Sekrata
A Sakalava word from Madagascar for someone assigned male at birth who was recognised as a girl in early childhood, raised as one, and lives as a woman — a word that belongs to that community and is not open to outsiders.
- One of twenty-two Cultural identities
- No settled flag
- 13 min read
What it is
Sekrata is a Sakalava word. The Sakalava are a Malagasy people of western and north-western Madagascar. It names someone assigned male at birth who showed as a girl very early, was raised as one by her family, and lives as a woman.
The word belongs to them. It is not an option on a list. If you are not from a Sakalava community, or a Malagasy community where this word is genuinely used, it is not a word you can take for yourself, no matter how well the description fits you. That is not a technicality. It is the whole point.
Now the honest part. Almost everything written about sekrata in English traces back to a small number of older accounts by outsiders, and then to articles copying those accounts. First-person material is close to nonexistent in English. Where this page describes daily life, it is describing what has been written about sekrata, not what a sekrata has said. We are not going to smooth that gap over.
Keep reading
So this page is short on purpose. It exists so that someone Malagasy who grew up hearing the word can see it set down without a freak-show frame, and so that everyone else can work out quickly that it is not theirs and go and find their own page.
And if you are here because someone quoted sekrata at you in an argument about gender: these are living people in a real place, not evidence.
Pronouns
Malagasy does not gender its pronouns. Izy covers he, she and they without distinction. So the pronoun moment that dominates so much of this conversation in English does not really arise in the language itself. Gender is carried by name, dress, work and kinship terms instead.
In French or English — the languages most writing about sekrata happens in — she and her are used. If you are writing about a sekrata in either, she is the correct default. If you are speaking to her, ask, the way you would ask anyone.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
Nobody has published a sekrata's account of her own ordinary day. So take what follows as the shape of what has been described about sekrata, not a diary.
Coastal Sakalava village life, in the accounts, runs on ordinary work. Water fetched. Rice cooked. The market. Mats and baskets. Someone else's hair to braid. A long day of things that need doing, split along lines everyone in the village already understands.
A sekrata's day sits on the women's side of that line. She does the women's work with the women. She does not go out with the boys to the cattle.
The point the accounts keep making is how little of a point anyone makes. No daily negotiation. No explaining. The village has a word, the word covers you, and the day just proceeds.
Modern life complicates this, and the sources mostly do not follow it there. Young people leave for towns. Churches have a great deal to say. A day in Mahajanga or Antananarivo is nothing like a day in a coastal village, and the word carries differently in each.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
The accounts say partners are men, and that nobody treats this as scandalous. Beyond that the published record is close to silent, and this page will not fill the silence with invention.
What is worth saying is what love looks like structurally. In the village version there is no coming out to a partner, no explaining, no reveal. The word already did that work. Everyone knows what you are. A man who wants you knows what he is choosing before he speaks to you.
That removes an entire category of danger that trans women elsewhere organise their whole lives around. It does not remove all of it.
What the accounts do not describe: marriage, inheritance, children, what happens when a man's family objects, what happens when he takes a wife as well. Those are the questions a real life turns on, and outsider ethnography rarely asked them.
In a city, or abroad, none of the above holds. There the usual rules apply — apps, disclosure, risk, and men who are warm at night and cold in daylight.
Desire
The honest answer is that the record here is thin, and much of what exists is prurient — outsiders who wrote three sentences about work and thirty about who slept with whom.
What the accounts say: partners are men, and this is treated as unremarkable within the community.
What the accounts do not say: anything from the inside. Not what she wanted. Not who she chose. Not what she refused.
If you came to this section hoping for detail because the subject seems exotic to you, there is none here, and that is the right amount.
The body
**What is actually written down**
Long hair, grown from childhood and plaited the way the other girls wear it. Jewellery. Women's clothes worn as clothes, not as a look. Some accounts mention cloth used to shape a chest. That is roughly the extent of the published detail about the body, and most of it is description from outside, written by people watching.
**What is not written down**
Whether it hurt. Whether puberty was a bad year. Whether there was a particular morning in front of a mirror. Nobody has published a sekrata saying so, so this page will not put words in her mouth.
**Medicine**
Hormones and surgery are not part of any of this. Madagascar is a poor country with thin health infrastructure, and gender-affirming care is out of reach for the overwhelming majority of people who might want it. If you grew up with this word and you also want a body change, you are dealing with cost, distance and paperwork long before you deal with anyone's opinion.
So the body question here has mostly been a question of hair, cloth, work and how you carry yourself. Not because that is more spiritual. Because it is what has been available.
Work
Village work, in the accounts, is split by gender, and a sekrata works the women's side of it. Cooking. Water. Market trading. Mats and baskets. Braiding hair. The daily labour that keeps a household running.
Cattle are the standard example of the other side. Zebu herding is men's work among the Sakalava, and the boy she was not is the boy who would have gone out with the herd.
Notice what this means economically. She is not marginal. She is doing work the household needs, alongside the women who do it, and the household eats because of it. That is a very different position from being tolerated at the edge of a community.
The modern picture is harsher and far less documented. Young people leave for Mahajanga, Antananarivo, Nosy Be, or overseas. Work there means service jobs, market stalls, tourism, and for some trans Malagasy women, sex work with all the danger that carries.
The traditional description and the current reality are two different pages, and most of what you will read online only covers the first.
Family
In the accounts, the family is the mechanism. Not the obstacle.
The parents notice early — around the age children start being handed jobs. The child leans to the girls. And the parents raise a girl. Hair grown out. Girls' clothes. Girls' tasks. No fight described, no dramatic scene, and no ceremony either.
That is the part many readers stumble over, because in most of the world the family is who you have to survive rather than who names you.
Do not over-read it. The Sakalava are over a million people across many communities, generations and religions. Some families do this. Some are devoutly Christian and do not. Some fathers wanted a son with the cattle and said so. Older ethnography tends to record the custom and skip the households where it went badly.
If your family did this for you, you have something rare, and you are allowed to know that without owing anyone gratitude for it.
If your family did not, you are not less sekrata for it. You just had a harder start than the version in the articles.
Coming out
Mostly, there is nothing to come out of.
That is the sharpest difference between this and the identities that sit next to it on the internet. In the accounts, the family recognised the child at four or five and raised her accordingly. There was no closet. There was no speech. By the time you were old enough to make an announcement, everyone had known for a decade.
The declaring comes later, and it comes with distance.
It comes when you leave — for Mahajanga, for Antananarivo, for Réunion, for France, for a job, for school, for a church. Somewhere your family's word does not travel. Then, for the first time, you have to explain what you are to people who have no category for it, in French or English or a Malagasy dialect that only has the insult.
That is when people reach for a borrowed word. Trans. Sarimbavy. Nothing at all, and just let people assume. All three happen.
And there is a second kind of coming out that outsiders never think about: going home. Coming back to the village after years in a city where you built a different vocabulary for yourself, and finding the old word waiting, and having to decide whether it still fits.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
Malagasy, and much broader — roughly 'like a woman'. Used across the country for feminine men and trans women, and very often as an insult. Sekrata is one people's word for a recognised way of being raised. Sarimbavy is what a stranger in the capital might shout at you.
From a distance the outcome looks similar: assigned male, living as a woman. The machinery is different. Trans is self-claimed, with medicine, law and a political movement attached. Sekrata, as described, is conferred by a family in childhood and held by a community. Many sekrata in cities use trans as well, because it is the word that gets understood.
Compare Sekrata and Transgender Female →Constantly filed alongside sekrata in 'third genders of the world' articles. Different people, different ocean, different meaning, and a far richer documented record with actual Samoan voices in it. The grouping is a Western filing habit, not a shared identity.
Hijra communities have structure — households, gurus and chelas, initiation, an established place in certain rituals, and legal recognition in some countries. Nothing in the sekrata accounts describes an organised community of that kind. She lives with her family, in her village.
Belongs to Native Hawaiian and Tahitian people, with documented ties to teaching and cultural transmission. Also closed to outsiders. It attracts the same misuse — people adopting the word after reading one article — for entirely separate reasons.
An English umbrella term coined in 1990 by Native American and First Nations people, for themselves, specifically to stop anthropologists' labels being applied to them. It is not a translation of anything and does not extend to Madagascar. Anyone applying it to sekrata is repeating the exact mistake it was invented to end.
Compare Sekrata and Two-Spirit →It might not be you if…
- You are not from a Sakalava or Malagasy community that uses this word. That is the first and largest filter, and nothing else on this page overrides it.
- You are Malagasy but not Sakalava, and your family and region have their own words. Use those.
- You are looking for a word you can choose. What is described here was conferred on a child by adults who noticed, before she could have chosen anything.
- You want a spiritual or ceremonial role. That claim circulates online, but the source base is thin, and the accounts describe washing, cooking and market days rather than rites.
- You feel between genders, or outside them entirely. That is not what is described here. What is described is a woman, doing women's work, in a community that considers the matter settled.
- You need a term with legal and medical weight behind it — documents, clinics, a movement. Sekrata carries none of that. If that is what you need, trans is the word that opens those doors.
- You want a word that sounds better than the ones available to you. Understandable impulse. Still not a reason to take this one.
On the hard days
The hard days are usually not about who you are. They are about who is looking.
Being an exhibit. Turning up as item four in a listicle of "cultures with more than two genders", between a paragraph on Samoa and a stock photo. Your grandmother's world flattened into someone's talking point.
Being used by both sides. One camp wants you as proof that gender variance is ancient and universal. The other wants you as proof that colonisers invented all of this. Neither is thinking about you. Both need you to stay simple.
The past tense. Reading about yourself in articles that say "the Sakalava traditionally recognised", as though the writer had checked and found you gone.
The church. In much of Madagascar, church is the centre of social life, and the sermon has an opinion about you. That is a present pressure, and no amount of "but this is traditional" answers it.
The city. Where nobody knows the word, where sarimbavy is what you get called instead, where trans Malagasy women deal with harassment, unsafe work and no legal recognition. The village version and the city version of this life are not the same life.
And the ordinary one: no doctor to ask about anything. No clinic. No paperwork that matches. Just getting on with it.
Questions people ask
What is sekrata?
A Sakalava word from western Madagascar for a person assigned male at birth who was recognised as a girl in early childhood, raised as one, and lives as a woman. The recognition comes from the family and the community rather than from self-declaration. Almost everything published about it in English comes from a small handful of older outsider accounts, repeated a great many times.
Can I identify as sekrata if I am not Malagasy?
No. It belongs to Sakalava communities in Madagascar. It is not a translation of a general concept and it is not a label available to people outside. If the life described here sounds like yours, the honest move is to find the word your own language and community give you. Taking this one from outside is not respect, however admiringly it is meant.
Is sekrata the same as being transgender?
Not the same, though a sekrata living in a city today may well use trans as the word that gets her understood. The difference is the route. Trans is a self-claimed identity with medicine, law and politics attached. Sekrata, as described, is conferred by a family in childhood and held by a village. Similar outcome from a distance, different machinery.
Are sekrata accepted in Madagascar?
In some communities, historically, the accounts describe it as ordinary and unremarkable, which is a stronger thing than acceptance. But do not stretch that across the whole country or across to now. Madagascar is large, plural and heavily churched. Trans and gender-variant Malagasy people in cities report stigma, harassment and no legal recognition. The tidy story about a tolerant traditional culture is an outsider's summary, not a current national picture.
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