4 - Transgender citizenship and public gender in Indonesia

Summary

Debates about the place of transgender, gay and lesbian people are a prominent feature of Indonesian political life in the reformasi period. Over the past ten years, same-sex sexuality and gender nonconformity have come to be articulated more explicitly as incompatible with national values. Although initially not the primary targets of the politically motivated violence aimed at gay men following the end of the New Order in 1998 (see Boellstorff 2004), transgender Indonesians have increasingly faced exclusion on the national stage (Wijaya 2019). This is something of a shift, particularly for one transgender population known as warias, who have been a visible and widely acknowledged part of Indonesian society since the late 1960s. While the acceptance of warias cannot be overstated, during the New Order they were able to obtain recognition in proximity to international norms of feminine beauty, as reflected in their established reputation as skilled salon workers and performers. While not every waria is a beauty expert, of course, these fields of work emerged as historically important for claiming acceptance on the national stage. The politically motivated efforts to tie warias to a putatively foreign ‘LGBT’ imaginary during the reformasi period marked a disconcerting shift. Nevertheless, for warias, being seen and valued by others remains an important avenue for achieving official forms of recognition.

Much of the discussion about growing hostility towards LGBT Indonesians has approached these transformations as a problem related to shifting currents of sexual morality at the national level. Often, analyses centre the role played by the consolidation and extension of Islamic norms and morality relative to national identity (Wijaya and Davies 2019: 160). This is certainly one part of the picture. Yet what this focus on morality conceals is the fact that warias have long been addressed in terms of the regulation of public order at the scale of the city and district. Indeed, the initial impetus for the creation and recognition of the term waria, as I describe at length elsewhere (Hegarty 2021), was the desire among city officials in Jakarta to solve the problem of gender nonconformity on city streets. Warias have long chafed against state projects that deploy gender as a component of public order, and have had to negotiate this patchwork of regulations accordingly.