TheStar.com – By Julian C.H. Lee
An anthropologist reports on a very different Merdeka event he attended that dealt with a subject often swept under the carpet: alternative sexualities.
In August last year, malaysiakini.com reported that a transsexual woman in Malacca had been brutally assaulted, allegedly by state religious officers, who also detained her because she was a man dressed as a woman, and that is an offence.
Sexual identities and behaviours attract a great deal of attention in Malaysia, and those who are seen to fall outside heterosexual norms are the subject of official punishments as well as vigilantism.