Bissu

The Bugis are the most numerous of the three major ethnic groups of South Sulawesi, at around three million people, and most of them are Muslim. The conversion from animism came in the early seventeenth century and many pre-Islamic rites are still honoured, the view that gender runs across a range among them. The bissu are the part of that arrangement with the least English equivalent and the smallest number of survivors.

Where the word bissu comes from

The theories diverge. The Bugis derivation takes bissu from bessi, clean in the sense of holy, of not menstruating. Wiktionary's Makasar entry runs the word instead through Malay biksu to the Sanskrit bhikṣu, a mendicant, which would make it a borrowing from the Buddhist vocabulary that reached the archipelago before Islam. That entry glosses the word as a shamanistic priest, traditionally an individual of non-binary or feminine habitus serving in pre-Islamic royal rituals. The compound bunga bissu, bissu flower, is the ordinary Makasar word for a hibiscus.

Nobody has dated the word. Travellers recorded the gender and sexual diversity of the region before Islam reached Indonesia in the early 1500s, and Sharyn Graham Davies, who studied Bugis gender for her doctorate at Auckland University of Technology, puts the five-term arrangement at at least six centuries old, citing comparable traditions in Thailand, Malaysia, India and Bangladesh. That dates the practice rather than the term, and no source on file gives a first recorded use of bissu itself.

How a bissu is made

The starting condition is held to be innate and is read at birth from ambiguous genitalia, which need not be visible: a child who appears male is understood to be female inside, and the reverse. That combination is what allows a meta-gender identity to emerge, in the phrasing Davies uses.

Ambiguity alone confers nothing. A prospective bissu must learn the language, the songs and the incantations, and must have a gift for bestowing blessings. Initiation is a long process and includes a ceremony in which the candidate proves immunity to a ceremonial knife, the keris, at real risk. Halilintar Lathief, an Indonesian anthropologist who has studied bissu for decades, explains the requirement theologically: the upper world is understood as male and this world as female, so only a meta-gender could carry messages between them.

Whether birth or training is the decisive part is disputed inside the tradition. Davies puts the disagreement plainly: bissu often say a person must be born bissu, meaning born both female and male, while others hold that learning the language, the songs and the incantations, and having the gift for blessing, is enough to become one. The office is the thing that is contested, not the gender, which is what separates it from the identity labels it gets filed beside.

Bissu are expected to remain celibate. Many in practice have sexual relationships, particularly with oroané, and this is not publicly acknowledged, because acknowledgement is held to strip the spiritual power away.

What the bissu did for kings

In pre-Islamic Bugis religion bissu are the intermediaries between people and gods, associated with the androgynous moon goddess as her spiritual offspring. Up to the 1940s they were still central to the palace rites, including the crowning of kings and queens. There would be no inauguration without bissu present, Lathief has said, because only bissu could carry a king's oath to the gods. The everyday work runs alongside the courtly kind: bissu officiate at weddings and at childbirth, and give blessings to people about to harvest.

The office has internal ranks, described in the La Galigo poems: bissu descended from the gods and tied closely to the courts and the nobility, landowning bissu with no spiritual duties, and bissu whose work is the conduct of religious rites.

Why the bissu nearly disappeared

Dutch colonial administration was ambivalent, leaving some Indigenous structures intact to keep agriculture running and because it read those traditions as a check on Islam, while contributing to a climate hostile to anything it judged immoral. The sharper break came later. After independence in 1949 the Bugis kingdoms were absorbed into the republic and the bissu lost the courts their standing rested on. A regional Islamic rebellion in South Sulawesi brought persecution under the campaign known as Operasi Tobat, part of the wider Darul Islam rebellion. Under the New Order they were marked as deviant, un-Islamic and, on an invented association, communist. The persecution included banning bissu practice, destroying spiritually significant objects, forcing bissu into male roles and executing many of them.

The count is now very small. By 2019 the population of Pangkep Regency had fallen to six bissu, of whom five still performed priestly roles, according to Dasriana, a cultural officer employed by the regency, who put the number a few years earlier at around forty. Bissu have mostly survived by farming and by serving as maids of honour at weddings. Lathief, who began working to revive the tradition in the 1990s, describes an internal decline as well as an external one, with no adequate figure left to lead. Davies reads the fall as a straightforward consequence of the surrounding climate: fewer people wish to become bissu as Indonesia grows less supportive of any account of gender beyond two, and her prescription is government policy protecting people of different genders.

Which genders the Bugis system names

The five terms are usually introduced in English through loose comparisons, and the comparisons are the part to hold lightly. Wikipedia offers them and states in the same breath that the classification of calabai, calalai and bissu as third genders is disputed, because all three are as much occupational and spiritual callings as they are gender categories.

Calabai, meaning false woman, dress in a distinctly feminine way that does not match what other women wear, and the style has absorbed Islamic and Christian influences alongside Bugis ones. The customary work is wedding planning and hairdressing, and Davies describes a village wedding of a thousand guests at which the calabai handles the tent, the decoration, the bridal chairs, the gowns, the costumes for a wedding party of twenty-five, the make-up and all the food. Calabai live as women without generally thinking of themselves as female or wishing to be; feminisation surgery is uncommon, partly because male genitalia is not held to contradict the identity and partly because of cost and access. The identity is understood as unavoidable, permanent and given by God, which supports tolerance while implying a lack of agency. Some enter unofficial marriages, kahwin di bawah tangan, marriage below the hand, and take the role of a wife in a household.

Calalai take men's roles, hold masculine jobs and often live with female partners and adopt children. Their dress signals the category rather than imitating it: an earring in the right ear only, against the left for oroané and both for makkunrai. They are expected to hold a mix of virtues read as feminine and masculine, devotion and bravery among them. They are fewer than calabai and meet more discrimination, since forgoing motherhood and marriage is judged harder, and much of their work is agricultural and out of public view, which feeds a stereotype of laziness. Many who can pass as men keep their sex to themselves. In the 1990s some calalai described themselves with the English words tomboys, lesbians and hunters, the last for hunting the dream of being accepted. In daily life bissu, calabai and calalai may all enter the dwellings and villages of both men and women.

What the revival has changed

Since the fall of the New Order there have been attempts to revive bissu practice, and much of it has merged with Islamic tradition: bissu now give blessings to hajj pilgrims and undertake the pilgrimage themselves. The revival has also turned the practice into a tourist attraction, which reduces it to entertainment and detaches it from the beliefs it rests on. Bissu are treated with more respect while visibly performing spiritual work and held to stricter male and female expectations when not.

The boundaries are blurring in both directions. Bissu increasingly take work associated with Waria, bridal make-up among it, and within Bugis society the bissu role is being conflated with calalai and calabai, who now substitute for bissu in some rituals because too few bissu remain. Calabai already carry less of the spiritual weight and are accorded less respect for it, so the substitution changes what the ritual is understood to be.

Petsy Jessy Ismoyo, writing in the journal Paradigma in December 2020, puts the loss in spatial terms borrowed from Edward Soja: the bissu have gone from what a community conceives and what it lives, leaving them only what it perceives, and the narrow space that remains has restricted the development of the hybrid identity the office depends on. The intervention proposed is the revival of the Bugis values malempu and malebbi, as a way of returning agency to bissu rather than protection to a category. The distinction from Intersex people in general, and from anybody filed under Third gender, is being lost at the same time, and the reporting does not help: the Australian coverage that carried Dasriana's count called them intersex priests in its headline, which names the starting condition and drops the office.