This article is only a personal reflection on some of my life experiences. I do not claim to be a philosopher or a sociologist who can answer all questions about how the society should deal with gender categories. Nevertheless, I venture to state it is commonsense that we need to look beyond the binary. I feel fortunate to be associated with support groups and organizations like Orinam and Nirangal that welcome all gender and sexual minorities without trying to label individuals.

We live in a society in which men and women are not yet treated equally in all situations. In most jurisdictions, we still need to implement affirmative action so women will have the same rights as men. It is not practical to disregard gender altogether. At the same time, I feel as a society, we need to recognize that not everyone fits into this binary model. Further, it is important for everyone to have the freedom to choose activities that interest them and express themselves in various social situations without undue constraints because of the gender assigned to them.

How are we going to do that? How are we going to ensure that everyone has the same rights but still protect women from harassment by men? We might not have answers to everything, but at the minimum, I think, we should be asking the right questions. As Maggie says in ‘The Opposite Sex … Is Neither!’, “a civilization is more well-known by the questions it asks than by the answers it comes up with” (re-quoted by Kate Bornstein). I would like to contribute my small bit to the advancement of our civilization by raising a few questions on gender and presenting my experiences here.

The day I was born everyone around me was happy and in a mood of celebration. In retrospect, I feel they were unduly concerned about certain aspects of my body which I don’t feel should determine how I live my life. Let me make it clear: it is not just my parents or family members who had the question “is it a boy or girl.” This is still the first question people ask while talking about a newborn in our society. I don’t find asking or answering this question a problem by itself, but I feel strange about the emotions and feelings that are commonly associated with this question. The first thing a mother or father asks is “do I have a boy or girl?” Even those parents who proudly say they will be equally happy with a boy or a girl will not readily accept that their child is not identified as either boy or girl at birth. Fortunately or unfortunately, the doctor decided that I was “male”. There was no ambiguity about my biological sex. So, people around me assumed that I would grow up to be a good “man”.

Some people are born with body parts they don’t feel comfortable with, but my concern is a bit different. Right from the earliest days in my life that I am able to remember, I never understood why so many things we are supposed to do in life are based on having or not having certain body parts. While it may be required to record what type of genitalia is present at birth—because it is not the same for every child—I don’t see any reason why a child should be dressed in a certain manner or given only certain types of toys to play with based on that. After all none of the toys meant for a child is not supposed to be operated using those very same body parts. Why then do we even distinguish between boys’ toys and girls’ toys?

What if there was a society which felt the blood group is very important and said all babies who have blood of type A must be made to wear red clothes and those who have type B should be made to wear blue clothes, and so on? You would think that is absurd, but I can argue that in various situations it would be more meaningful to differentiate people by blood group rather than by the genitalia. In most social and work situations, there is no legitimate reason for the other person to be concerned about your gender. For example, a person working in a bank is not expected to do anything as part of their professional work using the body parts based on which a gender is assigned to them. However, if someone in the bank meets with an accident, it would be more useful to know what type of blood they have and not what type of genitalia they have. So, why not name people in such a way that we know their blood group—and not their gender—by just hearing their name? Blood group is of course a hypothetical example. People have been treated differentially because of the circumstances they were born in—race, skin color and caste (specifically in India). We now agree that such differentiation is unethical, but as a society we have not done much introspection about the impact of assigning a gender to a child.

In one of the earliest observations a teacher has written in my school report, there is a remark which reads “does not mingle with other boys.” I do not have the opportunity to interview that teacher now. But from the language used, I can only guess that they decided I am a “boy” and I was supposed to mingle with other “boys”. My failure to do so was something unusual. I remember that I used to like many games and activities that were typically reserved for “girls” and did not feel comfortable being forced to participate only in “boys’” activities. I did not want to become a girl either. I could not understand why a child has to be a “boy” or a “girl”. I just wanted to be an “awesome child”: not an “awesome boy”, not an “awesome girl”. Society would not accept that and this created a lot of practical problems. I was lucky to be in a coeducational school. I am fortunate to have liberal-thinking parents, although they find my non-conformance to social norms like gender a challenge at times. While in school, even though boys and girls were generally seated separately, on occasion, I was allowed to join a group of girls for studies or other activities. Even then, certain boys would try to create problems for me because they felt I was trying to impress the girls, while I was just trying to explore our shared interests.

My biggest challenge was with sports. Boys and girls were separated for physical education instruction .Unlike girls, boys were expected to participate in aggressive and physically-demanding sports. Boys may—in a certain sense—have greater physical strength than girls, but there is no rationale why I should have been expected to participate in more aggressive sports just because I was assigned male. I could not join the girls as it might make them uncomfortable and teachers definitely felt it was inappropriate. But “boys” like me who did not exhibit such brute force during physical training were branded as “weak” and “girly” which was not only demotivating then but, in retrospect, must’ve also been insulting to girls as such. The strange thing is that certain boys would do anything and everything to avoid being told they are girly, and the teachers felt this was a good way of motivating them to do well in sports. Though I was not particularly keen on identifying as a girl, I cherished being different from the other boys. So, I started to deliberately act like I was physically weak. Consequently, I never took part in competitive sports in school. As an aside, it has taken me a long time to realize the importance of physical activity. I have tried the gym, and I now swim regularly to keep myself healthy.

While I was studying in high school, I woke up one day listening to the news on the radio. It was about the end of apartheid in South Africa. I was excited to hear the voice of Nelson Mandela. I was happy to hear that the nation had decided that they would no longer have separate bridges and public parks for blacks and whites. A few days later in our history class we studied about how Ambedkar struggled to end discrimination based on caste in India. While I was still feeling elated about the achievement of human equality in various societies, my school suddenly announced that boys and girls were to use different staircases from that day on. This was shocking to me. There was no reason why they should have come up with this new policy. Some teachers felt such segregation was required to improve the morality of the students. There were two staircases to access the classrooms in the second floor and they were at two ends of the building. The policy of segregation meant that on most occasions both girls and boys would have to walk much longer to reach their classrooms. Some people protested against it because it caused a lot of inconvenience, but I felt the imposition of this policy was a violation of my rights at a much deeper level: they infringed on my freedom to use a staircase because of how they perceived my gender. Students were using staircases only to climb up or come down the building. Even if there were any isolated cases of misbehavior they should have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis. I felt it was not only stupid but also inhuman for my school administrators to impose such a policy of segregation. Nevertheless I was a mute spectator at that time to this victory of Victorian morals over both common sense and basic rights.

Now I feel I must speak up against such irrational and inhuman practices. In a sense, I am still learning to be more assertive. More recently, when I was working in a corporate environment, I was given feedback that I should try to be like the other “men” so everyone could feel comfortable. While I was not assertive enough to protest against it, I just ignored the feedback. I was lucky that they did not bring up this issue again during the course of my work in that organization although I continued to be myself. I am not sure if I responded to it in the best possible manner, but at least I did not allow others to dictate how I should express myself.

I have been much happier during the last few years primarily because I got involved in the LGBTQI movement. I now interact with people who have similar interests. However, not everyone working for the welfare of gender and sexual minorities understands or accepts fluidity. Sometimes I happen to meet people who want to put me into a category like gay or trans. There is a clear binary into which the world wants to fit people like me. For example, even our languages don’t have a common third-person singular pronoun that is not gendered.

I am just a person. Why do others need to categorize me as either “he” or “she”? I feel gender is fluid: it can change based on time or situation. While I understand that for some of my transgender friends, it is very important for them to transition to their target gender, I would want people to understand that I don’t have a target gender. In my exploration of life, as well as my understanding of gender, my purpose is not to reach a destination but to just enjoy the journey. I am not here to discover an identity that fits me. I just want to keep exploring ways of expressing myself that makes me feel satisfied; without harming others, of course.

Some people think that fluidity means they can fit me into whatever identity they feel best suits me. Typically, I am asked, “So if you are not trying to become a woman, why do you want to wear women’s clothing?” There are multiple ways of looking at it: one perspective is, what is wrong if I dress like a woman? That is what I feel like doing at the moment. Another perspective is, why do men and women need to dress differently in the first place? By this perspective I also want us to question the relevance of gender. While most of the times I try to explain, sometimes I just ask them back: “How does it bother you? In what way is my dress affecting you?”

I am much happier now that I have started accepting myself. I feel I can share my experiences in the hope that it could benefit others. Most people live with gender dysphoria; they are not comfortable with at least some aspect of gender assigned to them. For example, a girl who is not allowed to study in an out-of-the-town college because no other girl in the neighborhood has done that or a boy who is discouraged from wearing nail polish because “boys” are not supposed to do that. I want to reiterate that the right to gender expression is a basic right—an integral part of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression and the fundamental right to equality. This is something that should concern not just certain individuals like me who don’t want to be identified as male or female. This is something that should be of concern to every single human being. Sometimes, people ask me what is so significant about wearing nail polish? Why do you have to talk about fundamental rights here? Parents telling their child not to wear nail polish because of the gender assigned to the child are at once violating both the right to equality and the right to freedom of speech and expression the child is entitled to. The body parts of the child have nothing to do with how the nails can be colored. This is as absurd as saying that a child should never wear a red shirt because he or she has long fingers. Some people might argue that though arbitrary and absurd, such a parental injunction would not by itself violate constitutional rights as no serious harm is done. It is not just that the child cannot color their nails but the consequence is that the child cannot participate in several meaningful social interactions just because of the gender assigned to them. Imposing norms such as use of nail polish, prevents the child from expressing their own identity. Therefore, I feel this is a violation of fundamental rights.

One other personal question that I find difficult to answer is “What is your gender identity?”. To those who insist on me mentioning a label, I usually say “genderfluid”. However, I don’t think there is any label that exactly describes me. I personally view gender as a performance rather than as an identity. I tell people, if I look feminine to you, call me “she”, if I look masculine to you, call me “he”. I don’t care what you think about my identity as long as you treat me with respect and dignity. I have a problem with someone only when they try to interfere with my right to express myself. In fact, I don’t even feel gender should have much relevance in my life. As long as I have the right to wear clothes of my choice, participate in activities that interest me, and associate freely with people who have similar interests, it does not matter to me if others think I am man, woman or someone of another gender.

A Tamil version of this piece translated by Arthi Vendan is available on eanil.com

Queer Madras, and sundry musings on sexuality
True, if you scout the city with the eye of an amateur ornithologist looking for a distinct subspecies called the homosexual, you are likely to conclude that it’s a rare bird or at least an elusive one. There are no bars or yuppified clubs in whose smoky recesses gay-identified men gather for an evening of dancing or cruising. Then again, Madras is hardly as exuberant as Bombay or Bangalore to begin with.

What I would include under the rubric of queerness is more subtle and far more pervasive than any institutionalized lesbian or gay identity. It’s like those flakes of tomato pulp nearly dissolved in steaming peppery Madras rasam, lurking below the surface, gratifyingly tasty yet barely palpable, and threatening to vanish if you attempt to define them or pick them out from the matrix of which they are a part and which they help constitute.

Some recollections.

All the schools and colleges I attended in Madras had queerness so amply represented that for the longest time I firmly believed that the Indian Kinsey Zero was a mythical creature. The Catholic boys school: where the gorgeous Malayali boy in my French class missed no opportunity to make salacious body contact and out of whose notoriously clumsy hands the pen would invariably fall into my lap, affording him scope for a leisurely feel.

Even that arts-and-science college that was the bastion of Mylapore middle class conventionality may have been straight-laced but was anything but straight. Encounters between day-scholars and hostelites were all too frequent, eroticised by a sense of otherness in both parties and enacted in late afternoons in decrepit hostel rooms with windows wide open, as the coconut fronds rustled in conspiratorial bemusement.

The hip rival college west of Gemini was no repository of heterosexual virtue either. A friend and study-partner resided in its hostel: this fellow was plenty smart, witty, a debating team rival, and big crush of mine. On one particularly memorable occasion after we had finished taking an competitive exam practice test in his room, he pulled out his stack of straight porn to show me, a common gesture of male bonding. Of the momentary wordless debate that ensued on the issue of who would initiate what with whom, I fondly recall there were two winners…

Inter-collegiate literary, music and art competitions, especially those in which out-of-town colleges would participate, were incubators for sexual exploration. It was in one such event at a co-ed college that I met the woman with whom I was to have my first “all the way” experience, one that left me starry eyed and gazing vacantly into space weeks after she was long gone. The intercollegiate festival of a prominent engineering college had immensely popular light and Western music competitions to which the hip crowds thronged while the more paavam-fied junata stood around the periphery in their rubber chappals and gaped at the unabashed revelry. Drawn to one such event by the hype, but finding myself out of place in both of these demographic strata, I opted instead for a walk through the campus woods, where, having left behind the crowds and the smattering of boy-girl couples making out or getting stoned behind sundry bushes, I chanced upon a vigorous scene of what the French describe so delicately as soixante-neuf, involving, yup, two guys who were audibly having the time of their lives.

But queerness wasn’t confined to the classrooms and grounds of academic institutions in Madras. The PTC buses, especially the 23A and 4G routes that serviced several colleges, packed in warm horny bodies like vegetables in aviyal stew. As the guys huddled and jostled in clumps to letch at the gals yonder, displays of homosocial bonding slid seamlessly into sexualized contact, all ostensibly catalysed by the sight of one “deadly babe, macchi” or the other. Tales of nocturnal travel on Thiruvalluvar inter-state buses are beyond the scope of this article…

How can I forget the venerable music auditorium, where, at an evening concert during the 1984 December cutcheri season, I was groped by an elderly gentleman in a fine pattu veshti (silk dhoti) as his wife sat on the other side resplendent in Kanjivaram sari and oversized nose stud, blissfully unaware of what her husband was up to as she noisily and inaccurately kept time to the ongoing keertanam.

As dusk fell on the corporation playground opposite the park on Venkatanarayana Road in T Nagar, bodybuilders would trickle in to pump iron and occasionally more. At the now defunct music school operating out of a dinky garage near GN Chetty Road: while young girls were sent to acquire credentials that would enhance their future marriageability, the boys usually went of their own accord, and not a few lingered after the school closed for the evening, the mridangams and violins were stacked away and the lights turned off.

I remember the strip mall in Besant Nagar where, on one of my visits home in 1995, a former classmate whom I was meeting after a long time proceeded to demonstrate his recently acquired skills at seducing even the straightest of guys. As I looked on in wonderment, he licked his lips, fluttered his eyelashes, ground his hips, and girded his loins as he minced over to a strapping specimen of Mallu masculinity, gave him a deliberate once-over that said it all, and walked on forward and around the block. In moments, the cruisee stubbed out his cigarette, glanced furtively around, and hastened to catch up with my friend. That was the last I saw of them that evening.

The more cynical or jaded reader might inquire: what relevance do these admittedly lurid anecdotes have to our contemporary (1990s) discourses on queer identities and movements in India? Everything, in my opinion. Bear with me as I detail my argument. See, some people would be wont to dismiss the above examples as opportunistic or situational homosexual behavior that “regular” heterosexual guys would readily engage in when testosterone surged and female companionship was unavailable. To yet others, these instances would illustrate the tyranny of a society that invisibilizes gay people and allows them only such fleeting encounters devoid of emotional substance. Both these views may be partially correct, but, in my opinion, are overly simplistic as they refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity and fluidity of desire.

Mixed in there with the libidinous teenagers and adults are individuals stuck in unhappy marriages, some male “friends” whose relationships remain invisible to most of the rest of society, not to mention the single women who deliberately acquired enough educational or professional credentials that they made themselves over-qualified for marriage in the eyes of prospective in-laws. Some of these “spinsters” live with their parents. No questions are asked about their sexual lives, of course, because it is assumed that women have no sexual desires, only sexual duties. Even parents who know what their daughters really want would prefer not to know.

There are untold tales of boys from conservative families who choose the spiritual track, sometimes leaving their homes to join ashrams or becoming vadhyars/pujaris because these options are queer enough in their unconventionality that they can allow them to escape the trappings of heterosexual marriage.

There also tales of men and woman who have unquestioningly acceded to their wishes of family and society and are not too unhappy with their heterosexual lives, but may have chosen other options had they been available.

Sure, we need gay and lesbian people to come out and identify as such, gaining acceptance within their milieux. But what about the countless others whose sexualities are more complex or fluid? By subscribing to the rigid binarism of sexual orientation most often prevalent in gay rights discourses, we deny some of the richness of human erotic experience. We also run the risk of pathologizing sexual orientation by presenting gays and lesbians as that minority that are only “that way” because they could not help it. While intending to elicit sympathy for their cause, such “born that way” arguments only serve to distance gays from the rest of society. They shove the bisexuals into one of two closets and further vitiate bipartisan politics.

Such rigid identity politics also have serious public health implications – HIV/AIDS awareness schemes that only target gay-identified men are going to exclude a large subset of the population that is not exclusively homosexual or is not gay-identified.

I am pleading for a more inclusive movement that recognizes the heterogeneity within our communities, that instead of creating “us” versus “them” polarities that only alienate, points out that some of us are also them, some of them are also us. A movement that challenges the gender inequality and heterosexism that’s at the root of not just homophobia but also institutionalized misogyny – brideburning, domestic abuse and rape. A movement founded on the premise that we have the right to choose who we love, and that it does not matter if we are guided by our hearts or politics or DNA.

Any takers?

To reach the author, please leave a comment on the Orinam website.

 image (c) The Guardian

This is how I like to view the world when it comes to genders.

Imagine a river. One bank is reserved for males and other for females. There are people standing on both banks of the river, so, obviously, they think they belong to one group or the other. Then there are people who are not happy just standing on the river banks and watching it flow. They want to test the waters: waters of gender fluidity.

Some dip their toes, some would take a bath once in a while, some would swim for a bit and then there are other folks who would like to swim across the river from one bank to the other. Depending on what part of the river one chooses, the outcome changes. If it is a calm and quiet part, wading and swimming is easy. If it is a churning part of the river, being in the water is a lot more challenging.

Now what would cause river to move in different ways? The rocks and other features underneath- which metaphorically translate into the unique situations and circumstances that each of us faces. How one behaves when they are inside the waters of gender fluidity might also depend on the people on the river banks. Are they cheering you or throwing stones at you ? It may happen that a boat might show up to help one through the waters- it could be navigated by a therapist, a support group of peers, or support from family and friends and so on.

This river has been flowing through since time immemorial and every generation has its share of folks testing the waters.

And that is how I like to think about it