The Teduray on the Philippines and the “one who became a woman”
I was alerted about an interesting article by on transgender concepts in the Philippines by Sass Rogando Sasot.
She points to the conversation between some Teduray people and Stuart Schlegel, a cultural anthropologist and specialist on the Philippines, Indonesia and California. Below is an excerpt from Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist (1998), Schlegel’s reflections on what he learned from living with the Teduray people in the 60’s.
One evening as Ukà was playing I asked the man next to me if she was married, because she had come to Figel accompanied by her brother, and her name didn’t indicate any children.
He replied, “Oh no, Mo-Lini, she can’t be married. How could she have children? She is a mentefuwaley libun.”
I had never heard that term before, but it was perfectly clear Teduray and meant “one-who-became-a-woman.”
I said, “Oh, so she is really a man?”
“No,” he said, “she is a genuine woman!” His word for “genuine” was tentu, which means “real” or “actual.”
But if she were really a woman, what did it mean that she became a woman? I was confused. (Remember that this whole conversation was in Teduray and therefore was without pronouns like “he” or “she,” “him” or “her.”)
I asked my companion, “Well, then, when she was born was she a boy or a girl?”
When he replied, I detected a slight in incredulity that I could be so dense concerning a perfectly clear situation. “She was born a boy, Mo-Lini. Don’t you remember? I just said that she is one-who-became-a-woman!”
“So then, cousin,”–I, the dense stranger in his world, forged bravely on–“she is really a man, just dressed like a woman!”
My friend’s disbelief at my inability to see what was right before my eyes seemed to go up a notch, edging toward a puzzlement equal to my own. He said, “Can’t you understand? She is really a woman! She is one-who-became-a-woman.”
So I played my trump card, sure it would clear up all this silliness: “Well, does she have a penis?”
“Yes, of course she has a penis,” he said. “She is one-who-became-a-woman.”
Finally I stopped quizzing him. In my world what identifies a man as “really” a male and a woman as “really” a female are their genitals, but evidently this was not so for the Teduray. In the months following this revelation, I asked several people about this phenomenon. I learned that in their view of things, what made you really a certain gender was the social role you played: how you dressed, how you wore your hair, what you did all day, how you were addressed by people, what gender you thought of yourself as being. And as far as Teduray were concerned, you could be whichever one you pleased.
I later met a man who had been born a girl but who had chosen to be male and had lived a long life as a man. Most boys grew up wanting to be men and most girls grew up wanting to be women, but if anyone didn’t and wanted to switch, nobody cared a whit. He or she was not thought of as strange or eccentric and, except that marriage was considered inappropriate, was treated just like everyone else.
Seeing my interest and opacity with regard to these people who changed gender, someone asked me, “Mo-Lini, don’t you have ones-who-became-women and ones-who-became-men in America?”
“Well,” I said, “we have women and men who wear the other’s clothing, and we have men and women who would like to be the other gender.”
“So, you see,” he said, “it’s just the same with you.”
“No,” I had to reply. “Many Americans give such people a bad time. They despise them and consider them bad people.”
“Just because they want to be a different gender?” he asked, amazement on his face. And his next question still rings in my ears: “Why is that? Why are you people so cruel?”.
“I wish I had even a glimmer of what we realize today about trans folks when I was in Figel, but in the 1960s I simply had no idea about any such things,” Schlegel later told Sasot in a Facebook message.
As Saso points out, Mentefuwaley libun is not about a “man” becoming a woman but the ungendered “one” becoming a woman: “one-who-became-woman.”
Ukà’s penis isn’t relevant to the Teduray people in determining her gender. She is a real woman even if she has one because she unfolded into being a woman.
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