The New York Times has cottoned on to the unpredictable glories of Indonesia. But they’ve got it just that little bit wrong. Here’s what they have to say about US President Obama’s childhood minder:

“His nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball.”

If Obama’s nanny was playing volleyball on teams like those that now take on the cops behind the Melia hotel, he was not an openly gay man, she was a waria, or transgender. As you can see from the photo above, waria live as women — they even do the whole beauty pageant thing. She probably didn’t carry on an affair with a butcher — it’s more likely she was “married” to him. Indonesia’s attitude to homosexuality in the late sixties was not relaxed, it was unbelieving. Waria, on the other hand, are just a part of society; in some provinces, though not Jakarta, Waria is an accepted gender on the all-important national ID cards. Finally, transvestites don’t hang around the streets singing. They hang around the streets cruising for people who will pay them for sex.

Still, nice to see the Times ticking the “exotic diveristy” box as best it can.

Salaam kepada pembaca di tannah air kita. Kalau seandenya ada di Jakarta hari Minggu ini (Tanggal 3 Oktober), ayo ikut skrining khusus film baru Madame X, di Senayan XXI, Jam 9.30 (blerch!). Di minta 250,000 rupiah; dana akan digunakan untuk mendamping kawan2 waria yang perlu di rawat HIV. Satu di antara setiap tiga waria penjajah seks di Jakarta sudah perlu bantuan; untungnya ada kelompok waria seperti Yayasan Sirkandi Sejati yang kerja secara rajin untuk membantu komunitas tersendiri. They need your help, so please support them. Apalagi, dari trailer, kelihatannya Madame X adalah film yang norak habiiiiiiiiiiiiis, berarti tentu saja lucu dan berhasil. It should be fun!

Their discussion about the rights and wrongs of discrimination in toilets is interesting. But the “where to pee” debate masks something (to me) much more important: “where to go for health care”. When I was working with the fabulous Lenny Sugiharto and other waria in Indonesia, I learned that one of the reasons these “women with penises”/”other definition of your choice” had such phenomenally high rates of untreated STIs and other illness was that they HATED going to health services, and getting stuck in the men’s wards. Groups like Arus Pelangi are lobbying for less discriminatory attitudes among service providers, but there’s a hell of a long way to go.

The Ministry of Public Health is concerned that young men are going through the cheap, easy castration process before they’ve really thought through the implications of this extraordinarily irreversible process. The debate around the ban has raised an issue that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Will the world of transgenders (katoey in Thailand, waria in Indonesia, hijras in much of the Indian subcontinent) morph as an open gay scene emerges? The subculture differs quite a bit from country to country — in Indonesia, most waria keep (and regularly excercise) their male tackle, even as the live as women, selling sex to straight men. In Thailand, far more katoeys go through the whole sex change process — castration is a first step which cuts down on hormone bills until the wallet is full enough for the full chop. But whatever the local norm. living as a transgender has been an obvious path for many people who, as young men, were effeminate or confused about their sexuality.

That was in part because there was virtually no visible gay scene. That’s now changing very rapidly throughout Asia. Young men, including those from rural areas and less educated backgrounds, are going on line and discovering that there’s a gay community in a city not far away. Are some of these men people that would in an earlier age have become transgenders? We’ll never know, but it does seem to me that delaying castration until a young man has had a chance to explore some of the alternatives for sexual expression is not such a bad idea.

Re the photo: I ripped it off a random website, which ran the credit: A woman (left) chats with katoey at a Bangkok cafe Flickr photo by Bart Morane. But the woman (left) looks for all the world like my friend Yindee, a former UN bureaucrat and therefore more than likely to be hanging out in bars chatting to katoey.

It takes me back to the time we were trying to explain the results of a study of HIV and syphilis to transgender sex workers in Jakarta. Stats — even terrifying ones like “23% HIV positive” don’t necessarily mean much to people who dropped out of primary school, so we drew 100 waria on a graph and coloured 23 of them in red, and 17 in green, with quite a few in red and green stripes. The red ones have HIV, we said. The green ones have active syphillis. And it immediately opened up the discussion: who’s a red one? How can we tell? Only by getting your test results.

An HIV prevention organisation targeting gay men in Britain did much the same thing. They put 10 men on a poster with a who-will-you-go-home-with-tonight message: one of these men has HIV. The poster did not show faces, but a more focused part of the anatomy. I’m afraid I can’t post it on a family website like this one… Much less give many details of the same organisation’s wonderful campaign to get guys to recognise the symptoms of syphilis, and go for tests and treatment. Suffice it to say that the information came as an insert with a fabulous CD called Sex Pigs: 60 minutes of music to fuck by.

More politely, while I’m on syphils, check this delightful essay by Marlene Zuk. It discusses whether or not it is in syphilis’s own interest to leave ugly, suppurating boils on the genitals. But it’s delightful, really.

Improbably, Tina Kelley’s story from New Millford, New Jersey reminds me of a vortex of confusion that engulfed me in Jakarta, early in our research into transgender sex workers. In a story about two women who have been married since one of them was a man, Tina writes about the impossible confusion of laws relating to same-sex marriage and sex changes in the U.S.

Lawyers for Christie Lee Littleton, a Texas male-to-female transsexual suing her husband’s doctors for wrongful death, noted the confused landscape: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

When we were training researchers for a study of transgender sex workers, or waria, in Jakarta, I was explaining questions about sexual partnerships. It’s a wee bit complicated, because most waria are transgender (they live as women) but not transsexual (they still have all their male tackle). This obviously racks up the sexual possibilities. “Ok, Section E is about sex with another waria who is paying you,” I intoned. Resty, one of the waria on the study team (pictured below), raised her hand. “What if you’re getting paid, but not by the other waria?” Patiently, I explained that we’d already covered payment by male clients in section C. Impatiently, Resty corrected me. “I know that. But I mean, what if a client pays me to have lesbian sex with another waria?”

So now we have a straight guy who is paying two people with penises and XY chromosomes to pretend they are women having lesbian sex. Isn’t the world a wonderfully varied place?