Sistergirl

What sistergirl covers and what it does not

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 not specifically define who someone is but might complement an identity, and that sistergirls and brotherboys might be non-binary, female or male. That last clause rules out reading sistergirl as a straight synonym for trans woman while leaving room for a person to be both.

The near-homophones are a separate trap. In broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities sistagirl and brothaboy are used as terms of endearment, for women and men respectively, with no reference to gender diversity at all, which means almost the same string of sounds can be a gender term in one conversation and an ordinary form of address in the next.

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 that general sense, an informal term of address for a female, with a 2003 quotation from the novelist Shonell Bacon and a 2004 one from Janette McCarthy Louard's Portrait of Deception. For the Aboriginal sense, which Wiktionary glosses as a member of a traditional gender role in Australian Aboriginal cultures resembling trans women, the earliest dated quotation it collects is from The Bulletin in 2004, on older sistergirls feeling a real strong sense, a real responsibility, to look after the little sistergirls because they know they have a hard time ahead.

The word was in use well before print caught it. TransHub dates the Anwernekenhe conference to Hamilton Downs, seventy-five kilometres north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, from Sunday 31 October to Friday 4 November 1994, where sixty-six gay First Nations men and sistergirls met in what is believed to have been the first forum of its kind held anywhere in the world. Anwernekenhe means us mob in Arrernte, and TransHub's account is that the recommendations the conference made for AIDS councils and health services working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still relevant.

The naming pattern continued. The 2016 gathering on Wurundjeri country in Victoria, arranged by the Victorian Government, was called Kunghah, meaning gathering in Ngarigo, and brought about eighty-five transgender and gender-diverse Indigenous people together from as far away as north Queensland and the Tiwi Islands. Both events took their names from an Aboriginal language, which is the reverse of what happened to sistergirl and brotherboy themselves.

What sistergirl carries that trans woman does not

Spirit and role are what the definitions turn on. A sistergirl, in the Tekwabi Giz wording, takes on female roles within the community including looking after children and family. Brie, a sistergirl quoted by TransHub, describes an older arrangement in which people would automatically see that sistergirl and know she was a girl, so she would go with the women and do women's dancing and ceremony. Kellum, a brotherboy, says he knew he had a boy spirit inside although he did not fully understand the term transgender. Neither statement is about an inner sense held in isolation; both are about what a community recognised and where a person stood in it.

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 she had known she was a sistergirl since she was about seven or eight, that at its most simple it is another way of saying a trans woman, and that there have always been people like her. All three statements sit in the same interview and none of them cancels the others.

The scholarship draws the same line. Work citing Kerry describes brotherboy as naming those who have masculine spirits, perform male roles and engage in men's business, and sistergirl those with feminine spirits, female roles and women's business, with cultural nuances that are not limited by Westernised constructs of trans identities, experiences and expressions. Men's business and women's business are the load-bearing phrase there, and the English vocabulary the words usually get translated into has nothing corresponding to it.

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 very gender-orientated, as the brotherboy Max Lyons put it to the ABC in 2016: there is men's business and there is women's business. Gendered cultural initiation processes have not always been able to accommodate a person's gender expression, and 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, conducted in 2015, recorded participants speaking candidly about tensions between maintaining important cultural ties and family support.

Exclusion is not only ceremonial. Zac, a brotherboy whose family is from the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland, told the ABC that his elders told him he was not welcome and had to go when he came out as transgender, which is why he has spent most of his life in New South Wales, and that he found other brotherboys who took him in.

Others describe the opposite movement. Crystal Love, a sistergirl from the Tiwi Islands, told the ABC that her people did not accept sistergirls for twenty-odd years and have since changed and evolved, and that she now practises culture as a woman and dances as a transgender woman. Max Lyons, then twenty-six and working in home care in Wagga Wagga, said one of his major goals was to sit down and consult with elders about practising Aboriginal culture as a man after transitioning.

How thin the research record on sistergirls is

Stephen Kerry's Sistergirls/Brotherboys: The Status of Indigenous Transgender Australians is the standard citation, and it is a discourse analysis of six research projects and six conferences and forums held between 1994 and 2012 rather than a study of a population. Its argument is that Indigenous transgender Australians face racism within wider Australian communities, queer communities included, and transphobia within traditional communities, and that they have coalesced around terms unique to their communities, sistergirl and brotherboy among them. Even the date of the article is unsettled: ResearchGate places it in the International Journal of Transgenderism in March 2015, while TransHub's reference list gives it as 2014.

No count exists. There is no census figure for sistergirls or brotherboys, and the ABC reported in 2023 that empirical research into the broader wellbeing and health outcomes of Indigenous LGBTQIA+ communities remains scarce, with those experiences largely absent from national studies of sexual orientation and gender identity. Andrew Farrell, a queer-identified Wodi Wodi descendant from the Jerrinja Aboriginal community on the South Coast of New South Wales who lectures in Indigenous studies at Macquarie University, describes the consequence: the services that stand to close the gap for Indigenous people render trans and queer communities invisible in those services and in their resources.

What is documented instead is attendance. Sixty-six people at Anwernekenhe in 1994, about eighty-five at Kunghah in 2016, and a Sistergirls and Brotherboys Facebook group with more than 1,600 members by 2016 are the figures the sources carry, and every one of them counts a gathering or a membership rather than a population. The ABC noted in 2016 that there is no concrete data on suicide rates among LGBTI Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, while separate statistics show high rates among Aboriginal Australians and higher rates among the LGBTI population than the broader one.

Which older words the record still preserves

Scholarship cited alongside Kerry holds that gender diversity beyond the female and male binary was recognised by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups prior to colonisation, and that several language groups had their own terms for it: Kerry records yimpininni for trans women living in the Tiwi Islands of the Northern Territory. Missions established under assimilation policy forbade Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who had been forcibly removed from using traditional language, clothing and customs, and that is where much of the older vocabulary went.

What survives in general use is a pair of English compounds made inside the communities themselves. That is a different thing from a Third gender category with an unbroken ceremonial function, and the sources do not claim otherwise. TransHub states its own limits in the same spirit, noting that its page speaks mostly about Gadigal country, the land where the service was developed, and that a national version awaits a process of collaboration and deep listening with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.