Emily Mellen 0:07

Welcome to Global Research Bytes. I'm Emily Mellen, and I'm here with Sylvia Tidey, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Studies program. Hi, Sylvia.

Sylvia Tidey 0:16

Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me on the show.

Emily Mellen 0:19

Thank you for coming on the show. You began your research project “Aging in Indonesia at the Margins of Care” in 2022 following your receival of a CGII center grant. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of the project?

Sylvia Tidey 0:31

Yes, definitely. So, as a little bit of background, I have been working in Indonesia and with transgender women there for quite some time. I think for close to two decades now. And in my work, I was mostly focused on the kind of care that's available around HIV/AIDS-related services. But as I went back to Indonesia over and over again, I started to wonder about what happens to older transgender women, because most of the people that I did my work with were in their teens, 20s, 30s, maybe 40s. But at some point, it seemed like they sort of fell off the available care map into what I thought of as a care void. So, I wanted to know, once transgender women are a little bit too old to be of grave concern when it comes to HIV transmission, what happens to them and what kind of care do they have available to them? Because, as you might be able to imagine, Indonesia is not the richest country on the planet and doesn't have a ton of services available for people who don't have, let's say, family members or other close people to rely on. So, in Indonesia, overall, elderly care is mostly done by family members. There aren't many state-sponsored or state-run care homes for the elderly. But, for transgender women, they don't necessarily have a lot of family to rely on. Sometimes they were kicked out of their houses by their family members once their family members found out they were transgender. Most of them don't have children or grandchildren who can take up caring responsibilities, so I was wondering what happens to them. For elderly women who don't have family to rely on, no real state services, and who aren't of the greatest importance or interest to NGOs, non-governmental organizations, who are providing HIV-related care. So, with this CGII grant, I wanted to go to Indonesia, to three different places to investigate and compare three different kinds of care initiatives I'd heard about that were focusing, either explicitly or sort of indirectly, on elderly transgender women to see what were they doing, what were the benefits of what they were doing, and what were kind of their limitations or their shortfalls.

Emily Mellen 2:52

And what did you find, especially in terms of the different approaches of the three organizations?

Sylvia Tidey 3:00

Yeah. So, the first thing I found, I wanted to do my research in three different places with three different kinds of organizations, one in the capital, Jakarta, one in a smaller city on the island of Java called Yogyakarta, and one on the island of Bali. And my first stop was Jakarta, and what I found there was that the home for elderly transgender women that I'd been reading about in international media didn't actually exist. So, this was a surprise. Luckily, I knew a bunch of LGBTQIA activists in Jakarta who I had some appointments with, and we were going to catch up and talk about what they had been doing and where their activism had taken them. And I asked about this, and I said, I've been reading about this particular transgender women's elderly care home for quite some time. I think I've seen YouTube videos of it, and I've read about it in pretty reputable international newspapers. So, where is it? And the founder of this home hasn't been responding to my emails, my text messages and other things, and so I was told that it seemed to be the case, that this care home was more of a front to gather attention from, let's say, international journalists and others, but also government officials who wanted to do some reporting or show sort of a caring interest into the fate of transgender women, and would oftentimes pay for some face time with this founder, but that care home itself didn't actually exist. It was this person's actual own home, and the money that she received basically went to funding her own lifestyle. She would, however, whenever a journalist would show up, gather a bunch of elderly transgender women for photo ops and so forth, but this care home did not exist. So, that was a surprising finding. But, luckily, I did find at the same time that other initiatives existed and that other elderly care homes did exist in other parts of Indonesia. So, as with any kind of research project, especially anthropological research, where you spend a lot of time in certain places and you're not quite sure what you're going to find, being able to pivot and come up with a plan B or C or D is pretty important. So, I decided not to pursue this woman and ask her, well, a little bit about the existence or non-existence of this care home, and I decided to focus on other initiatives in Jakarta and other elderly care homes in other parts of Indonesia.

Emily Mellen 5:33

That's fascinating. And so, I hope that you had better experiences with these other two initiatives. Could you tell me a little bit about those?

Sylvia Tidey 5:43

Yes, so, originally, in my research plan, I wanted to do the elderly care home in Jakarta. I wanted to go to what is known as a pesantren, or an Islamic Boarding school, in the city of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, and I wanted to spend some time with... and now I don't want to call him an elderly man, because I don't think he'd like to be referred to as such, but let's say an older gay man in Bali who had been active in HIV-related activism for the LGBTQIA community in Bali for a very long time, and who, because of his own advancing age, started to wonder about, well, what are we missing? With all the AIDS-related activities I've been involved in, who are we missing? And who is taking care of those of us who are too old to work or to make money or to do all those kinds of things? So, these were the three points of comparison. And for me, Jakarta, the transgender elderly home, was the wild card, because I didn't know the founder all that well. But luckily, in the Islamic boarding school, I've known the people who founded that and run it for years and years, so I felt quite confident that I'd have more luck there. And I've known the man in Bali who's been involved in these activities for well over ten years. So, I was quite certain that that we'd be able to catch up and talk and find out how these things are going. So yes, more luck in the other two places.

Emily Mellen 7:06

That's good to hear. How did you get involved in this research that then led you to the research about elderly people in the LGBTQIIA community in Indonesia?

Sylvia Tidey 7:19

Yeah, I guess, the shortest and clearest answer is sort of a long-term interest in the incredible unfairness of the world. And then zooming that in on the particular unfairness sort of brought about by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, especially the ways in which this affects people with certain genders and certain sexual preferences. To me, those two things combining, and also in a country that is, like I said earlier, is not the wealthiest country in the world. There's something about this convergence of, let's say, poverty or marginalization, gender and sexuality, and the lethal consequences of HIV/AIDS that just that has been interesting to me for a very, very, very long time. And the first time I went to Indonesia for my Master's research, I actually intended to develop an HIV/AIDS prevention film with female sex workers. So, there's the topics of gender, marginalization, HIV/AIDS, but not long after I arrived in Indonesia, in the city of Yogyakarta, where that Islamic boarding school is as well, I started to notice people on the streets, in shops, in restaurants, and around that I didn't quite have a good word for to describe them. The only word I had available at the time was something like transvestite. So, this is well over 20 years ago, and I was surprised, because I am from the Netherlands, which is supposed to be quite the open, diverse, and tolerant country, whereas Indonesia, with a Muslim majority population, isn't always known for its tolerance and inclusivity. So, something that struck me as noteworthy was, how come that there are so many, and I'm just going to use the word transgender women, how come there are so many transgender women here in Indonesia? Whereas I would expect there to be more out in public, visible to everybody in the Netherlands. So, I shifted my focus at that time and started spending time with transgender women in a non-governmental organization that focused on HIV/AIDS-related care. And this is how it started, I think in 2005 or 2006, and I've been going back for more research opportunities there with them ever since, to try to see how they develop their activism activities, how they develop organizations, and how they are able to bring care in spite of increasing, let's say, political stigmatization and crackdowns on LGBTQIIA communities. So, in a sense, I started off with this interest in HIV/AIDS, gender and sexuality in a context of well, severe marginalization, and I conducted a very long research project on that in Bali far and long after my Master's research was completed, to find out what kind of services were available and also what kind of shapes care took for a community that doesn't really seem to matter very much for the sake of itself.

So, one thing that I that I looked at, for example, is how a lot of HIV organizations who work with gay men and transgender women will invoke in their advertisements and how they're trying to write grants the importance of safeguarding, for example, housewives and mothers and children, which struck me as somewhat strange, that shouldn't you advocate for yourself, for the importance of your life and your worth. But, as was explained to me in various contexts, it is a lot easier to invoke sort of the danger that we pose towards, let's say, morally more deserving others than to ask to be recognized based on our own worth. And this got me thinking about the worthiness or the value of certain lives. If those who are at risk of dying prematurely from a disease which, well, one can live with for a very, very long time with the right medications, how does this valuation of a life, how does it work out as people get older? A lot of transgender women and also some gay men in Indonesia make their money by engaging in sex work. Unfortunately, not many other opportunities for, let's say, legal work, are available. That means that those who engage in sex work, who are somewhat within sort of a reproductive time of their life, are of most concern in the world of HIV/AIDS prevention and care, because that is when they are most likely to pass on a virus they might have to others, to male clients, who might pass this on to their wives, and then the wives to their potentially unborn children. So, I was thinking, if the kind of care that is available now is already somewhat conditional upon the lives of other people, then what happens to them when they don't pose, let's say, a risk or a danger in that sense anymore? So, after the long project that I've done on HIV/AIDS-related care and prevention with transgender women and gay men, I thought this is one question that I just want to look into. So, I’m not sure if it's the end of a longer research project or the beginning of something new, but this is what that came out of.

Emily Mellen 12:36

That makes so much sense and that's really important work. You sort of started to touch on this, but what are your next steps with this research?

Sylvia Tidey 12:45

Yes, that is such a good question. So, yes, like I said, not sure if this is the sort of the end or the tail end of the project around HIV/AIDS-related care that I was working on, or just the exploration of something new. So, what I'm thinking now is I'm working on a book project, on the big research project that sort of preceded this, and I'm about to start writing up my little summaries of my chapter overviews. And then I think I'm going to find out, are these going to be the last two chapters, or is this going to be a new book? And I have to say, since this is a question that I have, I'm pretty sure this is going to be the start of a new book, in part because I found out after the whole Jakarta debacle looking for a transgender elderly care home that didn't exist, I found out through friends there that there are so many other activities happening that are trying to expand possibilities for care and for belonging and for inclusion for transgender women young, but also especially older, that I just didn't have time to actually get into. So, I think I'm going to start working on the book and, either for summer research or when I have my sabbatical in a year and a half, go back for a longer time and figure out what is there, what I've missed, all these new opportunities that I heard about but haven't had a chance yet to look into. So, for now, I consider the research I did with the CGII grant, let's say, preliminary research for a longer project that I think that I'm so fascinated by that it can't just be the tail end of a book. It has to be its own project.

Emily Mellen 14:27

Well, we love to hear that. The real goal of CGII is to be funding for things that take off in the future and we look forward to hearing how that goes.

Sylvia Tidey 14:36

Thanks, Emily. I'll make sure to check in when that's done.

Emily Mellen 14:39

And thank you for meeting with me today.

Sylvia Tidey 14:42

My pleasure.