'When I was transgender'

This think piece reflects on the ways in which the category ‘transgender’ is used by waria – Indonesia’s ‘national transvestite’ (Boellstorff 2007) – based on ethnographic data collected from informants aged forty years or older in Yogyakarta and Jakarta. I was struck by how this group used the category ‘transgender’ with reference to a particular time in life that stretched from mid-teens to late twenties, a period marked by national and transnational migration for intensive sex work and other labor. Their use of ‘transgender’ to describe certain times of their lives but not others validates scholarly calls to question the privileging of gender and sexuality in analyses of subjectivity. It also troubles the basis of Western assumptions about aging and its relationship to the self, which presumes an experience of time as an orderly chronological progression. Finally, their use of ‘transgender’ demands closer attention to why the use of categories of gender and sexuality might shift across the life course. My informants’ narratives invite us to consider how people in different locations draw upon globalized categories to make meaning. Greater ethnographic attention towards how categories are drawn upon to produce and reflect subjectivity in diverse ways may produce a reflexive understanding of the relationship between categories and the context of entrenched structural inequalities in which they are used.

Prologue

This prologue describes events that occurred in the lives of Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli in the summer of 1858. The publication in November 1859 of Darwin's groundbreaking Origin of Species, had its catalyst in June 1858. That was when Darwin, fearing that he might lose precedence by continuing to delay publication of his painstaking researches, was galvanised into writing up his findings quickly and having them published in one readable volume. For Dickens, the summer of 1858 was one of horror. Aged forty-six and already the famous author of several successful novels, he lost his head and publicly advertised his separation from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years, while disclaiming rumours of a relationship with either his sister-in-law or an actress aged nineteen. He acted impulsively and brutally, losing friends, dismissing his publishers, causing anguish to his wife and children. As for Disraeli, he became chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby's reforming Tory government.

James Walter McLeod, 2 January 1887 - 11 March 1978

J. W. McLeod was born in Dumbarton on 2 January 1887. His father, John, an architect, belonged to a family whose occupations ranged through law, medicine, the civil service, industry and commerce, conducted mainly in the south of Scotland. John McLeod had built up a successful practice, and at the time of his marriage in 1884 had just completed the new Glasgow synagogue— a surprising commission for a Presbyterian. He was then aged forty-five and his bride, Lilias Symington McClymont, who was twenty-one years his junior, was the daughter of what was then described as a gentleman farmer in Borgue, Kirkcudbrightshire. Less than four years later John died of diabetes, leaving his widow with two sons, Norman and James. Norman was to work for many years on irrigation schemes in India, and later to become a technical adviser to the World Bank. Four months after her husband’s death, Mrs McLeod bore a third son who was named John, after his father. He was to train as a lawyer and to make his career in banking.