Indonesia’s transgender madrasa
It’s 11pm, and in moon-lit back-street Yogyakarta, I’m marching along with Eva and Juli. They’re dressed to the nines, tottering and tripping over the cobbles on their high heels, and they’re definitely strutting. Eva is 52 and Juli, drawing hard on a strong kretek clove cigarette, is 55. They’re off to work.
It’s 11pm, and in moon-lit back-street Yogyakarta, I’m marching along with Eva and Juli. They’re dressed to the nines, tottering and tripping over the cobbles on their high heels, and they’re definitely strutting. Eva is 52 and Juli, drawing hard on a strong kretek clove cigarette, is 55. They’re off to work.
Saturday 13 Feb 2016
This central Javanese city is tolerant of its transgender subculture. It’s nothing new. In fact, it goes back centuries, even pre-dating the arrival of Islam. Elsewhere in this country of 210 million Muslims, waria run the gauntlet of Islamist condemnation. Not here.
This central Javanese city is tolerant of its transgender subculture. It’s nothing new. In fact, it goes back centuries, even pre-dating the arrival of Islam. Elsewhere in this country of 210 million Muslims, waria run the gauntlet of Islamist condemnation. Not here.
Transgender women are known as “waria” — the Indonesian term for someone born as a man and living as a woman, and it’s not derogatory. The word is a compound of “wanita” — or woman — and “pria” — or man.
Noor Aya dances to popular dangdut folk music; there were at least six other Waria doing the same thing elsewhere in the market.
In the alley, groups of women passing in the other direction look at Eva and Juli first, then at me. They’re mostly po-faced. If they disapprove, they don’t give it away. Men just smirk at me. God knows what they’re thinking.
God has been the big theme tonight. Eva and Juli have just finished their Koranic studies and prayers in the world’s one and only transgender-madrasa, set up by waria for waria, so they can have somewhere to study and pray. Tolerant though they are, local mosques don’t want them. Yogyakarta’s top imam told me: “In Islam, it’s prohibited.”
Noor Aya dances to popular dangdut folk music; there were at least six other Waria doing the same thing elsewhere in the market.
In the alley, groups of women passing in the other direction look at Eva and Juli first, then at me. They’re mostly po-faced. If they disapprove, they don’t give it away. Men just smirk at me. God knows what they’re thinking.
God has been the big theme tonight. Eva and Juli have just finished their Koranic studies and prayers in the world’s one and only transgender-madrasa, set up by waria for waria, so they can have somewhere to study and pray. Tolerant though they are, local mosques don’t want them. Yogyakarta’s top imam told me: “In Islam, it’s prohibited.”
