Tonë Bikaj (1901 – 1971) farm worker, partisan, musician

The marriage of Lule Bikaj to Katerinë, both of the Catholic Kelmëndi tribe of northern Albania, was delayed 12 years when Bikaj was arrested for his part in the struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Initially sentenced to death, he served 12 years penal servitude in Anatolia.

Their first child was Tonë. She was followed by two sons and two more daughters. However the two sons both succumbed to malaria at an early age. At the age of 9 Tonë decided to be the son his parents and sisters needed so much. He switched to male clothes and male tasks, but never did masculinize his name (to Ton). Lule introduced his 'new son' to neighbours, and like all other sons in the region Tonë received weapons from his father on becoming 15.

In 1921, when Tonë was 20, his 49-year-old mother gave birth to a son who was named Gjelosh. Tonë was pleased to be the older brother. The Kelmëndi recognized and honoured him as a man, and his posture and voice were increasingly male. When his sisters reached marriageable age, Tonë handed them to their grooms as an older brother would.

Both Tonë and Gjelosh fought with the Albanian partisans against the Italian and German invaders 1939-44. Tonë was a unit commander. However his unit was with Balli Kombëtar, which opposed the Communists because they did not demand that Kosovo be part of Albania, and lost its credibility by allying with Nazi Germany. Katerinë was shot for refusing to persuade her sons to join the cease-fire. When Tonë did surrender he was imprisoned for a year. During confinement he was deeply upset at being treated as a woman and being separated from his comrades. Lule died just after the war finished and Gjelosh was released in 1951. Tonë and Gjelosh crossed the border to Montenegro, Yugoslavia.

They settled among the Grudë. Gjelosh married in 1953 and Tonë acted as vëllam, the elder male relative who goes for the bride and leads her to the groom. Tonë lived with Gjelosh and his wife. Their children referred to him as babá, and some younger members of the family did not realize that he was female-bodied until after his death.

Tonë, in Herdt p258.

Gjelosh commuted to Titograd where he worked as a carpenter, and Tonë worked locally mowing and hay-stacking (male tasks). He did cooking but not any other female tasks. He attended gatherings of the male heads of households, and was popular as a singer and musician.

Tonë died at age 70 after three years of illness, with several nuns at his bedside. At the cemetery some men, friends and relatives, wanted to start a traditional lamentation, but objections were raised by the Grudë who would not allow such for a woman. Gjelosh felt that Tonë was therefore deprived of the last honours of a man to which he was entitled.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:150-2. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 253-6.
  

Mikas Milicev Karadzic (1862-1934) soldier, farmer.

Milica was born in the village of Hanovi (later Žabljak) in Crna Gora (Montenegro). Her father, a celebrated hero, was killed in battle against the Ottoman Empire. The widow having no other male to be head of the family, renamed her child Mikas and dressed him as a boy.

Mikas got used to it. He played with boys and tended sheep. When the other boys put on a belt with arms, Mikas did likewise. No-one was allowed to mention his origins, and Mikas would not have it otherwise. It was assumed that with adulthood Mikas would return to being a woman, but when this did not happen, his mother and other near kin approved, but the Karadzic clan leaders were embarrassed, and reprimanded him. However the more they did so, the more stubborn he became. He expostulated that he would rather lose his head than become a woman.

Around 1880 the leaders of the three clans of Jezera put the problem of Mikas to the Bishop Visarion Ljubisa (1823-84) when he visited. After a talk with Mikas, Ljubisa instructed that Mikas was not ever to be insulted. However he told Mikas to never drink brandy in that it might bring shame.

In 1885 the doctor Milan Jovanović-Batut (1847-1940) was to examine the soldiers of Zabljak, who included Mikas Karadzic. He was informed that Mikas was a ‘wonder of the world’ and had a private consultation with him. He was able to get Mikas to admit to being a woman, and asked how he hid the menses. Mikas insisted that he never had such since age 13.

After military service, Mikas farmed the family land. He had a flock of fifty sheep of the highest quality. He also bred and traded cattle. This occupied him so much that he leased out the arable land.

When in 1916 the occupying Austrian army interned and deported all the local soldiers, a neighbour applied to the Wachtmeister and informed him about Mikas’ sex. The Austrians refused to believe this without a medical examination. Mikas unlike his comrades was released.

In the 1920s, when Crna Gora had become part of Yugoslavia, there was a drought of several years, and Mikas was reduced to three cows and a much smaller farm. He was still doing the hard masculine tasks: mowing, stacking, ploughing and harvesting. He did his own cooking, but other female tasks were done by female relatives and neighbours, usually for a small fee.

Photo by Branimir Gušić 1929, printed in Herdt p249.

In 1929 the Croatian ethnographer, Marijana Gušić (1901-87), attempted to visit Mikas. But he refused her as she was a woman. However her husband Branimir was allowed to sit with him and take photographs.

Each November 8 Mikas officiated as the head male in the family at the Feast of the Archangel Michael. He also voted.

In 1933 a sick and weakened Mikas was taken on ox-back to the home of his paternal aunt’s grandson, where he was referred to as svekar (father-in-law). He requested that his daughter-in-law not disgrace him. She bought him a new manly suit which he was buried in, with the approval of the local priest.

• Milan Jovanović-Batut. “Cudna prilika (S moga puta po Crnoj Gori)” Branik, Dec 12-24, 1885.
• Marijana Gušić. "Etnografski prikaz Pive i Drobnjake" Narodna starina 9 (1930): 198; "Ostajnica-tombelija-virdzin kao drustvcna pojava," in Treci kongres folklorista Jugoslavije (Celinje: Obod, 1958): 57-58, and "Pravni polozaj ostajnice-virdjincse u stocarskom drustvu regije Dinarida," in Vasa Cubrilovic (ed.), Odredbe pozitivnog zakonodavstva i obicajnog prava o sezonskim
  kretanjima stocara u jugoistocnoj Evropi kioz vekove (Belgrade: Srpska akademija,
  1976): 280.
• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:144-9. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 246-253.

Fatime Ejupi (1926–?) peasant, soldier, councillor.

Fatime was the fourth daughter of a Muslim peasant family in Kosova. Lacking a son, the parents deemed the child to be a boy, Fetah.

Widowed at an early age, the mother was left the difficult task of guiding her son through the rites of boyhood. This was essential in that a widow with only daughters had no right to retain her husband's house and land. She managed to avoid the synét (circumcision) and postponed the search for a bride indefinitely.

In 1944 the 18-year-old Fetah was recruited by Tito's People's Liberation Army to fight the Axis occupation. Only after two years in the army was he examined by a doctor, who declared that he was a woman, and he was discharged.

Back in his village he was appointed to the revolutionary community council where he campaigned for rights for Muslim women, in particular the ending of veils and seclusion.

The village became aware that Fetah was a 'woman'.  In 1951 Asllan Asllani decided to marry Fetah. He was still in male clothing and resisted. Asllan 'seized' Fetah and made her his bride. At the wedding she returned to the name Fatime and changed to wearing the wide harem trousers.

They had a son and two daughters. Fatime later claimed to a journalist that she was content. The mother died without granting forgiveness for the loss of her only son.

• René Grémaux. "Mannish Women of the Balkan Mountains". In Jan Bremmer (ed). From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality. London & New York: Routledge,1989:162-3. Reprinted as "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans" in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. NY: Zone Books, 1994: 270-1.

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Fetah was not a typical sworn virgin in that he was raised as a boy from birth.  Grémaux suggests that Fetah switching back to Fatime indicates that the Sworn Virgin tradition was already in decline by the 1950s, however Fatime’s untypicality means that her case does not support the suggestion.

Note that the gender changes are both initiated by men, the father and then Asllan.  Fetah’s only time of choice was that he chose to stay a man after being discharged from the Army.

The virgin of Rapsha

The tradition of Sworn Virgins, found in northern Shqiperia (Albania), Crna Gora (Montenegro) and Kosova, wherein born-female persons avoid marriage and adopt male dress, was a long time as a legend in the West, reported at best in brief anecdotes, almost as if the subject were part of crypto-biology.

One of the earliest reports was by Edith Durham, who at the beginning of chapter IV of her book reports of an incident in 1908:

We left early next morning for Seltze-Kilmeni, piloted by the old man, and followed a stony track to Rapsha whose people derive from Laj Gheg, son of Gheg Laz.

Here we found one of the Albanian virgins who wear male attire. While we halted to water the horses she came up—a lean, wiry, active woman of forty-seven, clad in very ragged garments, breeches and coat. She was highly amused at being photographed, and the men chaffed her about her " beauty." Had dressed as a boy she said, ever since she was quite a child because she had wanted to, and her father had let her. Of matrimony she was very derisive—all her sisters were married, but she had known better. Her brother, with whom she lived—a delicate-looking fellow, much younger than she —came up to see what was happening. She treated me with the contempt she appeared to think all petticoats deserved—turned her back on me, and exchanged cigar­ettes with the men, with whom she was hail-fellow-well-met. In a land where each man wears a moustache, her little, hairless, wizened face looked very odd above masculine garb, as did also the fact that she was unarmed.

• Edith Durham. High Albania. London: E. Arnold, 1909. Reprinted:Virago travellers. London: Virago, 1985: 80.