Waria

Where waria was coined

The making of the word is unusually well documented for a gender term. Officials wanted something more respectful than banci, which many waria find offensive and which can in any case mean an effeminate man, a different thing. A minister named Alamsyah built waria out of the two halves of the binary, with the support of President Suharto, and it appeared in print for the first time in the newspaper Kompas on 7 June 1978.

That is a coinage with a state behind it, which is rare in this vocabulary and shows in the shape of the word. It names no role, no temperament and no spiritual office. It fuses the two official categories and leaves the fusion unexplained.

Two earlier attempts survive in the record, alongside the local vocabulary they competed with.

Most waria today prefer waria on the grounds that it sounds more polite, while treating the whole set as naming the same thing. As one put it to the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, they are only terms.

What came before the word

The category is older than its name, and the archipelago's record of people outside the two categories runs deeper still. The bissu of South Sulawesi appear in the La Galigo, a body of Bugis manuscripts parts of which may date to the 1300s, standing in front of armies and guarding sacred objects for the royal court. The Portuguese merchant Antonio de Paiva, who reached Sulawesi in 1544 trying to convert its rulers, left letters describing bissu advising kings on when to go to war, and blamed them for the local king's choice of Islam over Christianity. It is the earliest written account in this material of anyone in Indonesia holding a position between the two categories, and its author is a hostile witness.

Waria as such are recorded from the early 1800s, in accounts of effeminate men working in markets, performing and sometimes selling sex. By the 1830s there were dances in Batavia, now Jakarta, at which young men dressed as women, and a Dutch writer used banci in print in 1855. Newspaper accounts from the late 1800s name districts where transgender women gathered.

The shape of daily life changed later. Before the 1960s most waria wore women's clothing only for performances or at night; between the 1960s and 1980s full-time dress became common, and salon work spread at the same time, until doing hair and make-up for brides is now the first thing many Indonesians associate with the word.

How waria earn a living

Work sorts into three kinds. A waria who owns her salon can become wealthy; one who works in somebody else's makes a modest living; some do sex work. Weddings supply a second income, where waria act as indo' boting, wedding mothers, organising the ceremony and doing the bride's hair and make-up. During the economic crisis of 1997 and 1998 the salons stayed open when other businesses failed, which produced the remark, recorded by Boellstorff, that salons beat the banks.

Standing is pursued through prestasi, achievement and usefulness, and through performance. Beauty pageants and lip-synced singing contests are a substantial part of waria culture, and an organiser at a contest in Makassar told the crowd that acceptance had come through good works, and that the country's heroes were not men and women alone but waria too. The Miss Waria Indonesia pageant, run by the Yayasan Putri Waria Indonesia and founded by the former beauty queen Megie Megawatie, takes a finalist from each province and requires its holder to sign a contract forbidding sex work for the duration of the title. Megawatie's stated purpose is to break the stereotype twice, for the public and inside the waria community itself.

Yulianus Rettoblaut, known as Mama Yuli, grew up in a village in Papua, moved to Jakarta at eighteen, and is the first waria to hold a master's degree in law. She founded Indonesia's first care home for elderly transgender people disowned by their families, and she runs the pageant, held in secret in recent years after raids by vigilantes. The BBC reporter she recruited as a judge in 2017 found a panel that included a waria from Sulawesi in a white robe and prayer hat, revered at home as a prayer leader.

Why scholars disagree about waria

Whether waria constitute a third gender is genuinely disputed. Boellstorff argues that they do not, and describes the category instead as male femininity. His evidence is administrative: a public park in Surabaya has two toilets, and the men's is signed pria/waria, with no third door; some East Java identity cards carried the designation male, in brackets waria. He also records waria telling him that they were born men, will be buried as men, and will make the pilgrimage dressed as men.

Other researchers record the opposite. Many waria describe themselves as women, take hormones, have silicone injected and in some cases have surgery, and ask to be called by women's names. Shuniyya Ruhama Habiiballah has objected publicly to the activist Dede Oetomo's definition of waria as men who imitate women while keeping a masculine identity, on the grounds that a substantial part of the community would reject it, and has pointed out that waria who identify closely as female become invisible in exactly the accounts that describe the community. Her further objection is to the stereotype: many waria are middle class and well educated, and work as designers, psychologists and sociologists rather than in salons or on the street.

She also concedes the constraint, which is documentary. An identity card may read female while a birth certificate and academic transcript read male, and no procedure exists to change them, so formal employment closes off in practice whatever the law says.

Bharti Sharma and Devika Naithani, writing in History and Sociology of South Asia in 2025, set waria beside the Hijra of India and the Bakla of the Philippines and argue that all three were shaped by a shared colonial insistence on two categories, and then by legal recognition arriving without social inclusion. Their conclusion is that a legally driven remedy does not by itself reach the structures underneath.

Bissu complicate the boundary from the other direction. A troupe performed at the Miss Waria Indonesia pageant in 2006, which as Irfan Kortschak noted requires a very flexible reading of the word: Sharyn Graham had written in 2001 that Bissu do not cross-dress, wear their own distinctive clothing, do not call themselves women, and describe themselves as a combination of all genders. Neither Third gender nor Transgender settles the case, and the scholarship has not closed it.

How Islam and the role meet

Most waria are Muslim, and the common framing is takdir, God's will, or kodrat, fate: a given. When waria discuss sin, they tend to name behaviours such as sex work or having many partners rather than being waria. Some have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a few of them dressed as women and praying with women, and one told Boellstorff of nine pilgrimages, always as a woman.

The institution built on that was the Pondok Pesantren Waria Al-Fatah, an Islamic boarding school founded in Yogyakarta in 2008 by Shinta Ratri, the only place in Indonesia where waria could study Islam together and live openly. It closed in 2016.

Why the mood changed in Indonesia

Waria had lived through both tolerance and violence before. In the 1950s the rebel group of Kahar Muzakkar targeted waria and bissu in South Sulawesi, and during the mass killings that began in 1965 waria were treated as a threat to national security. Under the New Order, from 1967 to 1998, they appeared on television sitcoms, worked in salons and were permitted official organisations, and in 1972 the mayor of Jakarta said publicly that waria were citizens like anyone else. Local law moved the other way before the national mood did: South Sumatra classified anal sex between men as immoral and illegal in 2002, Palembang followed in 2004 with a law tying homosexuality to prostitution, a national anti-pornography law passed in 2008, and Aceh, which operates under Sharia law, passed the Qanun Jinayat in 2015.

The position hardened from 2016. In January the research and higher education minister said he wanted LGBT student organisations banned from campuses, and the defence minister called the movement a proxy war and a threat to national security. In February the broadcasting commission banned television and radio content relating to LGBT people, the psychiatrists' association described transgender people as having mental disorders, and Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Muslim organisation, called for criminalisation and rehabilitation. The Yogyakarta school closed that month. President Joko Widodo said in October that LGBT people should be protected from violence while Indonesian beliefs did not support them.

One consequence of an earlier decade cuts across all of it. Health researchers have studied waria since the 1980s, mostly in connection with HIV, and classification as a key population has brought funding, services and a reason to organise as well as scrutiny. The organisations continue. The Forum Komunikasi Waria Indonesia houses older waria with nowhere to live and runs job training, and Perwaris in Semarang works on identity cards that match how members live, without which police contact, employment and housing all become harder.