Women Build Home for Indonesia’s Aging Transgender Community
Down a dirt alley in a suburban corner of Jakarta, past chickens and playing children, sits a small pink house — Indonesia’s first retirement home built specifically for elderly waria, the term used across the country for transgender women, many of whom have spent decades with nowhere safe to grow old.
A Life Built Without a Safety Net
The home currently shelters three elderly waria, their walls lined with photographs from decades earlier — beauty pageant trophies and pictures of them young and striking, a visual record of lives that took a hard turn once the same beauty faded with age. Yoti Oktosea, nearly 70 and missing most of her teeth, was disowned by her own family as a teenager after her mother found her in bed with a man. “I don’t want this in my family, so you must leave the house now,” her father told her, according to her own account of that night. “If you live or die, I don’t care.” She left with nothing but the clothes on her back, and eventually found work as a ship’s chef, traveling across Asia before returning to Indonesia — where, decades later, she now does the cooking at the small home that’s become her final refuge.
Yoti’s story reflects a documented pattern researchers studying Indonesia’s transgender community have described repeatedly: waria who work for years in sex work or street performance — often the only income available to them given pervasive employment discrimination — reach old age with no savings, no pension, and frequently no family willing to take them back in. The community’s own informal habits compound the problem; as one Surabaya-based trans activist put it, “the trans community doesn’t have the habit of saving money and preparing for old age,” leaving many older waria to become beggars, buskers, or scavengers once their bodies simply can’t keep up with the physical demands of the work that sustained them for decades.
Mami Yuli’s House
The home’s founder, known simply as Mami Yuli, has her own history that mirrors the community she now serves — she worked as a prostitute for 17 years before turning her life around to build something more permanent for others facing the same aging-without-a-net crisis she once feared for herself. Running the house isn’t cheap: Mami Yuli needs roughly 350,000 rupiah, about $36, every single day just to keep it operating, and when she can’t raise it through donations alone, she organizes street performances where the home’s own elderly residents sing and dance for passersby — expected to keep earning their keep even well into old age.
Support has come from an unlikely mix of institutions. Mami Yuli, a devout Catholic, says roughly 70 churches across Jakarta have offered the home shelter during flooding, though only four actually contribute money directly. She hopes eventually to expand into the vacant lot next door and take in far more of Jakarta’s estimated 800 elderly waria — a fraction of the roughly 35,000 transgender Indonesians the Asia-Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health estimates live in the country, a figure activists suspect undercounts the real population considerably.
A Community That Occupies a Strange, Contradictory Place in Indonesian Society
Waria hold a genuinely paradoxical position in Indonesian culture — considered sacred by some of the country’s ethnic traditions, yet still facing routine harassment and intimidation in daily life, even as public attitudes have shown some signs of softening in recent years. That contradiction plays out starkly for the elderly residents of homes like Mami Yuli’s: honored in certain traditional and religious contexts, largely invisible in the country’s social welfare policy, which offers essentially no formal support structure once a waria ages out of whatever informal income she’d relied on.
Similar efforts have since emerged elsewhere in the country. In Surabaya, a coalition of trans organizations known as Perwakos would go on to open its own elderly home years later, describing its mission in terms that echo Mami Yuli’s own experience almost exactly: rescuing older trans women found living, as one Perwakos activist put it, in conditions no one should have to endure, with no family, no income, and nowhere else to turn. Public health researchers who’ve since studied the broader crisis, including a peer-reviewed study published in the journal PMC, have documented the same structural gaps nationally — a near-total absence of regional policy addressing older transgender Indonesians’ health and welfare needs, leaving grassroots, community-run homes like Mami Yuli’s to fill a gap the state has largely declined to address.
For related coverage of transgender rights internationally, see our piece on Uruguay’s gender identity law, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.