When Shika Corona was growing up in Malacca in the 1980s, her Muslim Indian family would take her to visit pop-up fairs. The fairs always featured "paper doll" performances in which trans women (mak nyahs in Malay) would perform on stage as though they were in a beauty pageant. Shika was born into a body that was assigned as “male,” but she’d already begun to recognise that this didn't feel right. “They were so beautiful, I wondered if I could be like them,” she said . “Malaysia was a very different place back then.”

All of the positive depictions of mak nyahs Shika found were in Western publications. Sadly, almost all portrayals of trans women in local Malaysian newspapers were either neutral or negative. Some articles even claimed that when trans women died, the earth would refuse them due to their sins. And yet, despite the terrifying portrayal of trans women in Malaysian media, Shika still held on to these articles as proof that people like her existed.

Shika was about six years old when the fatwa was issued. As a child she was obsessed by the glamorous mak nyahs she’d seen at the pageants, and she collected any newspaper or magazine clipping mentioning a trans woman. The first story she ever cut out was from a British newspaper article on Caroline Cossey, a trans actress featured in a 1981 James Bond film. “When I read about her when I was really young, I really thought to myself ‘that is me,’” she said.

That year a fatwa was issued by the National Fatwa Council, banning such surgeries, and the hospital was shut down, marking the beginning of a repressive, anti-LGBT chapter in Malaysia’s history.

At the time, the Malaysian government offered gender-confirmation surgeries —the only other country in Southeast Asia to offer the surgery aside from Thailand. Trans health was so widely embraced that even the government contributed funds towards the Mak Nyah Association. But then in 1983, everything changed.

The tolerance towards trans and queer people that Shika remembers from her childhood was not an anomalous blip in Malaysia’s history. In fact, it was for many centuries the de-facto attitude not just for Malaysia, but also for most of Southeast Asia, even in Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Brunei.

Shika believed the only way she could transition was if she migrated to the West. But when her father died in 2009 and she still hadn’t migrated, she decided to go ahead and transition in the country where she’d been born. "When he passed away, I told myself, 'fuck I think I really need to transition… I need to really catch up with my dreams and make it happen. Life is so short'," she said.

Yet this isn’t a simple case of the West looking down its nose at the East. It’s important to keep in mind that European powers once mocked Southeast Asia's tolerance for gender and sexual diversity, perceiving their attitudes as evidence the region needed “redemptive civilization.”

The tragedy is that Southeast Asia’s rich LGBT history is unknown to most people. Modern headlines are mostly negative—particularly in Brunei, where a recently passed law prescribed death-by-stoning for all who commit gay sex or adultery. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah later announced the law would likely never be enforced , but the fact that it even passed was still a shock for most Westerners. As the former New Zealand PM, Helen Clark, tweeted : “Hard to comprehend what could be driving such a barbaric move which stands in stark opposition to fundamental human rights principles.”

South Sulawesi is a great example. When the Europeans arrived in the 16th century, they were shocked by what they saw. Portuguese missionary Antonio de Paiva wrote a scandalized letter to his Catholic bishop in 1544 about his observations of the Bugis people:

“Your Lordship will know that the priests of these kings are generally called bissus. They grow no hair on their beards, dress in a womanly fashion, and grow their hair long and braided; they imitate [women’s] speech because they adopt all of the female gestures and inclinations. They marry and are received, according to the custom of the land, with other common men, and they live indoors, uniting carnally in their secret places with the men whom they have for husbands...”

He concluded the letter with his amazement that the Christian god, who had destroyed "three cities of Sodom for the same sin," had not yet destroyed such "wanton people" who were "encircled by evil."

The bissu tradition dates back to the 13th century. They are considered a “fifth gender” within the Bugis' gender system, which is comprised of male men (oroané); female women (makkunrai); male women (calabai); female men (calalai); and bissu, who are neither male nor female.