
Jovin began to
unbutton his shirt, “See, I haven’t yet got my operation done. I tie them up.”
“No, no, there’s no
need,” I said and turned away hastily, but caught a flash of the crepe bandage
that bound his breasts.
“It’s no big deal,”
Jovin said, “Guys sit around shirtless. If I were operated on, I’d be sitting
like that, right? I get so bloody frustrated when [Selvam] sits around without
a shirt. I want to yell at him and say, ‘Cover up, da!’”
Selvam, who was
leaning against the wall, broke into a lopsided grin, like a rock star
indulging a groupie.
I had first met
Selvam in 2006, while making a documentary on transgender women. At the time,
the state had allotted land to create a village for transpeople, called
Natarajapuram, and houses were being constructed. Future residents were camping
in tents.
When I used the word “aravani”
in my piece-to-camera, a transwoman took offence and said she would smash my
face to pulp. “You have to walk alone to the bus stop, right?” she said, “By
the time I’m done with you, people won’t know whether you were a man or woman.”
I must have looked as
terrified as I felt, because one of my interviewees touched my shoulder and
said, “Don’t worry. I’ll send Selvam along to protect you.”
Selvam was six inches
shorter than I, slighter than the average schoolboy, and biologically female.
He had recently moved his family—parents and siblings—into one of the tents. I
heard his parents addressing him as da—an endearment used for boys.
“I’ve told them I’ve
changed naturally from female to male,” Selvam grinned, in a high-pitched
voice, “I ran away from home because I heard that they’d started looking for a
groom for me. Enakku kalyaanam ellaam pidikkaadhu (I don’t
like stuff like marriage). So I ran away, cropped my hair. By the time they
found me, I’d become a guy, and that’s what I told them. They believe me. My
entire village does. But then everyone pesters me about marriage now—they want
me to get married and prove I’m a guy...you know, produce a child.”
Ten years on, he was
waiting for me outside his house, hands in pockets.
“Hello,” he said, in a
deep bass. Only his height and smile hadn’t changed.
“I had a super moustache,” he said, with a sigh, “I shaved it because someone told me it would grow better if I shaved regularly. The damn thing hasn’t appeared since.”
He had moved his
parents to Kalpakkam, he said, because they didn’t like the way people spoke in
Natarajapuram. “You know how they are, swearing and stuff,” he said, with a
grin. “I live here with my sister.”
It was a strange house. The women in the house were born men. The men were born women. None is in a romantic relationship with any other. The women are upset that the men cook; the men are upset that women are the breadwinners.
Aarthi, the “sister”
to whom Selvam referred, is not biologically related to him or anyone else in
the house. But this quasi-family of transpeople has imposed a complex network
of relationships on themselves.
“He was staying with
people like us in Kuppathurai,” she told me when I met her. “My mother’s
sisters are my chithi, periamma and so on. I call
them also amma. One of my ammas in that manner
adopted him. So he’s my brother. He came with me when I moved to Chennai.”
Several transmen whom Selvam knows have also joined the household.
“Avunga ellaarayum
naan madikattitten (I’ve adopted them all),” Aarthi said, “So now I
have four-five sons, in addition to my daughters. I look out for them, figure
out what’s bad for them, what’s good for them, show them the ropes.”
The sons call
Selvam “mama” (maternal uncle), while the daughters call him “anna”
(older brother), perhaps because “mama” is also popularly used to address
one’s husband.
I would visit the
house several times over the next few months. Every time I arrived, one of the
“sons” would bring me a vat of water to drink. The “daughters” spoke broken
Hindi to me. Sometimes, they danced to film songs. At others, they came up with
their own dance numbers. They would offer me food and “cool drinks”even when
they knew me well enough not to stand on ceremony. The sounds of teasing and
laughter constantly rang out—“Sister, has anna told you
about anni (sister-in-law)? Tell her not to torture him like
this, he can’t sleep nights!”, “Write about us also, we’re prettier than
Selvam!”—but there was something transitory about it all, like these were
ephemeral bursts of joy in lives that would never get easier.
Unlike transwomen,
transmen cannot identify themselves in a historical lineage. In the Middle
Ages, transmen appear only as women in disguise, mostly in Shakespearean
drama—a ploy that suited actors in an all-male repertory and gave the groundlings
cheap laughs at the spectacle of same-sex romance; happily for the characters,
a twin of the acceptable sex usually turned up.

But the earliest documented cases of female-to-male gender transition appear in the 1800s and early 1900s, and the details are vague. The first documented gender reassignment surgeries were performed in Germany, chiefly on the patients of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
In America, the first
surgery recorded was on Dr. Alan L. Hart (1890–1962), a radiologist and
tuberculosis researcher who pioneered the use of X-ray photography to detect
TB. In 1917, Hart approached Dr. Joshua Gilbert at the University of Oregon,
asking for a hysterectomy, identifying himself as a person with an “abnormal
inversion” who should be sterilised. Gilbert evaluated Hart as “extremely
intelligent and not mentally ill, but afflicted with a mysterious disorder for
which I have no explanation.”
The diagnosis is
radical even in the context of today, when the desire for transitioning from
female to male is classified as a mental illness according to the manual of the
American Psychiatric Association—labelled “gender identity disorder” or “gender
dysphoria”.
Indian mythology has the Amba-Shikhandi story, and that of Princess Chitrangada, immortalised in Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra. But the history of female-to-male (FTM) transition is nebulous.
There is no clear
enumeration of transmen. The 2011 census claimed the number of people who
identified as third gender was 4.9 lakh, but there appears to be some
confusion, since 55,000 of those were in the 0-6 years age category.
India’s transman
community has articulate representatives successful in their chosen
fields—cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul, writer-activist Gee Imaan Semmalar,
disability rights activist Kiran, among others—but the majority live in hiding
for fear of losing their jobs, or even lives. Transmen in the police force were
reluctant to talk to me even on condition of anonymity for fear of
repercussions once the state knew that personnel recruited as women now
identified as men. At least one transman said he was unfairly terminated by his
employer, an IT major. Another interviewee was threatened with
rape-until-impregnation.
In his study Towards
Gender Inclusivity: A Study On Contemporary Concerns Around Gender, Sunil
Mohan of the community support collective LesBiT says transmen are often expelled
from school or college for “gender variant behaviour”.
A community, a support
system, is essential, and is beginning to form. Satya Rai Nagpaul, founder and
facilitator of Sampoorna, a group for and by trans and intersex Indians, said,
“Networks of trans-masculine people are expanding, especially the last two
years or so. [They] have found each other in Ahmedabad, Baroda, Delhi,
Guwahati, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Indore, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune”, apart from
Chennai and Bengaluru. In Tamil Nadu, transmen even have an indigenous
name, thirunambi, a male equivalent for thirunangai, as
transwomen are known.

L. Ramakrishnan, from the public health and human rights NGO SAATHII, said there is an increasing number of private social networks, mainly WhatsApp groups, through which transmen can find support. Through these, people who don’t need chest binders any longer, post-surgery, donate them to others. Purpose-built binders are expensive, and using the wrong material could lead to health issues, from bruising to bone displacement.
The idea of a
community is crucial for transmen, who are doubly disadvantaged—aside from the
obvious challenge, they face prejudice from the larger community of sexuality
minorities. With limited funding for trans-healthcare and schemes, there is
community gate-keeping, chiefly by transwomen. Activists speak of the
“hierarchies of authenticity”, where post-operative transwomen are considered
most genuine and deserving; at the bottom are transmen.
Selvam only attended
three days of school. He was bullied, and decided not to go. His parents did
not compel him.
“They were always
affectionate,” he told me, “But I was not very attached to them then. I think I
was angry because they wouldn’t let me cut my hair after I got my period. My
hair grew to hip-length. So I said, ‘Let me go to a temple and get a tonsure
done’—it seemed a better idea than to tell them straight out. I’d always wear
pant-shirt, anyway, or a veshti at home. I would never wear
a paavadai (skirt) unless I was going to work. They never
objected. When I said I’d get a tonsure, they said ‘Aiyayo, you
shouldn’t do all that!’”—he imitated their shocked expressions, drawing both
palms to his mouth— “‘You’re a vayasu ponnu (a girl who has
come of age, a nubile woman)’! Vayasu ponnu nu sollarappo evvalavu
aathiram varum (Imagine how infuriating it would be for someone to
call me a ‘vayasu ponnu’)!”
“Yeah, that monthly
thing, I hate it,” Jovin chimed in.
“Mine’s stopped now,”
Selvam said.
Jovin sighed, “It’s
the worst thing.”
Why do I suffer so much, i used to think. I’m a guy. Do guys get periods? They don’t. Why do i? Why has god made us neither this nor that? We’re not able to walk as men on the road. People may find out from our voices. People may try something funny with us.
Both Jovin and Selvam
grew up hundreds of kilometres apart and are separated by five years in age,
but had similar habits in childhood. They wore trousers under their skirts,
which they discarded as soon as they were out of sight of family. They joined
the boys on the road, first scaling walls and trees as children, eventually
checking out—and whistling at—girls in their teen years.
Both started working
early—Selvam because he did not want his mother to work and felt guilty staying
at home while his father did hard labour; Jovin because of family
circumstances.
“My dad was a
drunkard,” he said, “A son at home would have got a job and there would have
been money. I was the third of three girls. My parents named me Kalaivani. Ten
years ago, at 15, as a girl I went to work in a biscuit factory.”
“Not studying was a
big mistake,” Selvam rued.
Since he was seven,
though, Selvam has been earning money. He accompanied his father, looking for
work. He found it mostly in construction, laying roads and loading stones. As
he got older, work became harder to come by.
“People hesitate even
to give me a watchman’s job because they look at me, think I’m a kid and wonder
whether I’ll be responsible. I worked as security at a morgue when I first
moved to Chennai. They gave me 100 bucks a day. I spent a chunk on alcohol. You
need to down a few to stay there. No one is there. Just corpses.”
But he never held a
job for long. He was happiest working with a theatre group exclusively for
transgender people, Kannaadi Kalaikuzhu. He met several activists,
including Siva Kumar of Nirangal, a Chennai-based non-profit for advancing the
rights of individuals with alternate gender and sexual identities. Siva took
him to LGBT meetings across cities. Selvam met other transmen, many reluctant
to come out.
“I’ve always wanted to
do social service. No one has come forward and said ‘I’m a transman’, at least
in Chennai. Because all of us think we’re oddballs, one-offs, there is no one
like us. If people knew there were others like them, they’d come out. So I’ve
spoken on TV, to newspapers, radio, all media. I used to give interviews even
when I had a job. I’m not afraid. I’ve never known fear. Of whom should I be
afraid? What can they do?”
But sometimes, Selvam
felt his colleagues knew he was not what he seemed. Perhaps they had read
interviews. Perhaps they sensed he was hiding that he had been born a woman.
“Every time I thought there might be a problem, I changed jobs,” he said, “So
it was hard to hold on to one job. Also, you can’t keep bunking work to attend
meetings and expect them not to replace you.”
He worked at a tailor’s
for four years, hoping to learn the craft and start his own business. But they
never allowed him to see them cut cloth. He quit and worked in an export
factory at a better salary. He made enough money to get his two sisters married
off, and put his brother through college.
“See, he bought me
this watch,” he said proudly, showing me a shiny, gold-coloured watch. “When I
think about how far I’ve come without studying, I feel a sense of pride. There
are so many people who have studied a lot and who haven’t done much with it,
right?”
Selvam is on the board
of Nirangal, but it is not a paid position. He could not work in an NGO, he
said. “Set aavaadhu, I’m outspoken,” he said. He had not held a
regular job in four years.
With the odd
exception, every transman I spoke to had a woman in his life who saw him for
the man he was. Selvam began to tell me about the only woman with whom he had
been in love.
He met her when he was
14, travelling on contract work in and around Theni district, laying roads, for
Rs. 110 a day. The contract was for a year. Happily for him, having lived
several years in Kerala, his family decided to move to a nearby village, and he
could meet her every day. She thought he was a man who wore his hair long.
Their relationship was three years old when it met its first hurdle.
“Her family began to
speak about marrying her off. She came to me one night and said, ‘Let’s go all
the way. Then, no one can separate us, and they’ll have to marry me to you.’ I
told her I had some sort of condition that I don’t understand. I’m a guy, but I
don’t have a penis. For 2-3 hours, she didn’t understand. Then, she began to
cry. But she could not bear the idea of separation. She said she would run away
with me. I knew the moment had come to leave home.”
The two of them headed
for Kerala. Selvam had spent most of his childhood and youth there, and knew
the language and place well. He cut his hair, changed clothes in a “gents’
bathroom”, and for the next six months, they lived a charmed life, staying with
friends Selvam had made over the years.
But his father did not
give up the search. He borrowed Rs. 2000, and tracked him down. “I didn’t think
my dad was that resourceful,” Selvam said.
His father convinced
them to return. The girl’s parents beat her to within an inch of her life. But
she said, even as the blows rained down, that she would run away with Selvam
again.
She left home that
very night. Her brother chased her down on his bike, dragged her home, and
tried to force poison down her throat. She survived. She then locked herself up
in a room for a week, refusing to bathe, eat, or even drink water.
In the meantime,
Selvam had convinced the entire village that he had biologically turned into a
man during his time away. His parents did not object to his marrying the girl.
Her hunger strike had chipped away at her family’s resistance. Her mother, her
brother, sister-in-law, and sister tried to convince her father to let her
marry Selvam. But the father was worried about what everyone in the village
might think.
Selvam promised
he would make money and come back for her. He would build a house. No one could
make snide remarks about a groom with a house of his own in a big city. He
moved to Chennai, with his family.
“She held out for three,
maybe four, years,” he said, “Then her father forced her to marry someone. I
can’t go to my village anymore. I feel like killing myself there. I’ve never
stayed longer than two hours. I go to my sister’s village nearby, to stay if I
have a family wedding or something to attend. Every Pongal, and every
Deepavali, I used to wear pant-shirt and dance like a maniac with the other
boys. We’d tease every single girl. They’d be scared of us. That was the life.”
He sighed. “And then there’s this emptiness.”
“Oh, a lot of girls
like Mama,” Jovin said, “It’s just that he doesn’t like any of them.”
“Tell her your story,”
Selvam said.
Jovin blushed. “Mama,
why, Mama?”
But he didn’t seem to
need much encouragement. “This girl in the biscuit factory liked me. So at the
time, I found it funny. I thought both of us are ladies, how can we have a
relationship, it’s wrong, isn’t it? I didn’t even know that you could do an
operation. I didn’t think our relationship could exist.”
But the girl
persisted, even attempting suicide because life without Jovin was not worth
living.
He told her he had too
many commitments to think about a relationship—he had to support his family,
build a house, get his sisters married, have an operation done like the friends
he had made in Chennai had. If she waited, he would come back. If she couldn’t
wait, she could marry whoever her family chose.
“She told me I would
only see her corpse if I left her ever again,” Jovin said, “I slapped her. I
said don’t talk like an idiot.”
He moved out of
Chennai and took up his old job at the biscuit factory. He worked five years.
The job wasn’t easy, but he liked it. They were working 12-hour shifts,
switching weekly between day and night shifts. In a good month Jovin made Rs.
3,500. The workers went on strike once, demanding eight-hour shifts. The company
gave in, and now they had more time on their hands.
“Pay day was like
Deepavali for us. We’d run off to the movies, the beach, the park, buy things
to eat, I’d check out the girls, the girls from the factory would check out the
guys. At the end of the day, we’d see how much money we had left, and figure out
what lies to tell at home—how many days’ salary was cut and so on. That girl
hated it when I checked out other girls, though. She didn’t even like my
talking to other boys, leave alone girls.”
At this point, Selvam
held out Jovin’s arm. I saw an initial carved into it.
“I did that for her,”
he said.
“Tension party,”
Selvam said.
“I got furious when
she suspected me of being unfaithful,” said Jovin.
“Veera vilayattu,”
Selvam mumbled, “And whose fault was it that she was suspicious?”
“So,” Jovin said,
“There was this other girl who liked me. I didn’t know it. She was a lot
prettier than my girlfriend. Her skin was so fair that if you pinched it, you
could see it redden.”
“You pinched her?” I
asked. Selvam grinned.
Jovin looked
embarrassed. “Oh, I’d pinch her waist. She used to call me ‘Mama’. She had
no thaimaaman (maternal uncle) so I used to tease her like
a thaimaaman would have. She had eyes like our Silukku (Silk
Smitha). She’d bewitch you with those eyes. And her figure, chance-ey
illai, you’d want to grab her if you saw her. Everyone in the company hit
on her. But she didn’t fall for anyone except me. And I didn’t even know.”
It came to a head one
day. The girls had to wear a shirt with the company logo on top of their
clothes. Jovin walked in on ‘Silk Smitha’ removing the shirt one day, and
apologised. She told him it was no big deal, she had her clothes on underneath.
“I went about my work.
Suddenly, my girlfriend drags me away in front of everyone, takes me to a
secluded room, and starts removing her clothes. I said, ‘What the hell is wrong
with you?’ She said, ‘If you wanted to see this so badly, why didn’t you ask
me? Why ask her?’ I said I promise I did not see anything. Then, this second
girl comes in and says, ‘What he’s saying is true, Mama did not see anything’.
And then this girl says, ‘How dare you call him Mama?’ And the
two of them are fighting. I tried to intervene. Finally, I slapped my
girlfriend, twice on each cheek, telling her not to talk such shit when she
doesn’t know what happened. I slapped her so hard it left marks. Her mother
called me later to ask me what happened at the factory, why did she have
bruises, and I told her, ‘You don’t know how to raise a daughter to be a girl,
what kind of mother are you, go and die.’”
It was only as I was
driving home that I realised I had laughed with Selvam and Jovin when they said
things that would not have been acceptable from cis-men. There is some
criticism of the patriarchal attitudes of transmen. And it is hard for their
partners to find sympathy even in cases of physical abuse, because the
responses they get are usually either, “But this is a woman you’re talking
about, why don’t you hit her back?” or “He’s been through so much, it is only
understandable that he’ll take it out on someone.
A woman who requested
anonymity told me about her experience with a transman to whom she was
introduced by an activist friend, not to set them up, but because the activist
was hoping to find the transman, who had recently moved cities, a wider social
circle. “My friendly demeanour was mistaken as an open invitation for
attention, to the point of being stalked on Facebook,” she said in an email,
“Even upon being told that I wasn’t interested, he continued to send me
messages, which is when I decided to block him and report his actions to the
greater community.”
Bangalore-based
Dharini*, 31, met a transman on Tinder. She found him intelligent and
articulate. They had similar taste in music and books. The chemistry was great,
Dharini said, though they didn’t do much more than kiss.
They had not discussed
exclusivity. He assumed they were exclusive; she assumed the relationship was
open. He had also assumed she had quit Tinder after they met, as he had. But
Dharini has always been in open relationships, with both men and women. He was
unpleasantly surprised when Dharini told him she couldn’t meet him one day
because she was on a date. She woke up the next morning to more than twenty
nasty messages.
“He called me some
really ugly things, like ‘cock-sucking whore’ and ‘loose pussy’...I think I was
doubly shocked that someone was directing this at me—someone I liked a lot—and
this someone had once been a woman. I got really angry. I called him and we had
a fight. He said, ‘Well, next time, I’ll just bring a rod to shove in your
cunt’, and I thought, okay, this is a threat. Obviously, I haven’t seen him
since.”
Delfina, a member of
Nirangal, said misogynistic attitudes are a problem in the
community. In a meeting s/he—Delfina identifies as non-binary and prefers
a gender-neutral pronoun—had attended, s/he heard a group of transmen “bragging
about how ‘I can flirt with so many girls, so many girls are in love with me’.”
Delfina asked one of them if he had a girlfriend. He did. “I asked him how many
boys he thinks his girlfriend should flirt with, and he said, ‘I’m a guy, I can
check girls out. Let her look at another guy, and I’ll beat her up.’ That’s the
type of attitude they have.” When s/he questioned him about this discrepancy in
their flirting rights, he said, “She is a girl, after all. I’m the man, right?
That’s how it should be.”
“I think most transmen
are inspired by toxic models of masculinity,” Delfina said, “which are very
extreme, unrealistic, and harmful—the type of portrayal we see in cinema. You
typically have a man who overpowers women, is aggressive, who can do anything
and everything he wants to, and women are supposed to implicitly obey him. I’m
not saying everyone is like that. I do know transmen who are in committed
relationships, who treat women in a very loving and caring manner. [But] we
need to do away with special consideration on account of transitioning and call
out sexism and misogyny as we would with cis-men.”
Many transmen have
faced extreme violence.
Sunil Mohan, in his
study, writes, “I played cricket so I thought I could handle my expression of
gender identity in terms of my masculinity in the name of sports. But that also
came under fire though my father is a sportsperson. He tore my shirt, snatched
away my cricket uniform and burnt it in front of me because I was not behaving
like a woman. My father would beat me black and blue because of my gender
expression.”
“The first time I went
out and cut my hair, my sisters and mother stripped me down to my jetti-baniyan (underpants
and vest), bound my hands and legs, and hit me. They all kicked me. My father,
my grandfather, my mama, and his son were standing around,
encouraging them.”
During his first stint
in Chennai, Jovin met people from several NGOs, some of whom asked if he was
willing to speak on television on account of how articulate he was. “So I went
on TV, and said I don’t have a life. We’re not accepted at home. We’re not
accepted in society. Don’t we have the right to live as we want, to come out
and be who we are? What we’d like is to be open about ourselves. But if we’re
being shoved aside for jobs, how can we live?”
A neighbour told
Jovin’s family that their daughter had cut her hair and was claiming she was a
man on television; that she had said her family had treated her poorly.
“When I went back
home, my father stripped me of everything I was wearing, and tied me stark
naked to a pole outside the house, siluvaiyile katti podara maadhiri (like
one ties someone to a cross), on display. Passersby were staring. He brought a
knife and said he would cut me to bits. I said, ‘Do what you want. What is the
point in my living anyway after the entire village has seen me naked?’”
His mother rushed out
to drape a cloth on him, but Jovin was so traumatised he attempted suicide
several times. First, he drank engine oil. Nothing happened. Then, he downed
rat poison. His mother took him to the hospital on time and had his stomach
pumped. Then, he ground oleander seeds into a paste and ate it.
“They took me to
hospital again. It became a police case. The cops asked me why I’d done this.
Was it love failure? Had a man cheated me? I said, ‘Go ask my parents. Don’t
blame me for my father’s mistake. I like this life, they won’t let me live. If
I can’t live, I have to die.’ The policemen praised me for speaking so bravely.
They wrote a case against my father, and went off.”
He tried to run away
from home, but his family tracked him down every time. Once, they even tried to
persuade a friend who had given him shelter into laying a trap. “They asked her
to make sure I stayed home that evening—they would come, tie me up and cart me
off to the mental hospital. She told me, and I went elsewhere.”
When his family asked
him why he was eroding their honour, Jovin snapped that he was putting food on
their plates, which was more than their honour did. They couldn’t argue.
“I’ve done so much
work. I have all these skills, and if I need money at a pinch, I can use any of
them. I know ironing, I know how to string flowers together, I know painting, I
know decoration, I know carpentry. In an emergency, I can earn 200 rupees
like that!”—and he snapped his fingers—“And now I’m taking driving
lessons. I told them I can’t live for the village, for the world, for society.
If my family accepts me as I am, I will live for them.”
Finally, his sister
told his mother, after watching several of his interviews on television, that
there was no point in trying to change their Kalai, who thought of herself as a
man. Kalai had become Jovin.
Eventually, they came
round. When his father passed away, Jovin lit the pyre as his son. His mother’s
brother told her to accept what Kalai had become; Jovin was a better son than
most natural-born boys. He had, even as a child, defended her against her
abusive husband—twice, he had given his father a concussion and told him that
real men fought men, not women.
At a talk for the
“TransForm: Transgender Rights and Law” conference organised by the Centre for
Law and Policy Research (CLPR) in Bengaluru on December 14-15, 2016, transman
activist Gee Imaan Semmalar spoke of the severely limited access to healthcare.
The prohibitive costs of treatment and paucity of information are factors. But
so is prejudice from medical professionals, the red tape involved in
government-mandated procedures, and incompetence at hospitals.
“Initially when
hormone treatment was not accessible to me, I used to self-medicate,” he said
in the talk, a video of which is available on the website Orinam, “And I think
that’s one of the wonderful things about the Third World. You can just buy
medicines over the counter and nobody’s questioning you.”
But self-medicating
can be extremely dangerous. Chennai-based endocrinologist Dr. Sruti
Chandrasekaran said she has had at least three patients in the last couple of
months who have begun the transition to male. She believes it is imperative for
hormone treatment to be administered by a doctor.
“Testosterone has to
be given in the right dose, and in the right route—it can go through various
routes, as an injection, an oral tablet, a gel—and we need to monitor them
constantly. Every three months, we need to check that the levels are within the
reference range, because too much testosterone can affect cholesterol, liver
function, increase the blood count, chances of a blood clot.”
Excited by the
clinical effects of testosterone, such as a deepening of the voice and the
appearance of facial hair, those who are self-medicating may end up taking too
much testosterone. The side-effects are acne, hairfall, hyper-muscularity, and
metabolic problems.
Most transpeople are
convinced about their gender in childhood. But hormone treatment cannot begin
at puberty, which is when the natural hormonal surge typically occurs.
“If the desire to
change one’s sex persists, we will start treatment,” said Dr. Sruti, “But only
after they have been certified by at least two psychiatrists, to make sure they
don’t have any underlying condition that makes them think [they want to
transition], such as depression, anxiety, or psychosis, and that they have
mentally grasped what they are going in for with the transition process.
“Hormone treatment can
make them transition beautifully, with the right dose and the right duration.
But it’s not for two or three years—treatment is for life. Their bodies are not
equipped to make testosterone so it has to be given at least until 50-55 years,
when natural testosterone begins to wane. But I’ve never followed a patient
that old. Most are very young.”
Interestingly, some
patients freeze their eggs. “They want biological children in future, either
with a partner, or for themselves.” American Thomas Beatie is famous as “the
pregnant man”—he had gender reassignment surgery in 2002, and chose to become
pregnant through artificial insemination in 2007, because his wife was
infertile.
Patients are advised
to wait through a year of hormone treatment before they have any kind of
surgery, in case they change their minds. When I asked Dr. Sruti if anyone has
changed his mind, she shook her head emphatically, “No. They are very
clear about what they want.”
However, parents are
often not quite convinced. In some cases, they even ask doctors to brainwash
their children into believing hormones are harmful. “Obviously, I would never
do that.”
Parental support is
particularly important because of the costs involved. Testosterone costs
between Rs. 100 and Rs. 150 a shot. A blood test is required every three
months, at Rs. 1,000-1,200.
Dr. Sruti also spoke
of another injection, GnRH [Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone]. When administered
once a month, or even once in three, it removes the oestrogen, so that the
effects of the testosterone are more pronounced. Each shot costs approximately
Rs. 11,500.
Surgery will set one
back by several lakhs. Not many young people have that kind of money.
Most transmen want at
least a mastectomy. Experienced surgeons are usually expensive, as is a reputed
hospital.
In 2008, the Tamil
Nadu government created the Aravani Welfare Board for transgender people, with
schemes including free SRS (sex reassignment surgery), free housing, short-stay
homes, and pension for destitute transpeople over 40. The scheme most in demand
is free SRS. But the waitlist is long. Technically, transmen should also be
able to access the surgery, but partly because of community gate-keeping and
partly because of lack of expertise in handling female-to-male transition
surgeries in government hospitals, they rarely get funding.
“The myth of the Tamil
Nadu model has to be broken,” said Gee, in his talk, “The reality is that in
2009, a transwoman friend of mine accessed this in Stanley Medical Hospital,
and the surgery is the worst I have seen. She paid Rs. 50,000 in 2009. It is
not free. They say hospital charges are free, but the medicine, the bed—they
just add [various charges], so the bill comes to a big amount. She was
bedridden for six months.”
To “transform into a
complete man”, Gee said, not without sarcasm, one needs at least five
surgeries. If they are botched, corrective surgeries are required. His own
mastectomy, in Mumbai, went horribly wrong.
“The nipple graft fell
apart and I had craters on both sides of my chest. The ideal recovery period is
around two weeks. I was bedridden for six months, and had three more surgeries
to correct what was done.”
He considered filing a
medical negligence case, but lawyers told him he would be wasting his time—the
loopholes are too large.
Selvam was relatively
lucky. He found a benefactor—who asked to remain anonymous for this story. In
2014, Selvam travelled to Gujarat in pursuit of a mastectomy.
“I was wearing
half-trousers,” he said, “The tight ones. I took my shirt off. I went into the
room, and took my vest off. They asked me to lie down. They put some kind of
injection. I saw what was happening, but then I think I fell asleep. They did
the operation. When I woke up, they brought what they had taken out and showed
it to me. I remember seeing a bloodied bandage on my chest. Every time I woke
up, I would see dried blood from the scabs I had scratched. It was 15 days
before I could leave the bed. They told me I could do whatever I wanted. The
doctor said I could lift weights. It would be a good idea to go to the
gym. Of course, I can’t afford a gym.”
When he came home, he
liked looking in the mirror. He did not have to bind his breasts any longer. He
could roam about in a vest, even bare-chested if he wanted to. No one could tell
he had been born female. It was the freedom he had wanted for nearly 30 years.
But it came at a
price. It was three months before sensation returned to his chest. He had not
been taught exercises at the hospital, and he made up his own. He massaged his
chest, hoping he would one day be able to feel his hand against it.
“When I lifted my arm,
it hurt so much, it would feel like someone was tearing my flesh,” he said. He
thought of stretches he could do. He ate more than usual, and improvised
exercises.
“But all this
discomfort was nothing compared to the taunts I have endured in childhood,” he
said. Now, the world could see him for the man he was. At the time, he thought
it was his last surgery.
The final stage of
transition is the most challenging—the uro-genital surgery. Dr. Antony Aravind,
who is part of the Plastic Surgery Group at Apollo Speciality Hospital, has
personally handled four cases of FTM transition in the last seven years.
Because of the nature of the surgery, patients invariably return for
alterations, and the period of transition is at least 8-10 months.
The technique is
similar to what plastic surgeons use for the treatment of burns and cancer. But
there are not too many experts, because the technique used in FTM gender
reassignment is relatively new. “We call it micro-vascular transfer,” said Dr.
Antony, “We take a piece of tissue from one part of the body, along with its
blood supply, and connect the blood supply to another part of the body. If the
blood supply does not get established, you lose that bit of tissue.”
His patients are
usually well-informed before they approach him. “It is others who need
education,” he said. “The support they get is poor even in the US, Donald Trump
being against all of this, and you cannot expect people in a developing country
like India to accept it so quickly, perhaps. But society must understand this
is about making people comfortable with what they want to be.”
Even within the community, those who elect not to have surgery are considered less “complete” than those who have.
Jovin’s tumultuous
relationship with his girlfriend ended because he could not sleep with her, he
said. She was offended when she said she was ready, and he responded that he wasn’t.
“She wanted me to prove I’m a man by sleeping with her. I didn’t want that kind
of relationship.”
Then, the other girl,
the one with the Silk Smitha eyes, told him she liked him. “I said amma,
enna Muruganaa aakkidaadheenga ma, thaikulame (Don’t turn me into
Muruga, who has two wives)!” Jovin laughed, “She said she would wait for
however long I wanted her to. She said my girlfriend didn’t treat me right and
that she would. It didn’t matter if we could never have sex. But I felt I would
be ruining her life.”
Selvam now said, “I
have two more surgeries to do. First, get my uterus removed. Only then can the
penis be made.”
Many transmen have
spoken against the humiliating process one has to endure to access healthcare,
starting with a psychiatrist’s certificate that one has a “mental disorder”.
Gee said in his talk that he met a doctor who believes transitioning is
“messing with god”. Ramakrishnan told me of a doctor who refused to remove “the
healthy uterus” of someone who has not “experienced the joys of
motherhood”—joys to which no cis-man is entitled.
And then, there is
offensive curiosity—Satya has written about a producer who asked to compare
“dick sizes” after learning of the former’s surgery. When I asked Satya about
balancing one’s right to a dignified life against spreading awareness, he
answered, “This is a difficult one. My first instinct is to say that the answer
definitely does not lie in being present in mainstream media; I am a greater
votary of actual life encounters. Let’s not forget that the existence of
the hijra identity or expression in the public imagination is
not a product of presence on TV! The second is that patriarchy will never allow
sex, sexuality, gender identity and expression to be liberated. Third, no
amount of NGO-isation is going to do it for us. What we need is to work towards
a public culture where these are issues questioned, reconstituted and owned by
the public—not the state, not the law, not the media.”
On January 28, I had a
voice message from Selvam. He sounded excited. He had just got a job, he said.
He liked the work; it was something he might eventually do as the “own
business” he had dreamed of for so long—terrace gardening.
The office of Urban
Farm Guide (UFG) is an old house, with red oxide flooring, and large windows.
Coloured bottles had been used as edging for flower beds. Several plants were
standing packed in cases of soil, next to decorated earthen pots.
Selvam was making
notes from a class they had conducted. Another transman was arranging pebbles
around a flower bed.
Selvam hopes to start his own business some day. Photo: Suresh Kannan
UFG is the brainchild
of Arthi Devi, 30. She had always been into terrace gardening—an inheritance
from her grandmother, a farmer in Malaysia—and when she launched her own
start-up, she initially planned to hire only women from self-help groups. While
volunteering with Cheer, an NGO that works for the rehabilitation of
transpeople, she understood how hard it was for them to find employment. She
began to hire transpeople to man stalls which she organised at exhibitions in
Chennai, for farmers with whom she worked in villages, as well as for self-help
groups. Selvam was a regular. When she heard he was looking for a full-time
job, she called him.
“I’m happy when they
find higher-paying jobs and quit,” Arthi told me with a smile, “If they’re
interested in something particular—Gopika likes making idols from clay—we try
and find employment that suits them. We try to get them into the corporate
world, as receptionists, places where the public will interact with them and
stop seeing them as the other. Selvam tells me he likes to make handicrafts.”
Before I left, I took
pictures of Selvam working in the garden. He looked at one of the photographs
and smiled. “My dhaadi looks good,” he said, fingering his
sideburns, “Chedi valarkka vandhuttom; seyrthu idhuvom valarpom. (We’ve
got into this business of growing plants. Might as well grow this also.)”
Ramakrishnan told me
of a transman whose employers were initially supportive, but then terminated
his employment after his transition, saying they were downsizing. But he was
the only one to be let go at the time, and there had never been complaints
about his work.
Advocate Poongkhulali
Balasubramanian said this could be challenged in court. “I’m sure this can be
argued as a case of gender discrimination,” she said, provided the petitioner
could prove there was no other likely cause for being singled out for the
‘‘downsizing’’.
The Supreme Court
judgment in the National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India case,
delivered on April 15, 2014, is considered a landmark in recognising the rights
of transpeople. Essentially, it allows one to self-identify with a particular
gender, irrespective of what one’s birth certificate, hormones, or surgical history
say.
However, there have
been problems with implementation, said Ramakrishnan. “Even though the judgment
was far reaching in scope, in the popular imagination and, critically, in the
imagination of government officials charged with dispensing schemes and
identity cards, transgender=hijra. Transmen start with a disadvantage
because they have been relatively invisible in terms of national advocacy.”
States such as
Karnataka, Odisha, Manipur, and West Bengal are more amenable to changing
gender on legal documents, but it is still hard for transpeople to choose a
binary status rather than ‘‘Third Gender’’.
“The NALSA judgment
got a lot of press as the one that recognised transgender as the third gender,”
Ramakrishnan said, “That’s not the complete story. They also recognised
the right of people to identify within the binary, male to female or vice
versa.”
Some government
documents—passports, for instance—require proof of surgery for gender change.
And even then, some surgeries are more important than others.
“We know somebody who
applied to a regional passport office and submitted proof of breast reduction,
hysterectomy and oophorectomy. But the reply came ‘You don’t have a penis, you
can’t be a man’ and he got rejected. That’s very, very cruel,” said
Ramakrishnan.
Many transpeople also
have objections to the Transgender Bill 2016.
Satya said, “The
current version is in violation of the NALSA judgment—it asks for a district
screening committee with a Chief Medical Officer and other medical
professionals to vet trans applications! We are, together with other groups,
pushing for this to be addressed in the upcoming version of the Bill. And yes,
based on the NALSA judgment, which is now the law of the land, the option of
going to court is always there. But we would like to give the government a
chance to chisel the Bill in collaboration with our communities, before we
consider that route.”
To avoid the run-around
for medical records, it is easiest to change one’s name through a gazette
notification, and use that to change identity documents. Again, the eagerness
of the government to issue the Aadhaar card makes it fairly easy to get this
particular proof of identity with the gender of one’s choice.
“But, unlike the name
change provision, which you can do once in a single form and it holds for
everything, there is no provision for gender change. That has to be done
individually on every proof of identity,” said Poongkhulali.
She said the grey
areas would be resolved if someone were to file a case. “If a petitioner takes
it up in court again saying that despite the judgment, I’m being asked to
produce all of this, then a court is sure to clarify that it’s not necessary in
reading the judgment in its spirit.”
When transpeople, and
even intersex people, have gone to court to fight for their right to
self-identify with a particular gender, they have won. In the case of K.
Prithika Yashini vs The Chairman, Tamil Nadu Uniformed Services Recruitment
Board, 3 November 2015, at the Madras High Court, Prithika Yashini, a
male-to-female transperson was granted permission to write the police
recruitment examination as a woman. She became the first transwoman in the
police force. Another landmark judgment from the Madras High Court is in
the I. Jackuline Mary vs The Superintendent Of Police, 17 April,
2014. Justice S. Nagamuthu quoting the NALSA judgment said, “In my considered
opinion, in the case of Females to Males (FTMs) also, such fundamental right is
available to them and therefore, it is for them to choose and express their
identity either as females or males or as transsexuals.”
Ramakrishnan said the
rules on recruitment of transpeople to “gendered” fields such as the armed
forces, police, or sports teams are not too clear, since cases are yet to
present themselves. Poongkhulali said technically, the judgment does make
allowances for people to enter fields which are gender-segregated or restricted
by gender.
In the US, Schuyler
Bailar made history by switching from the women’s category to the men’s
category in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 in
November, 2015. As a woman, Bailar competed alongside Katie Ledecky, future
five-time Olympic gold medallist. Now, he swims on the Harvard Men’s Swimming
and Diving team as a member of the Harvard Class of 2019.
In India, transmen
have more immediate concerns. In places like Manipur, said Ramakrishnan, where
the CRPF and Army frisk people daily, transmen worry that they may be targeted
at security checks on account of their gender.
I met Keerththan
Shiva, an undergraduate engineering student at IIT Madras, outside his hostel.
He had the loping walk typical of teen college boys, enviably long eyelashes,
large expressive eyes, and a ready smile that woke two light dimples in his
as-yet-smooth cheeks.
Keerththan had the
ideal start. From a middle-class family in southern Tamil Nadu, he was sent to
an exclusive CBSE school—his parents didn’t mind taking loans to give their
only child a good education. The school was a liberal one, and Keerththan
didn’t notice that he had mostly male friends. Weekends were spent playing at
the sports facility in his father’s office. He didn’t like part of his school
uniform—the checked pinafore—but loved the white shirt so much he wore it when he
went out to play with his friends, until his mother shouted at him for getting
it dirty.
She would not let him
keep his hair short. “So I did some jugaad (stopgap),” he
grinned, “I told her I had some vendudhal (vow) in Tirupathi,
and I’d promised to tonsure my hair.”
But one day would
change his life forever.
“I was in eighth
standard when I attained puberty. That’s the last day I rode my cycle. The next
day, they sold it off. I used to win cycle races and all. I used to go
swimming, play with the boys. Suddenly, I could not go out, except to school.
They didn’t even like me going out with my girlfriends.”
He spent his time on
video games instead. He and his father would fight over the computer—he had got
his father addicted to Project I.G.I., he said with a laugh. He has
one happy memory of puberty: a grand function was held, and the trauma of being
forced into a saree, and a half-saree a few days later, was offset by the
number of people who turned up just for him.
He did not realise all
this while that he was, in fact, a girl. He had had crushes on three girls
through school, but so did other boys. Two of these girls became his “best
friends”, and he was so close to each that people would tease them for being a
“couple”. When I asked how that felt, he grinned, “That was fun!” He asked out
his best friend, Nethra*, in Class 12. “She didn’t realise I had proposed. She
thought it was a girly thing. You know how girls get emotional and say ‘dear’
and ‘darling’ and all that?” He thought she wasn’t sure of her feelings, and so
hadn’t responded.
It was only when he
got to the girls’ hostel in IIT that he realised something was not quite right.
“I would feel very uncomfortable when they’re changing their clothes or when
they’d come out in towels after a bath. I didn’t know whether I should stay or
go out of the room. And then all the girly chit-chat began.”
A group of freshers
got together and began to ask each other about their crushes. When Keerththan’s
turn came, he said, “Nethra.” They impatiently told him Nethra was a friend;
who was his crush?
“That’s the first time
I realised okay, they’re telling this is a friend? Then I’m
supposed to have a crush on a boy?” he said.
Soon, his hostel-mates
began to lose interest in him. He had no interest in discussing clothes or
makeup. They could not persuade him to go to the salon. Within eight months, he
had no friends, though he shared a room with two girls. So complete was the
isolation that when he was burning up with fever for three days, neither his
roommates nor their friends noticed he was shivering and crying on his bed.
After three days, he called his parents and said he was too ill to move and
needed help.
“Didn’t your
professors ask why you weren’t in class for three days?” I asked.
He laughed. “The
professors don’t really care about you. They come, they teach the class, and
they leave. We go to the website to check their names, because some of them
don’t even introduce themselves. If you have less than 85 per cent attendance,
they fail you with a ‘W’ grade, and then you have to repeat the course.”
But along with the
isolation came time to browse the free Internet the college provided. For the
first time, he could look up things about which he was curious—his mother would
sit beside him when he was browsing at home.
Now he typed little
phrases to see what Google turned up: “I like girls”.
“Slowly I got to know
about lesbians. At first I found it very awkward, to tell the truth—girl and
girl? How is that possible? Even then I didn’t realise I’m a
girl,” he said, with a sudden giggle at a younger, naïve self.
One day, he stumbled
upon an article about a transman. “He describes how he hates his breasts, and
he wears loose shirts to look like what he likes. That’s when I realised oh-kay,
this is what I have been doing for some time.” He began to search for stories
of transmen. “I realised many things after that. And I thought ‘Oh my god, I
can possibly grow a beard’...and I felt very happy.” One of his favourite
hobbies, growing up, was to secretly shave with his father’s kit in the
bathroom.
He called up
Nethra—they spoke almost every day, for at least an hour—and told her what he
had found; he also told her that she hadn’t understood he was in love with her.
“She doesn’t feel that
way about me, at least not yet,” he said, a note of hope in his voice, “But we
still hang out as friends.”
When the excitement
over the discovery waned, though, he sank into depression. He knew he was a
transman, but could he ever have the life people in the videos from the US and
Europe did?
This time, he missed
classes for two weeks, and failed five of seven subjects. His parents were
worried. They took him on vacation, to try and cheer him up. He could not
speak; he could not even smile. Finally, he came out to his parents. His
mother’s response was denial—“You’re just imagining things,” she said. His
father’s was to buy expensive “girly” clothes.
For three months, he
tried being a girl—he wore the clothes, tried to be affected by compliments
from his hostel-mates, tried looking at the mirror and feeling good about
himself. But the person looking back was a girl who was miserable in these
uncomfortable clothes and this uncomfortable body.
“I couldn’t. I stopped
trying. I said this is what I am, I have to accept myself.”
He put his efforts
into something else—networking. He found the LGBT group on campus. He attended
meetings, and then one of the members put him on to Orinam.
“I have friends now.”
He smiled, paused, and then said, “I actually just turned 20.
On February 11. And for the first time, I celebrated my birthday here. My
friends made a surprise visit. I used to get very jealous when [other hostel
residents] would celebrate their birthdays. I’ll be the photographer. This
time, it was like...‘My god, this is so nice!’”
Satya acknowledges
that these networks “have been life-giving to our communities, especially in
the light of the absolute lack of familial and social support, state apathy.”
However, he warns,
“These networks may not sustain their independence for long, as their
NGO-isation seems to be round the corner. Just as what happened with the
women’s movement, the radical potential of such spaces will be diluted, career
activists will be installed and the community divided against each other. It
will be crucial to see whether these spaces will finally hold out or be sold
out, in the sense, will they remain political at the core, or be reduced to
just service provision, again, something that in my opinion took the steam out
of a potential gay movement in the wake of the HIV-AIDS crisis.
“I hope we are not
going to be reduced to sponsored pride marches, coming out on TV, subjects of
sensational ‘before and after’ stories for print and online media, and that the
trans discourse can be brought into a life-world of its own and is part of a
reality we call ‘everyday life’.”
“That girl who liked
me, she’s married and she has a child now,” Jovin told me, “I bought clothes
for the baby before it was born. I wanted that dress to be the first the baby
wore. This girl told me she would tell the baby, ‘Your father gave you this’. I
said I’d kill her.”
“You should have given
me her number,” Selvam said, “Naanaavadhu correct panneeruppen (I’d
have got her). I’d have given the kid my initial and your name.”
“Look at him,” said
Jovin, with a shake of his head. “If I’d married that girl, she wouldn’t have
the baby, right? I need to think before I marry someone. I need a house of my
own. If a girl puts her faith in me, I need to be able to protect her. A hut
where the rain could seep in won’t do. She must be happier with me than she was
with her parents. I will do everything for her. I won’t let her lift a finger.
I’ll work, I’ll earn money. That will be enough to run our household. I’ll cook
for her. I’ll feed her with my hands. I’ll make coffee for her.”
“And what will she
do?” I asked.
“Avunga jolly-aa
kaalaattittu kudippaanga (She will put one leg over the other and
drink it),” Selvam teased.
Jovin wasn’t rattled.
“That’s enough for me. Every woman who leaves her family for a man does so only
because she wants a child. What can I give her, what wealth, what love, that
could make up for that sacrifice? I wouldn’t want a single tear to spill from
her eyes. I can’t give her a child. But she’ll be my child, and I’ll be hers.”
“I don’t think I’m going
to make all that much money,” Selvam, ever-pragmatic, said, “I can’t give a
girl the queen’s life our hero’s promising. She needs to work too. Everyone has
to work today. But then, I like poor girls more than I like rich girls.” He
smiled, contemplating his past and future at once. “It’s hard to curtail so
much—my desires, my anger, my emotions. I can’t help but want a girl in my life
again, the kind with whom I can settle down. I have so much love to give. It
makes me sad that I don’t have a partner. Guys who want to live an honest life
don’t get the girls. It’s only the cheats who will ditch them who get the
girls.”
*Names have been
changed to protect identities
Published in the March 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.