Word.ws English Dictionary

berdaches

berdaches is the plural of berdache.

Meaning of berdache

Noun

berdache (plural berdaches)

  1. (dated, ethnic, offensive, slur) Among Native Americans, a person who identifies with any of a variety of gender identities which are not exclusively those of their biological sex; a transgender person.
    • These culturally bound assumptions have bedevilled the entire anthropological literature on the berdache in Native American cultures, and it is because of this that I have followed the lead of Angelino and Shedd when referring to the phenomenon of the berdache-transgenderal, for as Fitzgerald...1980, Kenneth E. Read, “Observations on the Current State of Anthropological Research on Homosexual Behavior”, in Other Voices: The Style of a Male Homosexual Tavern, Novato, Cali.: Chandler & Sharp...

Questions about berdaches

What is berdaches the plural of?
Berdaches is the plural of berdache.

Words near berdaches in the dictionary

  1. Berciers
  2. Bercow
  3. Bercuson
  4. Bercy
  5. berdache
  6. berdaches
  7. berdachism
  8. Berdan
  9. Berdans
  10. berdash
  11. berdashes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: berdaches (page history and authors); berdache (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “berdaches.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/berdaches. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.