Apwint

Outside Myanmar the word is usually rendered as transgender woman, and Vanessa Veronese and her co-authors set out what that substitution costs. Western usage keeps one vocabulary for sexual identity and another for gender identity, while across Asia one set of labels is often used to carry both at once. Myanmar's National AIDS Program put the same point more bluntly in its 2015 and 2016 materials: there is no direct translation of transgender into Burmese and the English word is not widely used in the country.

Where apwint sits among the Burmese terms

Three words do most of the work in the written record, and that record was largely produced by HIV outreach programmes which use all three as reporting categories. David Gilbert, who spent his fieldwork riding buses around Yangon with a peer educator and published the results in Sojourn in 2013, found the organisation he was attached to sorting the people it contacted into open, hider and guy.

The third term is the one that breaks in translation. Some Burmese speakers who know English queer vocabulary call a guy straight, and Gilbert notes that inside Burmese gender codes the word marks gender-normativity, including a penetrative sexual role, rather than an orientation towards women. Guys are the usual partners of both opens and hiders, and it is unusual for opens and hiders to desire each other, though Gilbert records a growing homo culture in which hiders do. Veronese and her colleagues describe the same third position from the epidemiological side, as men with masculine presentations who have sex with other men sporadically or incidentally while keeping a heterosexual identity and relationships with women.

The pair at the top of the table is held together by something the table cannot show. Gilbert's account rests on three elements: external image, the internal seik, the mind or heart, and karma. Apwint and apone are understood to share the same feminine seik and to differ only in what they show of it. The pair is one category divided by exposure, which is why an English rendering that reaches for two separate identity words gets the relationship backwards. An apone commonly passes as a man in public and most reliably in family and work settings, and on the street is not distinguishable from other men in the public eye. An apwint does not.

Who owns this vocabulary in Yangon

Gilbert is explicit that these are not state terms or academic ones. Opens and hiders own the vocabulary, the queer sense of these otherwise common words is mostly unknown in the general population, and none of them appears in state discourse, which names people in its own way. The everyday register also runs wider than the three reporting categories. Ingahlan, achaut, dry, and meinmalya, aiming to be woman, all circulate in Yangon as synonyms for open.

The article records what happened when Gilbert asked a peer educator which amyoasa, which type, they were. The answer was "I am Maung Maung", followed by the question handed back to the researcher. Practices of labelling in Myanmar are commonly unarticulated and the local terms are contested, which is the argument of the piece: people are sorted by others who know without asking, and asking is itself a foreign move.

What the researchers admit they got wrong

The other body of fieldwork on this vocabulary concerns spirit mediums. Jessie Ford and colleagues, publishing in 2018 on observations made between 2010 and 2015, mostly in Mandalay with further work in Yangon and Bagan, interviewed achout, gender-variant people working as nat kadaw, spirit mediums, about how they understood their gender and sexuality in relation to that work.

What makes the paper useful is the passage in which its authors correct themselves. An earlier report of theirs, they write, oversimplified the complexity of gender, gender expression, sexuality and sexual orientation among the Burmese spirit cults, and the criticism they accept is that they had worked without the language, without the structure of Burmese sexuality, from a Western frame of reference and with few resources to cross-reference their findings against. Gilbert is one of the writers they name as having made that criticism.

How a colonial statute reaches apwint

Section 377 of the penal code, which criminalises sexual acts against the order of nature, was enacted under British rule in Burma and kept after British rule ended in 1948. The Myanmar Police Force continues to use it against apwint, who are considered male in the eyes of the law, and it is used against people who are not engaging in any sexual activity, which is not what the section provides for.

Lynette Chua and Gilbert, writing in Human Rights Quarterly in 2015, describe a pattern of persecution that mostly does not take the shape of a prosecution. The section carries up to ten years, and it is the threat of a charge that does the work. Sections 30(d) and 35(d) of the Rangoon Police Act of 1899 and the Police Act of 1945 allow arrest without a warrant, and police have been recorded using the threat of arrest to solicit a bribe or a sexual favour. Apwint are stereotyped as deviant and criminal and can be threatened with arrest for being visible at all, and the career and economic prospects attached to the category are severely limited as a result. The same authors record the other half of the period: an indigenous LGBT rights movement formed under those laws and has grown since the political transition began.

Why transgender does not translate

Ye Kyaw Aung and colleagues interviewed twenty transgender women and eleven service providers in Yangon in 2017 and found no Burmese equivalent for the English word. Every participant had been assigned male at birth and none identified as a man. They described themselves as women or as another gender such as trans, and located the sense of it in an internal conviction rather than in the changes of clothing and manner that many of them also reported making.

That study names the reason the literature has the shape it has. Transgender women in Myanmar have historically been counted inside the category men who have sex with men in programme and surveillance data, and they take part in and lead many of those programmes, so the same people appear in the record under a label that is not theirs. Neither Transgender nor Trans woman carries the division between gender and desire that the Burmese words hold together, which is why both translations lose something on the way across.

Why nobody has counted apwint

No source on file gives a number of apwint. The figure that circulates is an estimate of 250,000 men who have sex with men and transgender women in Myanmar, and the paper carrying it says in the same sentence that the estimate is not disaggregated by gender identity. As many as half of that population is thought to conceal same-sex preferences and behaviours, which is a statement about apone more than about apwint, and it is also the reason a disaggregated count is difficult to produce.

What the sources establish is the shape of the category rather than its size. That is the ordinary condition of a word which lives in one city's spoken register and in the reporting forms of health programmes, and no source traced for this entry closes the gap.