Muxe
A third gender inside Zapotec life on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec: assigned male at birth, raised into a role the town already has a word, a fiesta and a set of obligations for.
- One of twenty-two Cultural identities
- No settled flag
- 12 min read
What it is
Muxe belongs to the Zapotec people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, southern Mexico. Juchitán, Santo Domingo Tehuantepec, Unión Hidalgo, El Espinal, Ixtepec. It is a word in diidxazá, the Zapotec language, spoken by people with neighbours, debts and a church calendar.
A muxe is someone assigned male at birth who lives, in that place, as neither a man nor exactly a woman. Not privately. Not as a stage on the way to something else. As a kind of person the community already has a name and a job for.
This is not a word anyone can pick up. If you are not Zapotec from the Isthmus, it is not yours — not as a translation of your gender, not as a warmer word for non-binary. You can read this page. You cannot take the word.
Keep reading
It is also not one agreed thing. Muxes argue among themselves about who counts: whether a gay man counts, whether a trans woman is still muxe, whether you have to be vestida. Older and younger muxes often do not mean the same thing by it.
Outsiders write Juchitán as a paradise where muxes are adored. Muxes who live there rarely describe it that way. Both things are true at once: a place at the fiesta, and a brother who will not say your name.
Pronouns
There is no single answer, and asking is normal in the Isthmus.
In Spanish, some muxes use ella, some él, some take both and don't police it. Plenty of families switch by room — one word at the market, another at the table.
Zapotec does not mark gender the way Spanish does. Much of the pressure comes from Spanish and from paperwork, not from the mother tongue. In diidxazá you are more likely to simply be called by your name, or called muxe.
"Muxe" itself is often the noun people use for you. From someone in that town it is a category, not an insult. From a tourist it can be either.
Plural: muxes. Also written muxhe and mushe; people from different towns spell it differently and are not wrong.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
You are up early because the heat gets serious by ten. Coffee, your mother, a list.
The market first. Every trader knows what to call you. Some use the name your mother gave you. Some say muxe. One says nothing and serves you anyway.
Back at the house, work. A huipil half-embroidered on the frame. Two orders for a November wedding and one that was due last week.
Somewhere in there: your father's tablets, the electricity bill, your niece at two, your brother in Tijuana who sends money some months.
In the evening the phone. Someone you have been seeing for two years texts after eleven and never before. You know exactly why. You answer, or you don't.
None of this looks like the photographs. The flowers and the traje are for the vela, and the vela is three days out of the year.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
Most muxes have partnered with men who call themselves nothing. Not gay, not muxe. Married to a woman, sometimes. At ease in your kitchen at midnight, a stranger to you at the fiesta.
That arrangement is old and it is tiring. You can be the person a man has loved for ten years and still not be the person he introduces.
Younger muxes increasingly refuse the deal. They want a boyfriend who takes their hand in the street in Juchitán. Some get it. Some get hit for it.
Some muxes marry women and raise children. This baffles foreigners. It does not baffle anyone from the Isthmus.
And some muxes are alone in a way that has nothing to do with romance: adored at the party, fed by everybody, and nobody's first call at three in the morning.
Desire
You may have been treated as the town's sexual education from about fifteen. Boys come to you first, and quietly, and then they marry.
Some muxes want that role and are good at it. Some hate it and have never found a way to refuse that the town will accept.
Being wanted at night and unnameable by daylight does its own kind of damage. It is not the closet — the whole town knows what you are. It is being known and still unspoken.
There are muxes who want none of it: no sex, no men, no touching. Still muxe. Muxe is not an orientation.
HIV is not a metaphor here. It has taken people. The clinic is far, or judgmental, or both, and the condoms often come from a muxe organisation rather than the state.
The body
There is no muxe body and no procedure that makes you one.
Some take hormones. In practice that often means the pharmacy counter and a friend's advice rather than a doctor, and needles shared between three people. Everyone knows this is not how it should work. The alternative on offer is nothing.
Some have surgery, usually far away and usually expensive. Most do not.
Some change nothing at all. A muxe pintada with a moustache and eyeliner is not a half-measure.
The heat matters more than any of it. A full traje in May is a weight. So are the shoes, the hair, and the hour of ironing before a fiesta nobody will thank you for running.
Then ageing. The muxe who nursed everyone else's parents arrives at sixty with no children, no pension, and thirty years of standing up at other people's parties in both knees.
Work
There is a short list of doors that open easily. Embroidery. Huipiles. Hairdressing. Cooking for velas and weddings. Flowers, decorations, the whole machinery of a fiesta. Market trading.
Being good at those things is real skill and real money. It is also the only offer.
Teaching, nursing, accounting, driving, university — possible, and harder. Employers in the region look at you and see November, not your CV.
So many muxes leave: salons in Mexico City, work in Oaxaca city, the north, the United States. There nobody knows the word, and strangers sort you into gay man or trans woman while certain they are helping.
The money you earn tends not to stay yours. There is a mother, a roof, a nephew's school shoes, a funeral.
Family
The most common muxe story is not rejection. It is being kept.
Mothers often want a muxe child, and say so without embarrassment: a muxe stays. The brothers go north, the sisters marry out, and you are the one at home when your father stops being able to walk.
That love is real and it comes with a bill. Nobody expects you to have a house of your own. Nobody asked whether you wanted to be the nurse.
Fathers are usually the harder half. Some come round after years. Some never say the word out loud and hand you the family business anyway.
You are tía to some nieces and tío to others, occasionally in the same room. The children handle this better than any adult does.
And it goes wrong too. Houses in Juchitán throw muxe teenagers out, not only houses elsewhere.
Coming out
Often there is no coming out. You are named before you name yourself — by an aunt, by the street, by the boys who worked it out first. There is a mercy in that and a violence in it.
There are still moments. The first time you leave the house vestida. Your first vela as one of the intrépidas instead of a child at the edge. Telling a father. Telling a priest.
There is also the move outsiders never think about: leaving and having to explain. In Mexico City, in Los Angeles, muxe means nothing, and the form has two boxes.
Do not assume the Isthmus is safe because it has the word. A word does not stop a beating, and it does not stop a landlord.
If you are not out and never will be, you are still muxe. This category was never built on announcements.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
Some muxes also call themselves trans women and live as women. Others are angry at the equation. The difference muxes most often name: muxe is a place your community puts you, not only an understanding you arrive at alone.
Compare Muxe and Transgender Female →Many muxes are attracted to men, and in Spanish the words get blurred on purpose. But a Juchiteco who is a man and likes men is usually just that, and everyone local can tell the difference.
A self-chosen term available to anyone, anywhere, with no kin attached. Muxe comes with a town, a language, a November and a list of duties.
Compare Muxe and Non-Binary →Also Indigenous, also closed to outsiders, and constantly compared to muxe by people who have studied neither. Different nations, different continent, different history. Not interchangeable.
Compare Muxe and Two-Spirit →South Asian, with initiation, gurus, households and a religious frame muxe does not have. The third-gender shelf in a bookshop is not a shared identity.
Compare Muxe and Hijra →Pacific roles that outsiders line up beside muxe. The family-care resemblance is real. Almost nothing else transfers.
Fa’afafine → · Māhū →It might not be you if…
- You are not Zapotec from the Isthmus. However well the description fits, the word is not on offer. Keep what you recognised and go and find your own name for it.
- You want something private that nobody else needs to know. Muxe is a public position: the town, the family and the church all get a vote.
- You are from Juchitán, you are a man, you like men, and that is the whole of it. That is a life. It is not this word.
- You are a woman from the Isthmus who has said clearly that she is a woman. Some muxes take that road out of the word, and it is a real road.
- You want the flowers, the traje and the photographs without the funerals, the debts and thirty years of care work.
- You are the partner, the friend or the photographer of a muxe. Being close to it is not being it.
- Your interest came from a documentary and has not survived meeting anyone who actually lives there.
On the hard days
The killings. Óscar Cazorla, who founded the November vela in the 1970s, was stabbed to death at home in Juchitán in 2019. Muxes name their dead out loud and are still waiting on most of the cases.
The double life your neighbours run, not you. Adored at the fiesta, silent at your graveside.
The visitors. Someone arrives with a camera every November, photographs you for a magazine in another country, calls your town a paradise, and leaves. Nobody is paid.
The exhaustion of being evidence. Mexico likes to point at you when it wants to look tolerant. That is not a job, a clinic, or a conviction in court.
The 2017 earthquake flattened houses in Juchitán. Muxe groups ran relief while the money went elsewhere.
And the plain days. A body that aches, a mother who needs turning, a man who will not text before eleven, and the strong suspicion that you have given everything to people who will not carry your coffin.
Questions people ask
Can I identify as muxe if I am not Zapotec?
No. Not by feeling a connection, not with respect, not with a Zapotec friend's blessing. Muxe is a role inside one people's language, kinship and fiesta calendar, in a small number of towns in Oaxaca. Taking the word out of that removes everything that makes it mean anything. If something here described you, the recognition is yours to keep. The word is not.
Is being muxe the same as being a trans woman?
Sometimes overlapping, never simply equivalent. Some muxes take hormones, live as women and use both words without any conflict. Others say the point is precisely that they are a third thing and not a woman. The community does not agree with itself on this, and outsiders should not settle it for them.
What is the difference between muxe vestida and muxe pintada?
Vestida means dressed: women's clothing day to day, from jeans and a blouse to the full traje and huipil at a vela. Pintada means painted: men's clothing with make-up. Most younger muxes are vestidas, but that is recent — everyday dressing spread from around the middle of the twentieth century, long after the role itself. Some muxes reject both labels.
Where does the word muxe come from, and is it pre-Hispanic?
The role in Zapotec life is old. The word is widely thought to come from the 16th-century Spanish mujer, taken into Zapotec, though the etymology is not settled. Claims of an unbroken pre-colonial institution are argued over by historians and by muxes themselves. What is documented is more recent: the vela in Juchitán dates to the 1970s, when muxe parties were still being raided by police.
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