Sistergirl

The two words are not interchangeable with the English terms that sit near them, and they are not national. TransHub's own note says how the words are used differs between locations, countries and nations, that the terms may complement an identity rather than define it, and that sistergirls and brotherboys might be non-binary, female or male. In broader communities sistagirl and brothaboy are terms of endearment for women and men with no reference to gender diversity at all.

Where the word sistergirl comes from

The construction is transparent, sister plus girl, and the English form of address is older than the Australian sense; Wiktionary records it in African American use with quotations from 2003 and 2004. For the Aboriginal sense the earliest dated quotation Wiktionary collects is from The Bulletin in 2004, describing older sistergirls feeling a responsibility to look after the younger ones. The word was in use well before that. TransHub dates the Anwernekenhe conference to the first week of November 1994, at Hamilton Downs seventy-five kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, where sixty-six gay First Nations men and sistergirls met in what is believed to have been the first forum of its kind anywhere.

Anwernekenhe means us mob in Arrernte. The recommendations the conference made to AIDS councils and to health services are still cited, and the naming pattern has continued: the 2016 gathering on Wurundjeri country in Victoria was called Kunghah, meaning gathering in Ngarigo, and brought about eighty-five transgender and gender-diverse Indigenous people together from as far as north Queensland and the Tiwi Islands.

What the words carry that trans does not

Spirit and role are what the definitions turn on, and both are stated in terms of community rather than of the self. A sistergirl, in the Tekwabi Giz definition, takes on female roles including looking after children and family, and many live a traditional lifestyle with strong cultural backgrounds. Brie, quoted by TransHub, describes an older arrangement in which a sistergirl was recognised as a girl and went with the women for dancing and ceremony. Kellum, a brotherboy, describes knowing he had a boy spirit before understanding the word transgender at all.

That is why the mapping onto Transgender is partial rather than wrong. Jo, from the remote community of Ngukurr in south-east Arnhem Land, told the ABC in 2023 that at its simplest sistergirl is another way of saying trans woman, and also that there have always been people like her. Both statements are in the same interview and neither cancels the other.

Why ceremony is where the difficulty falls

The roles that give the words their meaning are the same roles that can exclude. Aboriginal culture is heavily gendered, as the brotherboy Max Lyons put it to the ABC in 2016, into men's business and women's business, and gendered initiation processes have not always been able to accommodate people whose gender expression sits outside the one they were raised in. Jo said plainly that people in her position are not allowed near the ceremony grounds for cultural reasons. The Australian Human Rights Commission's Sexual Orientation Gender Identity and Intersex Rights report of 2015 recorded participants speaking about the tension between keeping cultural ties and family support and living as themselves.

Others describe the opposite trajectory. Crystal Love, a sistergirl from the Tiwi Islands, told the ABC that her community spent twenty-odd years not accepting sistergirls and that this has changed, and that she now practises culture and dances as a woman. Max Lyons said his own goal was to sit down with elders and work out how to connect with men's culture after transitioning.

How thin the research record is

Stephen Kerry's Sistergirls/Brotherboys: The Status of Indigenous Transgender Australians, published in the International Journal of Transgenderism in 2015, is the standard citation, and it is a discourse analysis of six research projects and six conferences held between 1994 and 2012 rather than a study of a population. Kerry's finding is that Indigenous transgender Australians face racism inside queer communities and wider Australian ones, and transphobia inside traditional communities, and that these coalesced around terms unique to those communities, sistergirl and brotherboy among them.

There is no census count and, as the ABC reported in 2023, no reliable data on suicide among Indigenous LGBTIQA+ people, although the separate figures for Aboriginal Australians and for LGBTI populations are both high. Andrew Farrell, a queer Wodi Wodi descendant from the Jerrinja Aboriginal community who lectures in Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, describes the effect of the gap: services meant to close the gap for Indigenous people render trans and queer communities invisible in their own resources. The largest documented networks are informal, including a Facebook group for sistergirls and brotherboys that had more than 1,600 members by 2016.

What the record says about older roles

Writing from within the community holds that gender diversity beyond a binary was recognised by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups before colonisation, and that several language groups had their own words: Kerry records yimpininni for trans women in the Tiwi Islands. TransHub adds that mission policy forbade removed children from using traditional language, clothing and custom, which is where much of that vocabulary went. What survives in general use is a pair of English compounds made inside the communities themselves, which is a different thing from a Third gender category with an unbroken ceremonial function, and the sources do not claim otherwise.