Learning from the Teduray: Transgender women are real women
First of 2 parts
SPAIN recently crowned Angela Ponce as their representative to compete in this popular pageant — and it’s raising quite a stir in the Philippines. The main objection: Ttransgender women aren’t genuine women.
In pre- colonial Philippines, transgender women were simply considered women. Period. The
Teduray (Tiruray) people of Mindanao, retained this understanding, as they weren’t really colonized by Spain. Now, Spain has evolved in such a way that their gender under understanding of gender before they colonized us.
work on trans issues in 2001, a time when “transgender” was an lesbian and gay movement, one of the critiques I received was “transgender” was a western concept. As a teenager, I didn’t take it well. But the charming thing about life is our ability to learn and eventually see with much more insightful eyes. I learned to consider this critique as an invitation to ground my advocacy in the vocabulary rooted in the culture of our people.
But I, and a lot of women like me, have an uneasy relationship with the word “bakla,” the word used by Filipinos to refer to both gay men and transgender women. Also, bakla is often used as a slur as a term of endearment, a transgender woman being called bakla entails the invalidation and delegitimization of her womanhood: She is not a “real” woman because she is bakla. In other words, she is “really” a man like the gay men who are also called bakla.
Because one of the goals of our advocacy is for society to recognize and respect that our girlhood and womanhood are as real and valid as the girlhood and womanhood of girls and women who were assigned female at birth, we in the the Philippines (STRAP), decided to coin an identity that would symbolize this advocacy: “transpinay”. It is a combination of trans and Pinay the term in 2008 during the Manila Pride March. The banner we carried boldly declared — Transpinay: The other Filipino woman.
Nonetheless, I still continued my search for affirmative vocabularies rooted in our culture. The lack of gender in our pronouns also led me to reflect further on my development from being a baby assigned male at birth into a young child who never doubted her female identity into a fierce woman. Did I transition? Or did I unfold?
Tagalog is one of the very few languages in the world that don’t have gendered pronouns. He, she and it are just “siya/sya.” Hence, he or she becoming or changing into another pronoun doesn’t have an equivalent in Tagalog. It’s just “sya becomes sya(syaaynagingsya).”
I feel this is a better starting point women like me. I am not a he who became a she. I just unfolded to the outside world the reality contained inside me. Thus, if you are going to “he who becomes a she.” I didn’t transition, I unfolded.
In 2015, I stumbled upon the Facebook page of HAPI — Humanist Alliance Philippines, International. I was intrigued by their May 17 post in celebration of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. It said: “Did you? The Teduray tribe of Maguindanao has a concept of transgender: “mentefuwaleylibun” for “man who became woman” and “mentefuwaleylagey” for “woman who became man.”
HAPI’s translation didn’t fully capture what the term means. In Teduray language, nentefuwaley means “transformation.” There’s no “man” or “lalake” in mentefuwaley libun, and there is no “woman” or “babae” in mentefuwaley lagey. Thus, the translation “man who became woman” and “woman who became man” is analogous to the sensationalizing “he becomes she” and “she becomes a he.” This is a translation that takes the gender and knowledge system of the English language as its guide for translation rather than the gender and knowledge system of the Teduray from which these terms come from.
In the course of my research, I eventually got in touch with Stuart Schlegel, the American anthropologist who lived with the Teduray in me glow. In 1998, Schlegel pub - - tions on what he learned from living with the Teduray people, which