by Harpal Singh

India has made transformative changes in its transgender laws in recent years which have started the process of social change. But only just.

That energy erupts like a volcano when the gasp is muffled. It erupts to tell the hoity toity by the hoi polloi, mannequins of misplaced morality and mascots of hope, thought leaders and decision-makers, that trans lives & their stories are crucial for the future of the world.

Michelle Esther O’Brien’s comparison at an OHMA workshop at Columbia University between psychoanalysis and oral history, that both touch the subaltern thought and plumb the memory for a deeper understanding of the mind, is fascinating. It has set me thinking: in an instant, it has altered my newly-minted worldview of oral history, which, in any case, is work-in-progress.

While watching Michelle speak, I could not help thinking about how badly trans folks are treated back home in India by the civil society, by the organs of the state, particularly the police which is totally transphobic. This, even after legislative changes have been made.

For the most part, trans Indians live on the margins of society, and the only intersections where they meet the cis people are the traffic intersections where they beg and plead for financial support and are shunned & shooed away.

That is a life of extreme hardship for over half a million people. Their biggest enemies are ignorance and ambivalence, prejudice and stereotypes. The upshot: acquired atrophy of the mind is worse than nature’s atrophy of the body.

In recent years, India has done away with its colonial-era laws which unapologetically discriminated against homosexual and transgender identities. It has replaced them with transformative laws which have started the process of social change. But only just.

For instance, same-sex sexual activity was decriminalized two years ago by the Supreme Court of India by reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in a landmark case. But same sex-marriage is still anathema.

Similarly, under a 2019 law trans folks are allowed to change their legal gender but only after a sex reassignment surgery, and have the constitutional right to register themselves under a third gender. But they still cannot serve in the armed forces.

One positive effect of these legislative changes is that trans people would be legitimately and discretely enumerated as ‘male, female, transgender’ instead of ‘male, female, other’ in the next census of India, which was due in 2020 but has been delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. So they would no longer be ‘othered’ and their particular position and needs would no longer be erased into the general binary of population.

The census data, therefore, could help make focused plans for their education and emancipation, social cohesion and economic independence. It would also help extend their currently miniscule welfare benefits uniformly across the states.

But prejudice and stereotyping against the trans community would take a long time to wither, in the absence of mass awareness programs. Despite the gradual implementation of top-down policy change, there is indeed very little effort to spread trans knowledge and not let the civil society see them with a jaundiced eye.

In spite of the transformative changes in law, the Indian society continues to follow the old and outdated tradition of transgender individuals visiting homes of those families where a new baby is born. There, they sing and perform and get paid for their blessings.

It is quite clear that India is nowhere near the creation of a forum like the New York City Trans Oral History Project which Michelle Esther O’Brien has led to share trans stories. But along with other efforts, such a project is what India needs to hasten the process of social change. That could help replace apathy with empathy and contempt with compassion.

Harpal Singh is an Indian journalist and current OHMA student. He is working on 1984: Sikh Genocide which left nearly 5,000 dead over three days in India in the wake of then prime minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.

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