Two Spirits

When Fred Martinez told his mother that he felt as if he was both a boy and a girl, she explained that this was a special gift, according to traditional Navajo culture. But the place where two discriminations meet is a dangerous place to live, and Fred became one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at 16.

Activist Cathy Renna describes "overkill," the inordinate level of violence which is common in hate crimes, as Fred's mother Paula copes with the desecration of Fred's grave and murder site by vandals and tries to keep kids like Fred safe.

The world struggles for an understanding of what the terms "gay, straight, bisexual, and transgender" mean. But Native American beliefs about the spectrum of the masculine and feminine also connect with a gender-bending tradition from the Middle Ages in Europe.

Two Spirits is the tragic story of a mother's loss of her son with a revealing look at the largely unknown history of a time when the world wasn't simply divided into male and female, and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.

In Navajo, nadleehi means "one who is transformed," and as the film traces the ramifications of Fred's murder, it also shows the transformation being undertaken by Native activists who are working to restore the rich heritage of two-spirit people and to claim their place within their tribal communities.

In traditional Navajo culture, there are 4 genders which include the nadleehi and dilbaa -- persons born, respectively, as males or females, but who fulfill the roles of the other in adulthood. In this excerpt from the film, a more fluid way of describing gender is considered.