Many of us still have a rather fuzzy notion of what a transgender person is. For most people in India, transgender people exist figuratively only on the periphery of their reality and live literally on the fringes of society. The term ‘hijda’ is used to refer to encompass a group of people that we know shamefully little about. Sometimes our interest may be piqued by a transgender person standing for and winning an election, but that is about it.
There are those who are born believing that they are trapped in the body of the wrong sex; they feel and want to be something other than the sex (biological) and gender (which refers to social roles) what they were born as. This is independent of sexual orientation and has to do with gender identity or expression. It includes trans women (who were male at birth), trans men (who were female at birth), those who define themselves as agender or bigender. There are also those who think of transgender people as a third gender; as belonging to neither of the conventional genders. Transsexuals are those who have undergone surgery and /or medical intervention to actually transition from one to another sex.
People tend to have little information on the subject of transgender individuals and it is often their ignorance that leads to insensitivity in this matter. Bollywood's narrow, crass, exploitative and often overtly hostile portrayal of transgender people does nothing to remove either the stigma or the incomprehension that surrounds this subject.
Though we think of the blessings and the presence of hijdas as being auspicious for events such as births and marriages, we still, unfortunately, live in a society that shuns and fears trans people. We are still a society that wants to ‘protect’ itself from the reality of people with different gender orientations. Our social norms force them to live in ghetto like isolated communities that are not allowed to integrate into the mainstream. Because of poverty and social rejection, these communities often live in poverty and are sometimes forced into prostitution and begging.
Serena Daniari is a writer and activist who has undergone gender transition and has shared her story by blogging and writing extensively about her experiences. As a transgender activist, she has worked to remove some of the prejudice and ignorance that surrounds trans people. She speaks of growing up in a conservative American suburb where she felt completely isolated about expressing herself as the woman she always felt she was.
It took time and a lot of courage for her to “shed the facade of maleness that had imprisoned me” and to finally present to the world as the woman she always knew herself to be. She now has a weekly column called ‘transplaining’ where she shares her experiences, offers support to those in transition and informs and educates others. I think most of us need to take time to try and understand the hatred and rejection and even the threat of actual violence that so many trans people have to live with on a daily basis.
Here, Serena speaks of how so many trans people in the west opt to become models. She speaks of the need for more integration in the form of trans people in medicine, science, writing etc. She also implies that the standards of beauty prescribed by cisgenders (people who are comfortable with the gender and sex assigned at birth) are narrow; that trans people who try to align themselves with these are limiting themselves.
These are rather different concerns from the issues that India’s transgender community faces: trans people are ostracised, feared, rejected, harassed by the police and treated as an abnormal oddity. Even though trans people have featured in our mythology and ancient and medieval Indian cultural history has many references to trans people being integrated into court and community, paradoxically, the community has faced more hostility in modern times. Clearly transplaining is not a bad idea for rest of the world either.
Do you have something interesting you would like to share? Write to us at [email protected]
