Learning from the Teduray: Transgender women are real women

by Sass Rogando Sasot

 

“IN the mid-1960s, as part of a doctoral program in anthropology at the University of Chicago, I spent almost two years doing field research among the Teduray people in a southern Philippine rainforest — and I was totally astonished by their understanding of the world and how to live in it,” wrote American anthropologist Stuart Schlegel in an essay in 2015 titled “On Growing Up a Boy in America.” Schlegel sent that to me when he and I got in touch in 2015. He wrote his reflections on the Teduray way of living in Wisdom From a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist, published in 1998. One of the encounters he reflected on was the one he had with Ukà.

 

According to Schlegel, Ukà of Lange-Lange, which was several mountain crests away from Figel in Upi, Maguindanao, was considered the “best of all” among Teduray’s togo belotokan (bamboo zither) players. One night she was invited to play for Schlegel.

 

While Ukà was performing, Schlegel asked the man beside him whether Ukà was married. He became curious as her name “didn’t indicate any children,” Schlegel explained.

 

She’s not married, the man told Schlegel, because she couldn’t have children as “she is a mentefuwaley libun.”

 

It was the first time Schlegel encountered the term. And as he understood Teduray language, that meant “one-who-became-a-woman.” “Mentefuwaley” is the Teduray word for transformation.

 

“So, she is really a man?” Schlegel asked.

The Teduray man beside him said “No,” and described Ukà as a “tentu” woman. As Schlegel stressed in his book, in Teduray, tentu means “real” or “actual.”

 

Schlegel then inquired whether Ukà was born a boy. The Teduray man confirmed. The presence of a penis made Schlegel say that Ukà “is really a man, just dressed like a woman!”

 

The Teduray man was puzzled by Schlegel, who insisted that if Ukà had a penis then she must be really a man. Despite acknowledging that Ukà had a penis, the Teduray man just went on affirming the womanhood of Ukà: “She is really a woman! She is one-who-became-a-woman.”

 

It’s worth noting that this happened in the mid-1960s. The LGBT liberation movement was yet to kick off in 1969 after the Stonewall uprising in New York. The word “transgender” wasn’t even coined at the time. And the German-American endocrinologist and sexologist Dr. Harry Benjamin just published in 1966 The Transsexual Phenomenon, the pioneering book that widened the medical community’s understanding of transsexualism, the condition of being born with genitalia associated with male or female but being convinced that you really are the other sex.

 

“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 told me in a Facebook message.

 

Mentefuwaley libun is not about a “man” becoming a woman but the ungendered “one” becoming a woman: “one-who-became-a-woman.” This is the same with mentefuwaley lagey: “one-who-became-a-man.” Replacing the word “one” with man or woman is wrong. Schlegel confirmed this to me in a Facebook message: “There was never any question in my mind that mentefuwaley meant anything but ONE who becomes something or another.”

The gender of “mentefuwaley libun” is “libun,” which is babae in Tagalog and female in English.

 

Mentefuwaley only serves as a description of how Ukà’s womanhood came to be. She unfolded into a woman. Mentefuwaley simply refers to the path to being a man or a woman that the Teduray people recognize and respect and consider as valid and legitimate.

 

The Teduray people didn’t consider Ukà’s womanhood as fake. Thus, when Schlegel, who was operating within the gender system of his culture, asked “Oh, she is really a man?” The Teduray man he was talking to told him, “No, she is a tentu (real/actual) 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.

 

“It was never an issue until the settlers came — settlers to mean Christians. I honestly found that very amazing and liberating,” Aveen Acuña-Gulo, former manager of IPDEV, an EU-funded project for indigenous peoples in the ARMM in Mindanao, told me.

 

However, though Schlegel believes that these women have sexual partners, marriage isn’t necessary for them.

 

“I’m quite sure those individuals had sexual partners. The only difference was that they didn’t marry. Marriage was an economic unit for raising children, so there was no need for that among couples who weren’t going to have children,” Schlegel said in an interview at the University of California, Santa Cruz in November 1998.

 

The Teduray people are an inspiration. They’ve been respecting the right to determine your own gender long before the birth of the trans movement in the Philippines, long before the advent of gender recognition laws, which Spain, the country that destroyed our once gender-affirming culture, passed in 2006. The right to determine your gender identity is deeply rooted in the culture of our people. And the culture of the Teduray people serves as our light in reclaiming it.