The Filipino Indigenous Group That Welcomed Trans People

Deep in the rainforests of Mindanao, Philippines, was an indigenous group whose beliefs and practices towards transgender members of their community were much more progressive than they are in the country today. 

The group is called “Teduray” and we can learn a lot about them from one anthropologist’s accounts of the life and culture of one of its villages. In the book Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist and the essay “On Growing Up A Boy In America,” Stuart Schlegel tells the story of a bamboo zither player named Ukà, who was considered a mentefuwaley libun. 

In the Teduray language, “mentefuwaley” means “one who becomes,” and “libun” means “woman,” so mentefuwaley libun means “one who becomes a woman.” Schlegel wrote that he also met a man who was born a woman, a mentefuwaley lagey. 

LGBTQ discrimination is still common in the Philippines. Just this year, a trans man was murdered, and several lesbian women were allegedly shamed by having their heads shaved in public. Advocates are pushing for a bill meant to protect discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, but it has been languishing in Congress. Some opponents of the bill say it disregards Filipino culture and values, but these accounts about the Teduray show that on the contrary, at least one Filipino indigenous group embraced transness.

The events that led to the gay liberation movement at Stonewall started in 1969, while the term “transgender” was not coined until 1971. Schlegel visited and lived with the Teduray years before, in the mid ‘60s.

According to Schlegel’s accounts, he was confused by the bamboo zither player Ukà. He asked his guides in the community more questions about her, like if she was a man dressed as a woman, and what genitals she had. He told them that in the United States, where he was from, women and men who wanted to be another gender were despised and considered bad people.

The Teduray were puzzled, both by Schlegel’s questions and the information about how trans people were treated in the U.S. For them, Ukà and other mentefuwaley are tentu or “real.” The Teduray saw mentefuwaley libun as real women and mentefuwaley lagey as real men.

“One of Schlegel’s frustrations… was that his informants were also not interested in talking about mentefuwaley,” said Kenette Millondaga, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of the Philippines Mindanao (UP Mindanao). “For them, it’s not something to talk about. [The mentefuwaley] are part of the community.” 

The chapter on mentefuwaley in Schlegel’s book is all of six pages long. Millondaga guessed that part of the reason the chapter is so short was that, for the Teduray, transness was simply not a big deal. 

In Teduray culture, gender was not determined by biological attributes but by what people identified as and the role they played in society, Schlegel wrote.

“The Teduray did not discriminate on the basis of sex,” Millondaga said, referencing Schelgel’s accounts. “It’s not hard to imagine then that there were mentefuwaley who were not just artists like Ukà; we can say mentefuwaley were involved in economic activities [too].”

There was, however, one thing that mentefuwaley could not do—get married. “The worldview of the Teduray was that marriage is equivalent to reproduction, so that’s the exception for the mentefuwaley,” Millondaga told VICE.

Aside from that, mentefuwaley were treated just like anybody else.

Schlegel noted that a likely reason the group was so accepting of people identifying as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth was that neither men nor women held a higher status in society.

“Men did the heavy physical work in their cultivation system, such as cutting down the big trees, while women weeded, but nobody valued felling trees as a higher work than weeding,” wrote Schlegel. “Otherwise, all social statuses were open equally to women and men, however prestigious: shamans, legal sages, and healers.”

Millondaga teaches her students about the mentefuwaley to show them that trans people were accepted in local Filipino communities in the past and that our very own ancestors did not discriminate against them.

“The notion of trans is not new. We have examples that come from indigenous peoples’ communities, so I think it’s very important to always include the story of Ukà, especially when we talk about gender in the context of Mindanao,” she said. Mindanao is one of the three major island groups of the Philippine archipelago.

UP Mindanao’s only LGBTQ organization is called “UP Mindanao Mentefuwaley,” adopting the term to show that acceptance of the LGBTQ community is not a Western concept. 

“We have the indigenous knowledge of homosexuality and transness that is unique to our culture,” Malaya Lapina, an anthropology student and member of the organization, told VICE. 

Thanks to the student-led organization, Millondaga said discussions on gender have become more accessible to her students. 

“[Students] think the term mentefuwaley is gay lingo, a made-up term, so [learning its origins] is a eureka moment for them,” she said, adding that this nugget of knowledge piques her students’ interest and usually leads to some of the liveliest class discussions. 

The Teduray still exist as a people today, but according to Millondaga, the Teduray village Schlegel lived with and wrote about has since dispersed due to conflicts with another community. At the moment, it’s difficult to determine if the Teduray still treat their mentefuwaley the way they did in Schlegel’s accounts, she said. 

“It’s one thing that anthropologists should study again, especially anthropologists in the Philippines,” Millondaga added.

Lapina thinks learning about how mentefuwaley were treated in the past can help bring understanding and acceptance for the trans community in the present. 

“It’s really beautiful to revisit, to learn about this indigenous knowledge of sexuality,” she said. “I think it’s very helpful for starting a discussion on accepting LGBTQ people [among Filipinos].”

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