultural diversity in gender identities

Many societies have never operated on a strict two-gender model. They have recognised people who live outside the male/female divide, often with specific names, rituals, and social functions.

Hijras in India

The hijra community is one of the oldest documented third-gender communities in the world. References to hijra-like characters appear in ancient texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, suggesting their presence in the subcontinent for thousands of years. Hijras include people assigned male at birth, some intersex individuals, and transgender women; many are devotees of the Mother Goddess Bahuchara Mata, and they are traditionally invited to bless weddings and newborns.

Hijra identity is not a private feeling but a public role rooted in a community. Members live within the guru-chela system, a kinship structure of teacher and disciple that functions as a chosen family for those rejected by their natal kin. As one academic chapter notes, hijras “sustain their ordered rankings within their cultural enclave” through these kinship ties – replacing biological family with a deliberately constructed one.

The community’s social status has shifted dramatically over time. Hijras held respected positions in the Mughal court, but British colonial administrators criminalised them under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, stripping inheritance rights and pushing the community to the margins. Legal recognition returned only in 2014, when the Supreme Court of India, in NALSA v. Union of India, officially recognised transgender people as a third gender, framing the issue as one of human rights rather than medical classification.

Fa’afafine in Samoa

Move from South Asia to the Pacific and another long-standing third-gender community appears. Fa’afafine are people assigned male at birth who occupy a feminine or third-gender role in Samoan society; the term itself translates roughly as “in the manner of a woman.” They are not understood as transgender or gay in the Western sense. Fa’afafine identity is a cultural role – defined by behaviour, family contribution, and community recognition rather than by sexual orientation.

A fa’afafine activist captured this neatly in a Reuters interview: “Western society tries to fit us in a box, to put us under gay, under trans and queer, but I think fa’afafine is our cultural identity – it defines us.” Fa’afafine often take on caregiving roles within extended families, lead church choirs, and organise community events. Their identity is socially integrated, not socially deviant.

Comparing hijras and fa’afafine matters because it shows that “non-binary” is not a recent Western invention. Different cultures have institutionalised gender variance in very different ways – through religious devotion in one context, through family service in another.

Cultural control of sexuality

Culture does more than recognise gender. It also regulates sexuality – and almost everywhere, that regulation falls more heavily on women.

The Madonna-Whore syndrome in Christian cultures

The Madonna-Whore complex is a cultural pattern in which women are split into two opposing categories: the pure, asexual mother figure and the sexually available “fallen” woman. Feminist theorists argue that this dichotomy is rooted in Abrahamic theology and a male-authored culture that polices women’s sexual autonomy through shame. Mary, the eternal virgin, is set against Eve, the seductress responsible for original sin. A woman has to choose a side – and only one side is rewarded.

This is more than a religious idea. It is a cultural script. It shapes how films cast their heroines, how laws treat sexual violence survivors, and how communities react to women who express desire openly. Sociologists William Simon and John Gagnon described this as sexual script theory – the idea that human sexuality is performed according to scripts written largely by heterosexual men, casting men as pursuers and women as gatekeepers of “respectable” sex.

Regulating female sexuality in Hindu and Islamic traditions

South Asian cultures have their own scripts. Classical Hindu texts position women between competing roles: the revered goddess, the chaste wife, the dangerous seductress. The Manusmriti praises the honouring of women, yet also instructs that “a woman must never seek to live independently”. This tension – reverence paired with restriction – runs through much of the tradition.

In practice, the regulation operates through everyday institutions: child marriage, dowry, restrictions on movement, expectations of virginity at marriage. As one peer-reviewed study notes, “the regulation of female sexuality through seclusion is important both in maintaining patrilineal succession and endogamy” – meaning that controlling women’s bodies is how caste and lineage are reproduced across generations.

Islamic traditions in the subcontinent share overlapping concerns about modesty, family honour, and lineage purity, often expressed through purdah, dress codes, and chaperoning. The shared logic across Hindu and Islamic cultural regulation is that female sexuality is treated as a collective resource – belonging not to the woman herself but to her family, caste, or religious community. A daughter’s choices become a question of family honour, sometimes with violent consequences in cases of so-called “honour” crimes.

Importantly, these traditions are not monolithic. Hindu mythology also contains fluid expressions of gender and desire – Krishna takes the female form of Mohini, and the Puranas contain stories that complicate any simple heteronormative reading. The point is not that these religions are uniquely restrictive, but that culture, more than scripture alone, decides which strands of a tradition get amplified and which are pushed aside.

Kinship and sexuality

Kinship – who counts as family, and how – sits at the heart of how cultures organise sexuality. The rules of kinship decide who can marry whom, whose children are legitimate, and which sexual relationships are honoured or forbidden.

The hijra kinship system

The hijra guru-chela structure is a striking example of kinship built outside biology. New initiates (“chelas”) are adopted by senior gurus, who teach them, house them, and pass on community traditions. Households (“gharanas”) trace lineages through these adoptive ties rather than through blood. This system performs all the classical functions of kinship – economic support, social identity, ritual obligation – without depending on marriage or reproduction.

It also reframes sexuality. Within the hijra community, sexual conduct is regulated by community norms rather than by mainstream marriage rules. The community’s existence demonstrates that kinship and sexuality are culturally separable: families can be made without sex, and sexual lives can be organised without nuclear families.

New kinship from assisted reproduction

At the other end of the technological spectrum, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) – IVF, surrogacy, sperm and egg donation – are creating new kinship forms in India and globally. Motherhood, once treated as the most unambiguous of kinship roles, can now be disaggregated into at least three distinct roles: the genetic mother who provides the egg, the gestational mother who carries the pregnancy, and the social mother who raises the child.

This disaggregation challenges classical anthropological models that treat biology as the bedrock of kinship. As one review of three decades of research observes, these technologies produce “new forms of ‘social’ kinship and relatedness which is different from ‘biological’ one” – kinship that is intentional, negotiated, and sometimes shared across donors, surrogates, and rearing parents.

In India, commercial surrogacy was a booming industry until tightened regulation through the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which restricted the practice to altruistic arrangements for Indian heterosexual married couples. The law reflects exactly the cultural anxieties at stake: who counts as a “real” parent, which families are recognised by the state, and whether non-traditional kinship is welcomed or feared. Same-sex couples and single people still face significant barriers to using ARTs, showing how kinship rules continue to police sexuality even as technology expands possibilities.

What this comparative view reveals

Putting hijras, fa’afafine, the Madonna-Whore complex, honour-based sexual regulation, and ARTs in one frame produces a clear lesson: gender and sexuality are cultural projects, not natural facts. Each society draws lines around acceptable bodies, desires, and family forms – and those lines shift over time, often dramatically. Colonialism narrowed many of these lines in South Asia. Technology is now reopening some of them. Activism, jurisprudence, and everyday lived experience continue to push at the boundaries.

For students of population and family health, the practical implication is significant. Health systems built only for cisgender heterosexual nuclear families fail hijra patients, fa’afafine community members, same-sex parents, and surrogate-born children alike. Policies on marriage, inheritance, adoption, and reproductive care need to recognise that the cultural diversity of gender and sexuality is not an exception to manage but a baseline reality to design for.

What do you think? If the hijra community has lived as a recognised third gender in the subcontinent for centuries, why does mainstream Indian society still treat non-binary identity as a foreign or modern concept? And as assisted reproductive technologies redefine who can be a parent, should the law lead cultural change – or wait for culture to catch up?

References

PDF 📄

How Culture Defines Gender and Sexuality: A Global Perspective

Table of Contents

Why culture, not biology, writes the script 🔗

Cultural diversity in gender identities 🔗

Hijras in India 🔗

Fa’afafine in Samoa 🔗

Cultural control of sexuality 🔗

The Madonna-Whore syndrome in Christian cultures 🔗

Regulating female sexuality in Hindu and Islamic traditions 🔗

Kinship and sexuality 🔗

The hijra kinship system 🔗

New kinship from assisted reproduction 🔗

What this comparative view reveals 🔗