- Joined
- Feb 15, 2019
Informative post.There's Albanian sworn virgins and Bacha posh in Afghanstan/Pakistan. In both cases you have extremely patriarchal societies which don't allow women to do anything without a male relative. These "third genders" exist solely so that families without sons can still interact with the rest of the world, keep land in the family etc. Not exactly what people are looking for. And in the case of bacha posh, they are usually "detransitioned" at puberty so that they can be married off.
The Bugis of Indonesia allegedly had an FTM gender but all the information about them in English is pozzed. I'll have to check Indonesian sources to get more information on them. My guess is they existed but was nowhere near as progressive as westerners make them out to be. Indonesian stereotypes of Bugis are "hot headed, assholes and fanatically islamic" which doesn't jive with their enlightened gender folx image presented in the west.
e: So I looked a bit more into the Bugis.
First of all, my searches in Indonesian didn't yield very much, most of them referred back to English sources if they had any discussion on Bugis genders at all. This is especially true when discussing the FTM gender, calalai (literally "false men"). The impression that I'm getting is that it isn't so much a third gender (or 5th as it may be) but just a word that means "butch lesbian" and that literally no one treats them as anything other than weird women (they have no special role in Bugis society for instance and usually aren't strong enough to work men's jobs).
Anyway, the phd thesis/book that seems to have started the trend of westerns tries to present the Bugis as less based than they actually are. This quote near the beginning really sells it:
All that "s/he" nonsense is the author trying to force a western gender view onto the bugis. The actual conversation either used a gender neutral pronoun (neither Buginese nor Indonesian have gendered pronouns) or used "she" in English. And based Bugis woman not validating the FTM's supposed gender at all.
Other fun quotes:
Really makes you
Based anti-agp Bugis.
Finally this bit from the glossary
There's also an anecdote about an MTF tranny being an asshole to FTMs, declaring them sinful and not real. Isn't it great that trannies everywhere are exactly the same?
I also found a couple of things which basically said "Calalai don't transition, they're just women wearing men's clothes" but I unfortunately couldn't find the source to that claim
The five genders of these enlightened Bugi folx are supposedly: male, female, MTF (calabai), FTM (calalai which you wrote about), and nonbinary (bissu).
I spent some time looking into the Bissu gender of the Bugis and posted about it here. I'm going to quote my previous post:
The citations in the Wikipedia page about the amazing progressive Bissu gender are mostly post-2015 articles from authors eager to apply modern troon ideology to an obscure Indonesian culture. Bugis society is not some tranny Garden of Eden where gender transcends the binary. Bissus are men occupying an exalted role in society (priests). Their ceremonial clothing looks feminine, and they claim to embody the sacred feminine to make themselves seem more mystical, but it's just men.