From The Advocate December-January 2011
Who are the Warias?
In America gays continue to make advances while transgender people fight to keep up, but a new film tells a different tale in Indonesia.
By Neal Broverman
http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Advance/Who_Are_the_Warias/In Kathy Huang's sad and funny documentary, Tales of the Waria, transgender Indonesian women, called warias, eat at cafés, shop at malls, work in salons, and search hungrily for husbands. Many warias do all this while wearing tight clothes and pancake makeup, and few people in the world's most populous Muslim nation bat an eye.
Indonesia has a history of respect for warias (the term is a combination of the Indonesian words for "man" and "woman"). Before Islam arrived in Indonesia hundreds of years ago, cross-dressing attendants catered to royalty's needs, instilling a certain respect for warias that still exists today but is little known outside the nation.
