By my reading, the definition of berdache existed in the 1600s, and in is original European context, refers to '"passive homosexual", "catamite" or even "boy prostitute"' (quoting Wikipedia.)
Europeans didn't have a gender framework that could handle concepts outside of "male/female":"man/woman" so some re-used that French term meaning broadly to include what Europeans would now describe as transvestite, transgender, hermaphrodite, and homosexual people. See http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170...
You can see from the examples that while "berdache"/"two-spirit" was widespread in Native American cultures, there wasn't a "traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role".
In addition to "berdache" being re-used to mean non-gender-binary-conformant, the term as used in the scientific literature carried with it European prejudice which didn't reflect the native understanding:
> literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the berdache as a “creature of failed
biology, for example, hermaphroditism [...], or failed morals [...], or as someone not able to
live up to an expected norm” (Herdt in Jacobs et al. 280). -- quoting https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b...
Europeans didn't have a gender framework that could handle concepts outside of "male/female":"man/woman" so some re-used that French term meaning broadly to include what Europeans would now describe as transvestite, transgender, hermaphrodite, and homosexual people. See http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/archive/20070205170...
You can see from the examples that while "berdache"/"two-spirit" was widespread in Native American cultures, there wasn't a "traditional native-american 'boy prostitute' role".
In addition to "berdache" being re-used to mean non-gender-binary-conformant, the term as used in the scientific literature carried with it European prejudice which didn't reflect the native understanding:
> literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the berdache as a “creature of failed biology, for example, hermaphroditism [...], or failed morals [...], or as someone not able to live up to an expected norm” (Herdt in Jacobs et al. 280). -- quoting https://www.proquest.com/openview/c98c4f83e2910bd20e6b3ebb6b...