The Priests Revered in the Land of Five Genders

The Indonesian dancers, dressed in resplendent red and gold silks, swayed in rhythm to the beating drums and the piercing wail of woodwind instruments. Pointing a dagger to their throats, they jumped, stomped and knelt down.

Then, in the climax of the ritual, they twisted the blades into their necks again and again. A man in the audience recoiled.

But the dancers did not bleed.

This illusion of invincibility reflected the mysticism associated with the dancers. They are the bissus of Sulawesi — a star-shaped Indonesian island — whose lineage goes back more than a millennium. They are considered spiritual leaders and a bridge between the earthly and celestial because they are thought to embody both male and female traits.

They are called on to pray at events like weddings, births and deaths in southern Sulawesi. To earn the blessings of the gods, they participate in a self-stabbing ritual known as the ma’giri, in which they display their powers by emerging unscathed.

One night last November, we were among dozens of people in a crowded red house in the village of Segeri, watching the highlight of a three-day rice-planting ceremony. But the night was also a celebration of gender fluidity.

Born with male sex characteristics and raised as boys, the current group of bissus are feminine in appearance. Their sacred rituals embody both genders: the daggers represented masculinity; the colorful silks femininity.

“Within a bissu, both male and female exist, and that is perfection,” said Kahar Eka, 52, a senior bissu, who wore a distinctly male attire of a peci hat and trousers, a day after donning an elaborate headdress embedded with flowers.

The bissus are revered by the Bugis people, who number around 6.4 million and are the most populous ethnic group in South Sulawesi Province. Renowned for being master seafarers, they hold many beliefs that predate the arrival of Islam in Indonesia, which is now the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. For instance, they believe in five genders. These are:

• Cisgender men and women (cisgender people have gender identities that match their sex assigned at birth)

• Men who exhibit feminine traits

• Women who exhibit masculine traits

• Bissu

Eka, who commonly goes by just one name, remembers feeling effeminate even as a young boy; but that sentiment was rejected by Eka’s father, a conservative Muslim. Growing up in Sulawesi, Eka often looked at the bissus and wondered why they were respected, but the calabai — or men who exhibited feminine traits — were bullied. The calling to be a bissu, Eka said, came in a fever dream.

In Segeri — which is surrounded by expansive rice paddies and wooden houses on stilts the traditional architecture of the Bugis people — and in most parts of Indonesia there are no fights over pronouns, bathrooms or representation. (The Indonesian language has no gendered pronouns.) Some bissus wear the peci and a hijab over it.

Sharyn Davies, an associate professor at Monash University in Australia who has studied the bissus, said when Islam came to Indonesia, it arrived with the idea that “God created you as you are.” By contrast, the early Christian missionaries to Sulawesi told local people that they had to be either men or women, or be killed.

“From the very start, they’ve been able to find a place within Islam,” Ms. Davies said.

Eka is an example of that straddling of genders and religious beliefs. In 2023, Eka completed the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, dressed as a man and accompanied by Eka’s longtime male partner.

“By going on the hajj, I wanted to show the general public that even though we are waria, God still provides for us,” said Eka, using the Indonesian term for transgender, a portmanteau of the words for man and woman.

But the bissus have faced many hardships. After Indonesia became independent in 1945 from Dutch colonialism, they lost their traditional agrarian livelihoods because their lands were taken by the state. In the 1950s, an Islamic armed movement known as “Operation Toba,” or operation repentance, persecuted the bissus in the name of purifying Indonesia.

“They had to choose between living as a real man, or being killed or having their heads shaved,” said Puang Matoa Bissu Ancu, the 61-year-old chief bissu of a region neighboring Segeri.

In the 1960s, they were also swept up during the anti-Communist purge ordered by the dictator Suharto. As recently as the 1990s, it was very difficult to find bissus because they hid; few wanted to be one out of fear and religious pressure, according to Halilintar Lathief, an Indonesian anthropologist who specializes in bissu history.

Today, many bissus worry that they are likely the last generation left.

They know that they live by the whims of politics and religion, especially in a country where Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise.

Job opportunities are few and far between. Like many transgender people in Indonesia, bissus often find that they are limited to being performers, makeup artists or hairdressers.

Last November was the first time ever that all 22 aspiring and official bissus had come together — because they obtained government funding for being an “intangible cultural heritage.” Only four were officially inaugurated, according to Eka.

Ardiansyah Anwar, 25 — who is known as Anca — was training to be inaugurated as a bissu. Under the mentorship of Puang Matoa and Eka, Anca was memorizing the sacred mantras and prayers necessary for ceremonies. Currently, Anca is one of two “Gen Z” bissus, Anca said.

The training includes memorizing the “I La Galigo,” the Bugis creation myth poem that dates to the 14th century and is 300,000 lines long. Then, there’s the Torilangi, or what is known as the language of the heavens. The language does not have its own script, but is passed down orally or written down using the alphabet of the Bugis people. Candidates must also understand Bugis cosmology, learn how to read natural signs to predict the weather, determine planting seasons and calculate auspicious days. And one must be celibate.

While a musical-theater work based on the “I La Galigo” has been staged in New York, as well as in parts of Europe and Asia, the bissus remain relatively obscure even in Indonesia, an ethnically diverse archipelago that sprawls three time zones.

The day after the self-stabbing ritual, the bissus walked for hours through rice paddies, with the villagers carrying the rakala manurung, a sacred plow. The bissus wore white head scarves, similar to the turbans worn by Muslim clerics, and tied them with colorful headbands.

Along the way, happy children and villagers scooped up buckets of water and directed hoses at us. There were crashing cymbals and yelps of joy, symbolizing the villagers’ hopes for rain. About six months later, the region reported a better-than-expected harvest.