This is the accepted version. For the published version see the DOI. Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 28, no. 1, January 2019 © 2019 by the University of Texas Press DOI: 10.7560/JHS28102 B ENJAMIN D ANIEL H EGARTY ( VERSO RUNNING HEAD ) (Recto running head)The Perfect Woman The Perfect Woman: Transgender Femininity and National Modernity in New Order Indonesia, 1968–1978 Benjamin Daniel Hegarty University of California, Irvine University of Melbourne The decade between 1968 and 1978 was a period of remarkable activity in the state’s use of scientific knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality to define individual bodies in Indonesia. In this article, I analyze a particular locus for the deployment of expert knowledge about the body that emerged during this decade; the process through which Indonesian state experts incorporated, defined and debated transnational knowledge about transgender femininity during this decade. I argue that the very means through which the state sought to transfer knowledge about transgender femininity--an obsessive bureaucratic culture of documentation--generated the possibility for contradictory and ambivalent discourses about the relationship between gender and the self. Following a military coup in 1965, General Suharto officially became president of the Republic of Indonesia in 1968,