Transgenders, transvestites, eunuchs

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On the frontline

VAISHNA ROY
As Rose, the host of ‘Ippadikku Rose’, fights to realign rigid notions about gender and sexuality, it’s worth asking if we know what tolerance really means.
As Rose says: “What about my hobbies, my friends, my skills? There’s so much more to me.”


Transgender: An umbrella term that represents a whole range of people from drag queens to transvestites to eunuchs. I am headed towards my first social encounter with one. But I am not yet sure just what Rose is. All I have is a woman’s name, a man’s voice and a celebrity status as talk-show anchor.

I am curious but also wary, a fastidious shrinking from meeting another tedious exhibitionist. Aravanis are characteristically loud, aggressive and lewd. Rose has chosen to challenge this stereotype and her on-screen personality is intriguing, which is why I am in this narrow street in the bowels of West Mambalam, reluctant to ask for directions.
At any rate, the auto driver has guessed and is leering. Then I find the number, look up and see Rose on the balcony.

Gender identity
First, let’s settle the pronoun. Rose is ‘she’, a woman. This means she is neither a transvestite, someone who dresses like a woman; nor a eunuch, usually a castrated male.

She is a transsexual, someone born male with male genitalia, but who identifies strongly as a woman, including in her sexual preference for men. This is a gender identity disorder, where your body is one gender but your head disagrees.

And what you can do is try to make your body more sympathetic to your mind by using hormonal therapy and sometimes surgical procedures to become physically a woman or, conversely, a man.

Rose takes hormone pills but hasn’t had surgery yet. She explains her identity to me with infinite patience and grace. I am touched by how untiringly she handles the probing. Talking to her, I realise that anything I write about Rose will also necessarily be about reactions to her.

Because these reactions have traditionally decided that Rose and her ilk do not belong. They have decided that there are only two genders into which you can be born, and that leaves a considerable number outside the pale.

What do you do with transsexuals, homosexuals, or hermaphrodites, to name just a few? The last are born with characteristics of both genders, named after Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, a handsome man who the gods fused with a nymph.

For now, we have conveniently lumped them all together as ‘aravanis’, ‘hijras’, ‘chakkas’. This effectively means we don’t have to understand how or why they are different; we know they are and we can therefore shunt them into life’s sidelines, from where they impinge on our consciousness every now and then as nuisances, beggars or prostitutes.

Rose refused to be shunted. Born Ramesh into an ordinary, middle-class Tamil family, the boy from the first preferred the company of girls: “I was a softy who liked Barbie and found boys aggressive.” A class-topper, the chubby boy was teacher’s pet and life wasn’t tough yet.

Then came +2, a boys’ school, and the start of bullying and name-calling. The boy realised he was different but wasn’t sure why. Evidently, his assigned sex at birth was male but he ‘felt’ female, so who exactly was he? “Boys called me gay, I thought I was gay.”

Struggles
Gay is a bad word in our rigidly bi-gendered society. It is the stick with which you beat the faintest hint of femininity in a male and vice-versa. It is enough to frighten most transgenders into a perpetuity of deception, where they marry heterosexuals, dress for their assigned gender, and stay safe.

Rose didn’t want safe; she wanted a life, and on her terms. She struggled to discover herself through visits to psychiatrists (who dismissed her as ‘confused’ or ‘misled’) and to dingy gay spots (where she had unsatisfactory sexual encounters with homosexuals), until finally an Oprah Winfrey show on gender identity crisis showed her a glimmering of the truth.

But that wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. For Ramesh to become Rose in a society where even women cannot tackle their sexuality or identity comfortably takes incredible courage. Today, the West has counsellors and help groups, and parents who join support rings to help their transgendered children.

It’s a small island of acceptance in a sea of hate crime and extreme prejudice, an island India is struggling to create. For now, much like women, transgenders here are seen as willing male tools, there to be raped, marginalised and criminalised.

I remember a highly educated friend dismissing homosexuals as freaks and mutants. Well, a transgender is as much a freak as a blind person, or anyone an accident makes paraplegic. But in a Photoshop world where everybody has perfect smiles, sculpted bodies, eats Big Macs and uses fairness creams, how can you tolerate difference, especially when it is ugly and incomprehensible?

The 29-year-old Rose is no freak. She is charming, articulate and completely comfortable with who she is and how she got here. Thrown out on the street by an orthodox family, a victim of rape, fraud and abuse, she has clawed her way up. Armed with a Masters’ degree in biomedical engineering from the US, she wanted more. “I wanted media success as a transgender.” That happened when “Ippadikku Rose” was launched on Vijay TV, and a star was born.

Celebrity tag
The decision to join media is smart. Fame and glamour can make you heard like nothing else. It was the celebrity tag that got her and her friend Kalki, who started the Sahodari Foundation for transgenders, the tiny flat they call office, because people don’t let houses to transgenders, just as they don’t give jobs.

To survive these petty indignities and taunts, that’s the challenge. And to fight the assumption that there is only one dimension, the sexual dimension, to your entire life. As Rose says: “What about my hobbies, my friends, my skills? There’s so much more to me.”

For now, she knows she is on the frontline, paving the way for others. Of the quantities of fan mail she gets, the most satisfying are the ones from other transgenders, thanking her for giving them the courage to fight on.

The author is a freelance writer/editor. E-mail: vaishnaroy@yahoo.com.

PHOTO: K.V. SRINIVASAN

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