Mapping Discrimination Experienced by Indonesian Trans* FtM Persons

Abstract

This work sought to document how Indonesian trans* FtM persons experienced discrimination across the interlinked domains of social networks, religious and educational institutions, employment and the workplace, and health care institutions. Objectives were (1) to map the discrimination experienced by trans* FtM individuals in Indonesia, and (2) to establish the specific priorities of the Indonesian trans* FtM community. In-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation was used involving 14 respondents. Findings revealed that respondents experienced othering through rejection, misidentification, harassment, “correction,” and bureaucratic discrimination across the five preestablished domains. Health care and a lack of information emerged as areas of particular concern for respondents. This work calls for health care that is sensitive to the needs of trans* FtM people coupled with high-quality information to alleviate the cycles through which discrimination is sustained.

Keywords:

• Discrimination
• Indonesia
• Indonesian trans* FtM movement
• queer identity
• trans* female-to-male

Notes

1. After discussions with the community, the term trans* FtM was adopted, while recognizing that this is imperfect. Some respondents may object to the usage of trans in any terminology. However, this is used merely to highlight the discord between birth-assigned sex (female or intersex, and/or the consequent reduction of an individual’s gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation to this birth sex) and self-assigned sex, gender identity, gender expression, and/or sexual orientation.

2. Arus Pelangi is an Indonesian federation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* people established in 2006 in an effort to improve legal representation, public perception, and understanding of the rights of Indonesian LGBTI people (Arus Pelangi, 2015). Arus Pelangi helped to facilitate the present work.

3. In Indonesia, the term tomboi tends to refer to “female-bodied individuals who lay claim to the social category ‘man,’” where man denotes the “ideologically dominant conception of manhood that circulates through much of Indonesia” (Blackwood, 2009, p. 454). However, as Blackwood (2009) pointed out, “despite articulating a sense of self that they consider to be nearly the same as other men’s, tombois take up different subject positions in different spaces, engaging with and reproducing a version of femininity when they move within family and community spaces” (p. 454).

4. Article 2, Paragraph 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), which the Indonesian government has ratified, states that rights should be “exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political, or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.” It further states that “parties should ensure that a person’s sexual orientation is not a barrier to realizing Covenant rights… [and] gender identity is recognized as among the prohibited grounds of discrimination” (ECOSOC, 2009, para. 32).

5. Efforts during the past three decades for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights to be recognized as human rights culminated in the drafting of the Jogjakarta Principles in 2006 (a universal guide on the core rights of people regarding sexual orientation/gender identity that states were to comply with) and the passing of a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 that was “aimed at combating worldwide discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity” (Steans, 2013, pp. 78–81).

6. Drawing on Lucy Miller’s work (2015), “Cisnormativity refers to the systematic expectation that there are only two mutually exclusive genders and the gender of all members of a society will match the sex assigned to them at birth, with attendant benefits given to those who adhere and the labelling of those who do not, transgender and queer individuals, as deviant” (p. 127).