Five Genders, One Culture: What the Bugis of Indonesia Can Teach Us About Gender

When people talk about gender today, the conversation often sounds like it's brand new — something that started a few years ago in Western countries. But there's a place where recognizing more than two genders isn't recent at all. It's been normal for centuries.

The Bugis people live in South Sulawesi, a province in Indonesia. They have a population in the millions and have long recognized five distinct genders: makkunrai (women), oroané (men), calabai (people born male who live as female), calalai (people born female who live as male), and bissu — a special category for spiritual leaders who are considered to embody all genders at once, according to peer-reviewed anthropological research.

This isn't something happening at the edges of Bugis society. It's built into the way their culture works — their families, their jobs, their spiritual beliefs. And it's survived centuries of major change: colonialism, Islam spreading through the region, and modern pressure to think about gender the Western way.

How the Bugis System Works

To understand the Bugis approach to gender, it helps to know that they separate biology from social role in a way that many Western societies don't.

The Bugis recognize three biological sexes, separate from gender. But gender — the way people live their lives, what work they do, their place in the family — is different from biology alone.

The four main genders (makkunrai, oroané, calabai, and calalai) each come with their own set of expectations. If you're calabai, you were born biologically male but live a female social role. If you're calalai, it's the opposite. But these categories aren't simply copies of Western transgender identities. Each one carries specific duties in the family, certain kinds of work, and behavioral expectations that make sense within Bugis culture itself, according to research by anthropologist Sharyn Graham Davies.

Then there's the fifth gender: the bissu.

The Bissu: Priests, Healers, and Keepers of Knowledge

The bissu are not simply "a third gender" or a catch-all category. They're understood as something different altogether — spiritual leaders who were thought to contain all gender principles at once. In pre-colonial Bugis kingdoms, they were court priests. They performed rituals that were thought essential for the kingdom to function: blessing harvests, protecting sacred objects, conducting ceremonies for the royal family, and connecting the human world with the spirit world.

The bissu were — and still are — also experts in La Galigo, an ancient spiritual text so long and complex that it took years of study to master. They were the keepers of Bugis traditional knowledge.

We see similar patterns in other cultures around the world. The hijra of South Asia, the fa'afafine of Samoa, and the Two-Spirit traditions among Indigenous North American nations all have something in common: a third or additional gender category that is at the same time a spiritual calling, a specific social role, and something the community needs in order to function. In each case, when European colonizers or Christian missionaries arrived, these traditions faced real pressure. Sometimes they disappeared. The bissu survived, but it was not easy.

Islam, Change, and What Stayed the Same

In the early 1600s, most Bugis people converted from their traditional animist religion to Islam. This was a massive change that affected their laws, how families worked, and their public religious practice. But in practice, the conversion was mixed. Many old rituals continued alongside Islam, and the belief that gender wasn't simply binary remained part of Bugis life.

The bissu were caught in the middle of this tension. Their spiritual role was based on pre-Islamic beliefs, which made their position uncomfortable in a Muslim society. During the 1950s and 1960s, when a reform-minded Islamic movement called Darul Islam was active, bissu faced real violence — forced conversions, killings, and destruction of sacred objects. The community shrank dramatically.

But it did not disappear entirely. Over the following decades, the bissu tradition gradually came back, helped by Bugis cultural groups working to preserve their heritage and by anthropologists studying the community.

The tension has not gone away. Indonesia's government only recognizes male and female on official documents — there's no legal category for a third gender. Conservative Islamic voices in South Sulawesi sometimes push to restrict what bissu can do publicly. The fact that bissu still exist at all is because local Bugis culture has held space for them, even as national laws and international religious influence push in the opposite direction.

What This Means Beyond Just Anthropology

For people who study gender, religion, or Southeast Asia, the Bugis case is well-known. But it matters more broadly than that.

Most Western histories of gender treat anything other than two genders as either new or something that happens in small, marginal cultures. The Bugis are neither. They number in the millions. Their five-gender system comes from centuries of written records, spiritual texts, and kingdoms that actually built their government around these ideas.

The bigger point here is about how gender and power connect. In ancient Bugis kingdoms, the bissu weren't tolerated at the margins of the court — they were essential to how it worked. Royal authority itself depended on their rituals and knowledge. As those kingdoms lost power, so did the bissu. This tells us something important: gender categories are never just abstract ideas floating around. They're often tied to real power, real institutions, and how a society actually organizes itself.

There is also a pattern worth noting. The pressure on the bissu today reflects something happening across Indonesia as a whole — a push-and-pull between the country's commitment to religious freedom and plurality, on one hand, and growing religious conservatism in politics and law on the other. In recent years, Indonesia has seen proposals to restrict LGBTQ+ expression. The bissu sit in a precarious spot legally and politically — too deeply rooted in Bugis tradition to be easily erased, but too difficult to fit into strict interpretations of Islamic teaching.

The Question Ahead

Whether the bissu survive another century is uncertain. Community elders say fewer young people are becoming bissu practitioners. Learning the role requires years of training under an experienced elder — a commitment that young people facing economic pressure and new opportunities find hard to make. Cultural organizations have recorded bissu traditions, but recordings are not the same as living practice passed from one generation to the next.

The Bugis five-gender system will likely keep showing up in global conversations about gender — sometimes accurately, sometimes as shorthand that misses the real complexity. The honest takeaway from the Bugis case is this: how people understand the connection between biology, social roles, spiritual meaning, and identity can be organized in many different ways. The Bugis way has lasted for centuries across enormous disruption. But that doesn't mean it will continue without effort, institutions, and people willing to pass it on.