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.

Two earlier attempts survive in the record: wadam, from wanita and Adam, and walsu, from wanita palsu, false woman. Most waria today prefer waria on the grounds that it sounds more polite, while treating the whole set as meaning the same thing. As one put it to the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, they are only terms. Regional vocabulary persists alongside it: calabai in South Sulawesi, false woman in Bugis, and kedi in Java and Bali.

What came before the word

The category is older than its name. Records from the early 1800s describe effeminate men working in markets, performing in entertainment shows 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 particular 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 became common 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; the Miss Waria Indonesia pageant takes a finalist from each province, and its holder signs a contract forbidding sex work for the duration of the title. Yulianus Rettoblaut, known as Mama Yuli, is the first waria to hold a master's degree in law, founded Indonesia's first care home for elderly transgender people disowned by their families, and runs the pageant, which in recent years has been held in secret after raids by vigilantes.

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. 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 however it stands in law.

How Islam and the role meet

Most waria are Muslim, and the common framing is takdir, God's will, or kodrat, fate: not a choice but 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; in 1972 the mayor of Jakarta said publicly that waria were citizens like anyone else.

The position hardened from 2016. In January the research and higher education minister said he wanted LGBT student organisations banned from campuses; 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 in the same month. President Joko Widodo said in October that LGBT people should be protected from violence while Indonesian beliefs did not support them. Aceh, which operates under Sharia law, had passed the Qanun Jinayat in 2015. Waria organisations continue: the Forum Komunikasi Waria Indonesia houses older waria and runs job training, and Perwaris in Semarang works on identity documents and on the flooding that affects waria neighbourhoods. Whether any of this makes waria a Third gender category or a variety of Transgender experience is the question the scholarship has not closed.