Unrecognized yet regulated: Transgender faith and stateless life at the margins of law

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, this talk explores the lives of stateless Muslim transgender women engaged in sex work - a community deeply governed yet persistently denied legal recognition. While public discourse frames statelessness through security and migration, gender-nonconforming subjects remain largely overlooked, even as they are subject to intense scrutiny.

Dr. Somiah examines how overlapping regimes of civil law, Syariah law, and Native Courts do more than marginalise: they produce a condition of suspended recognition, where individuals are criminalised and moralised without ever being securely acknowledged as rights-bearing citizens.

Rather than centring victimhood, the talk foregrounds everyday negotiations of survival: faith as moral grounding, chosen kinship as infrastructure, and strategic self-fashioning as quiet resistance. In doing so, it invites broader reflection on legal pluralism, citizenship, and what it means to craft belonging when the state insists on your absence.

About the speaker

Vilashini "Vila" Somiah (she/her) is a feminist anthropologist and is a Sabahan of mixed Tamil and Indigenous heritage, currently a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Gender Studies Programme at Universiti Malaya. She is passionate about the narratives and agency of Bornean women, migrants, and indigenes, and other sexual and gender minorities, which are often underrepresented. 

In 2024, she was a Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and SEANNET. In 2025, she was appointed a Harvard University Asia Centre Associate (2025-2026), as well as awarded the Shirley Greenberg International Bursary at the University of Ottawa where she will be a visiting a scholar in Winter 2026.