For 50 years, Sari Kartina Abdul Karim kept a secret that would reshape Malaysian history. In 1974, at the age of 26, she became one of the region’s earliest Muslim trans women to undergo gender-affirming surgery and, in a rare moment of religious recognition, married with the approval of a Johor mufti.
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For five decades, she kept her story to herself. But now she says that silence has finally outlived its purpose.
“It feels like someone who was blind suddenly being told they have their eyesight again,” she told This Week in Asia in an exclusive interview.
“For 50 years I carried everything inside me. I stayed quiet for my mother and father because I felt responsible for protecting them. Now that generation has passed, I finally feel free to speak.”
Kartina, now 76, lives in the Netherlands, surrounded by the routines of retirement and a small Malaysian community she volunteers with. She spends her mornings with coffee and her two cats, and her afternoons working on a memoir she calls My Fifty Years Journey to Womanhood.
She left Malaysia in the early 1980s, but the defining chapters of her life remain in the southern city of Johor Bahru and Singapore, where she grew up and began the transition that would shape her future.
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