this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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The irony is that many places were well ahead of The West in that regard until the colonizers came and forced their binary norm onto them.
Well I don't about your country but India was pretty much backwards in terms of any rights of women and the oppressed castes. It was the British who employed the lower castes and gave them some dignity. That's all. Hijras in india were always frowned upon and were ostracized by the mainstream society for years. They are not mentioned in vedas and hindu texts (although gods can be trans or can have both feminine and masculine genders).
Go further East and things change considerably.
A good case study is Thailand. They managed to avoid being outright colonized, and their approach to gender is so far ahead of their SEA neighbours (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines) where historically they were very similar.
I think it's due to some kind of buddhist philosophy. India was and is pretty backwards
It's not exclusively from Buddhism. Buddhism wasn't prevalent in the Philippines, but the indigenous animist religions had gods and legends that Western culture would call trans. The spiritual leaders, the babaylans, were exclusively women and the few men that felt a calling to that role switched gender expressions.