LGBQ community complains about Dine ceremonies

This is an interesting post from the LGBQ community. ("Why are Diné LGBTQ+ and Two Spirit people being denied access to ceremony?") The article tells of one person's complaint that the Navajo medicine community will not perform a marriage for a gay couple, or a coming-of-age ceremony for a gay person.

In September of 2017, I asked my wife to marry me. We were determined to have a Navajo wedding and tried to find a traditional healer who would consider a marriage between two women. At one point, I found a medicine woman who supported same-sex marriages, but only if they were performed in a church or other non-Diné venue. She said that according to Navajo tradition, we couldn’t be blessed in the same way as a man and a woman, and she declined to perform the ceremony.

An interesting dilemma.  There is a lot of misconception and misinformation about this topic, both in Navajo and English.  The article says,

Traditional healers must talk about the Navajo creation story, understand and explain gender roles, use correct gender pronouns, and conduct ceremonies that honor multiple gender roles and different forms of relationships. Otherwise, we will lose those traditions for good.

If medicine people are the knowledgeable people of Navajo society, who are we to tell them to use the "correct gender pronouns"?  Maybe our understanding of correct gender pronouns is inadequate and they are using the correct form of pronouns since they are the knowledgeable people. 

The article talks about the Dine culture and the medicine community accepting "Nadleeh".  For the medicine community, maybe they have requirements that they need to follow in carrying out their ceremony, so it’s not a question of acceptance and discrimination.  We cannot just expect the medicine community to conform to Bilagana norms. The medicine community has its own rules which are different than our social rules. The medicine community does not necessarily follow the Bilagana social rules. They are independent from Bilagana. Perhaps the medicine community knows what it is doing, following their instructions as it was handed to them, and we need to try to understand and ask why they refuse to perform these ceremonies in these ways. We do need more education on this topic from informed individuals. 

I feel that we are just all ignorant, the blind leading the blind, and this article is no exception.