Kathy Huang
Documentary filmmaker and freelance cinematographer and producer
Tales of the Waria: Inside Indonesia's Third-Gender Community
Posted: 05/26/2012 1:40 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-huang/tales-of-the-waria-indonesia_b_1546629.htmlThis past March the Associated Press broke an unexpected story concerning Barack Obama's childhood in Indonesia. Apparently, as a young boy growing up in Jakarta, Obama's care had been entrusted to a transgender woman named Evie. American readers were shocked. What were the chances of the president having a transgender nanny -- and in Indonesia, of all places? Having worked closely with the transgender community in Indonesia for the past several years, I can say: actually, not that bad.
In Indonesia biological men who believe that they are born with the souls of women are known as "warias." The term is a melding of two Indonesian words: "wanita" ("woman") and "pria" ("man"). As a group, warias are diverse, encompassing what we in America might call cross-dressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and effeminate gay men. What unites them is an irrepressible feminine spirit.
[,,,]
Three years later my curiosity as a filmmaker got the better of me. I took some Indonesian language classes and traveled to Indonesia to experience the lives of warias firsthand. Under the counsel of Dr. Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist with 20 years of field experience working with the queer community in Indonesia, I landed in Makassar, a coastal city in eastern Indonesia known for both its strong Muslim faith and historic openness toward transgender individuals.
