Bissu

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. The compound bunga bissu, bissu flower, is the ordinary Makasar word for a hibiscus.

Nothing consulted here dates the first use of the word. Sharyn Graham Davies, who studied Bugis gender for her doctorate, puts the arrangement of five genders at at least six centuries old, and notes that travellers recorded the diversity before Islam reached Indonesia in the early 1500s; most Bugis converted from animism in the early seventeenth century.

Nobody has dated the word. The role is attested by travellers before Islam reached South Sulawesi and Davies puts the system at at least six centuries, but 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. 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 were 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. They also officiated at weddings and at childbirth, and blessed harvests.

The office had 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 was 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 to hold Islam off, while contributing to a climate hostile to anything it read as 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, and in the 1950s the rebel group of Kahar Muzakkar targeted bissu directly. Under the New Order they were marked as deviant, un-Islamic and, on an invented association, communist. The persecution included banning bissu practice, destroying sacred 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.

How calabai and calalai differ

Calabai are assigned male at birth and take the role of heterosexual women, the word meaning false woman. Their dress is distinctly feminine without matching what other women wear, and 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 in 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; 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.

Calalai are assigned female and take men's roles, holding masculine jobs and often living with female partners and adopting 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 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. In the 1990s some calalai described themselves with the English words tomboys, lesbians and hunters, the last for hunting the dream of being accepted.

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 Transgender 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. Petsy Jessy Ismoyo, writing in 2020, argues that the narrow space left to bissu has restricted the development of the hybrid identity the office depends on. The distinction from Intersex people in general, and from anybody filed under Third gender, is being lost at the same time, which is the ordinary fate of a category described from outside more often than it is practised.