Sayani Banerjee

Independent Researcher, Durgapur, West Bengal, India

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Abstract: In this paper my aim is to examine the life of the Transgender community with special reference to A. Revathi’s literary pieces namely, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010), A Life in Trans Activism (2016) and Our Lives Our Words-Telling Aravani Life stories (2011). The way A. Revathi questions the heteronormativity and herself crosses the boundaries created by this heteronormative society gives us an insight into the transgender lives. She boldly confronts the popular discourse about the Hijra community as either the ones who beg at the traffic signals or in the train compartments and asserts that a hijra life is way more than that. In the preface to her autobiography, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story, the first of its kind in English from a member of the hijra community, A. Revathi puts forward her aim behind writing this particular piece, which is to “introduce to the readers the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires’’ (v). Her uneasiness of being trapped in the wrong body that plagued her from childhood becomes an emblem of the entire transgender community. If in A Life in Trans Activism, she charts out her incredible journey of becoming India’s leading spokesperson for transgender rights and describes her life and work in the NGO Sangama, which cuts across gender identities and sexual orientation, in Our Lives Our Words –Telling Aravani Lifestories, she documents the lives of several trans women who are fighting long battles to gain social and legal acceptance and by bringing these stories together she holds a mirror to our transphobic and misogynist society. Her’s is a resistance to the colonization of gender identity that has been perpetrated on the transgender community for so long. She does this by choosing to write her ‘own story’ as opposed to the grand narratives of the transgender lives thus giving us a firsthand experience of the truth of the hijra community.

Keywords: Transgender, transphobic, gender colonization, hijra, social exclusion

The life and work of A. Revathi is a saga of the “hijra culture, hijra ways of living and the violence and discrimination” (243-244), perpetrated on them by the heteronormative, transphobic, chauvinistic patriarchal society. LBGT historians or human rights activist prefer to include them under the umbrella term, ‘Transgender’. In her 1994 scholarly article, “My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village Chamounix: Performing the Transgender Rage”, Susan Stryker defines Transgender as encompassing:

all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries. The term includes, but is not limited to, transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, hutch lesbianism, and such non-European identities as the Native American berdache or the Indian Hijra (Stryker 254)

Born as Doraisamy in the Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu, Revathi quite naively recognizes and acknowledges her ‘Girlish desires’ from her early childhood, for, she not only loves to play girls’ games but also wears and flaunts with great pride her sister’s long skirt and blouse and behave like a shy bride. Thus, ‘dress’ being one of the major and perhaps the most important marker of heteronormative gender distinction, ‘cross dressing’ or transvestism is regarded as the primary source of desire fulfilment by the transgender community. Stephen Whittle in the ‘Foreword’ to The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) points out:

[Trans] identity can cover a variety of experiences. It can encompass discomfort with role expectations, being queer, occasional or more frequent cross-dressing, permanent cross-dressing or cross-gender living… (Whittle xi)

Revathi does participate not only in cross-dressing but also in cross-gender living in so far as she loves to draw kolams, the beautiful floral and geometric rice flour designs women draw outside their homes in South India and engages in the daily domestic chores along with her mother with utmost diligence. But the treatment she gets from her school teacher, who threatens to strip her for speaking like a girl and ‘holding [her] body coyly like one’ (6-7), opens up an entirely new, never experienced psychological dilemma before her. Here, Revathi critiques the educational institutions, which are supposed to be the guiding light of young minds but are literally the root cause of the diseased mindset which we now encounter, since; it is out and out shaped by the heteronormative patriarchal social setup of male/female binary where one must behave according to the roles assigned to them at birth. Following the traumatic incident, the still tender mind is forced to think about her ‘abnormal’ sexual orientations: “I [experience] a growing sense of irrepressible femaleness, which [haunts] me day in and day out. A woman [has been] trapped in a man’s body…But how [can] that be? [Will] the world accept me thus?” (14-15) Revathi recounts how her situation gets aggravated when she romantically starts imagining her male classmates: “This [confuses] me-I [am] a boy and yet I [feel] I [can] love other boys. [Is] this right or wrong?” (9). But in spite of being bullied with derogatory terms as ‘girl-boy’, ‘Number 9’, she is nevertheless, aware that playing the role of Chandramathi in Harishchandra, has been a way to give vent to her ‘real self’ and that this man’s garb which has been thrust into her by birth is the real ‘disguise’.

“One is not born, but rather becomes [a] woman” (Beauvoir 364), asserts Simone de Beauvoir, the French Feminist philosopher in The Second Sex (1949). While sex is a biological fact, gender identity, the process of becoming a man or woman, is socio-culturally constructed based on traditional masculine or feminine stereotypes associated with being male or female respectively. In other words, it is not biological sex that determines gender identity, but rather one’s inner sense of belonging to the category of male or female. Revathi believes that gender identity refers to the innermost feeling of “who I actually am. I am a man or woman because I feel like one; not because of the sex organs!” (27) According to Judith Butler, the notion of gendered and sexed identities is performative. Butler extends de Beauvoir’s above quoted insight to suggest that ‘woman’ is something we ‘do’ rather than something we ‘are’. To quote Butler, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender …(gender) identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” (Butler 33). Therefore, the concept of gender binary itself seems to be the reason behind the social exclusion and vulnerabilities experienced by transgender individuals. Sigmund Freud on his lecture on ‘Femininity’ writes: “When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is, ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make this distinction with unhesitating certainty” (Freud 113). Indeed so, our world is confined in this gender binarism where going beyond it will make one a freak, an object of curiosity and a subject to critical gaze. Leslie Feinberg makes a somewhat similar claim in The Transgender Studies Reader:

Gender: self-expression, not anatomy. All our lives we’ve been taught that sex and gender are synonymous—men are “masculine” and women are “feminine.” Pink for girls and blue for boys. It’s just “natural,” we’ve been told. But at the turn of the century in this country, blue was considered a girl’s color and pink was a boy’s. Simplistic and rigid gender codes are neither eternal nor natural. They are changing social concepts. Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with men who are considered “masculine” and women whose self-expression falls into the range of what is considered “feminine.” The problem is that the many people who don’t fit these narrow social constraints run a gamut of harassment and              violence…Who decided what the “norm” should be? Why are some people punished for their self-expression? (Feinberg 205-206).                                                

The gender binary helps us to understand the widespread stigma, discrimination and multi- layered oppressions experienced by gender variant individuals who do not fit into the rigid either-or (male/female) binary gender categories. It seems to be a call on Revathi’s part to naturalize this ‘mismatch’ or ‘incongruence’ between the anatomical sex and gender identity and not treat the transgender as the ‘deviant’ and ‘abnormal’ since, the psychological trauma, the feelings of confusion along with an array of loneliness, anxiety, guilt and shame that a transgender goes through upon this realization of being ‘different’ is beyond reckoning. In “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post transsexual Manifesto” (1987), Sandy Stone, an American academic theorist, critiques medical research and theory that deem transgender individuals too illogical or damaged to represent themselves, as well as those institution whose role in the reproduction of binary gender and sexist norms is of paramount significance. Stone argues that these social phenomena have restricted transgender individuals from participating in their own discourse, and instead proposes a counter-discourse narrative that disrupts binary understandings of gender, thereby allowing transgender individuals to speak as transgender subjects. And this is exactly what Revathi is doing- promoting a counter discourse. Revathi’s purpose is to sensitize people about the various issues of her community, as she radically states- “How many of us are even conscious that there is a social group called hijra? Since people are not even aware of our existence, they think ill of us. It is our duty to dispel such ignorance” (247) Revathi’s life is, thus, an epitome of the transgender life; its trials and tribulations. The perplexity, anxiety and anger that stems from the inability to negotiate with one’s true self, stand as a forever companion to the transgender community.

Thus, caught up in the curious web of learning and unlearning oneself she ends up in Dindigul to become a ‘chela’ (daughter) to a guru(mother), thereby giving her, long cherished dream- ‘What it is to be born a woman’ (24)-a tangible ground. Revathi creates her own identity shunning the identities thrust into her by her family, nation and society. She forges a familial bond with her new-found community as she recounts in The Truth About Me, “I [feel] towards [my Guru] as I [do] towards my birth mother; in fact, I [feel] even more torn about her, so natural [does] all of it seem to me” and, “I AM NOT a man now. I am a woman and I have a family with a mother and a grandmother, sisters-in-law” (43). The words are all assertive of her resistance to the modern, western concept of family. Revathi rejoices at the prospect of embracing multiple identities – Chela, Guru, mother, activist- which otherwise would never have been a part of her conventional life as a man. Though the transition from Doraisamy to Revathi is undeniably burdensome, the real challenge lies in its aftermath, the far-reaching consequences of her dream that Revathi faces – sexual exploitation, social discrimination, and psychological trauma that goes on to leave an indelible mark on her life. At Dindigul she becomes what she is now known as- A. Revathi, after the Tamil film heroine Revathi. Keen as she is to be a woman, Revathi undergoes ‘nirvaanam’ (castration) with extreme physical torment. It is believed in their community that in order to ‘complete’ oneself, one must necessarily have to go through sex reassignment surgery. It is noteworthy that these kinds of surgeries are most often done out of a sheer lack of any alternatives. As Revathi writes in A Life In Trans Activism “For those of us who desire surgery, it is not a brave choice, it is most often, the only choice” (186). A somewhat similar assertion comes from gender theorist Sheila Jeffreys, who observes that:

[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life- threatening continuing treatment violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born, what Janice Raymond refers to as their “native” bodies. It represents an attack on the body to rectify a political condition, “gender” dissatisfaction in a male supremacist society based upon a false and politically constructed notion of gender difference (Williams 2015).

Whereas, Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist, in an interview with Cristan Williams, a trans historian and journalist, calls the surgical intervention that many trans people undergo as a “very brave transformation” and feels Jeffrey’s views as a ‘kind of feminist tyranny’. For Butler, sex reassignment surgery is a choice- “Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs- it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one’s gendered life” (Williams 2015).

Revathi, much like any trans woman, soon confronts the grass root struggles of her ‘dream’- she is neither accepted nor respected as a woman. Although she can finally be true to her gender identity, Revathi discovers the harsh realities of life as a hijra, where social exclusion, violence and sexual assault are all too common. Revathi poignantly recounts in her autobiography A Truth About Me- A Hijra Life Story (2010) the plight of trans women:

Some men made bold to touch us, on our waists or our shoulders. Some others pointed to our breasts and asked, Original or duplicate?’. At such moments, I felt despair, and wondered…How we could ever hope to make a living?...we have no work of our own, our parents do not understand us and this world looks upon us with distaste (29-30).

In her book Transgender History (2008), Susan Stryker succinctly explains why transgender people are often treated with open disdain and disrespect in society:

Because most people have great difficulty recognizing the humanity of another person if they cannot recognize that person’s gender, encounters with gender-changing or gender challenging people can sometimes feel for others like an encounter with a monstrous and frightening unhumanness (Stryker 16).

Thus, as an element of strong apathy, Revathi resorts to several odd jobs including dancing at weddings, begging and sex work. Today people ask the transgenders why their community is involved in street-based sex work and begging. To which Revathi retaliates in A Life in Trans Activism – “who will give us jobs?...what choice do we have?”(14). Usually abandoned by their families they are forced to discontinue schooling, resulting in low levels of education. Society doesn’t accept them, and the government is least concerned about their existence and so, for a community which has no place either in our national imagination or psychological realm, what choice they are left with than begging and at times forcefully indulging in ‘danda’ (sex work), which is often cited as a criminal activity. Are they really criminals or is it the heteronormative patriarchal society which is the real perpetrator? As Richard M. Juang writes in his essay “Transgendering the Politics of Recognition” that:

[Trans persons] are regarded as persons whose identities are not simply ‘deviant’, but actively deceptive and criminal (Juang 714).

Revathi vehemently questions this marking of sex work as an act of criminality by arguing that, because they are minorities and are highly visible as trans people it becomes easier to label them and other females, equally driven by their desperate need to live, as criminals but what about members from the cisgender community (the so called ‘normal’ and respected people) who often engages in ‘clandestine sex work’. Isn’t that visible to law and authority? But that’s precisely how national discourse is structured where the center is always the law giver and the margin is the law abider and what Revathi is doing is constructing a counter discourse which in all probability is forever silenced. But, in so far as Revathi urges for the decriminalization of sex work and voices for a life of dignity and respect for the stigmatized lives of the sex workers, she transcends this emblematic boundary of the transgender community and forges solidarity with the other marginalized sections of our community. It is significant to note that Revathi belongs to her community yet stands apart. Her individuality is at best reflected when she consciously wants her newly made daughters(chelas) to avoid the stringent laws of the transgender community: “If they have truly accepted me as their mother …I don’t intend to do these rites with the expectation that they have got to earn and recompense all that I have spent on them”. It is indeed a rule to earn as much as one can in a hijra community and repay one’s Guru. She becomes a true liberal figure when she accepts the way her chelas want to live their life in the ‘wider world’; quite unlikely of a trans woman- “I [am] certain that I [do] not want to impose myself on my chelas just because I [an] their guru. I [do] not wish to curb their freedom in any way. It [is] enough for me that they lived happily somewhere. If they [need] me for support, I [am] always there for them”.

For the transgender there is no difference between a rowdy and police, for them the borderline between the ‘protector’ and the ‘offender’ usually blurs away. They are no stranger to the brutal harassment at the hands of police, who, considering them as public nuisances and a source of shame drive them away from the city limits but not without sexually violating them. They usually foist false charges on transgender individuals, accusing them of chain snatching, stripping in public and pick pocketing. Susan Stryker in The Transgender Studies Reader points out the justification, people give for perpetrating violence on Transgenders:

Those who commit violence against transgender people routinely seek to excuse their own behavior by claiming they have been unjustly deceived by a mismatch between the other’s gender and genitals. State and society do similar violence to transgender people by using genital status, rather than public gender or subjective gender identity, as the fundamental criterion for determining how they will place individuals in prisons, residential substance abuse treatment program, rape crisis centers, or homeless shelters (Stryker 10)

Apart from witnessing the very many facets of violence, they face social discrimination. Revathi at times hides her own identity of a trans woman to get a mere shelter and even if she manages to get one, the struggle to keep it intact is far more than that. Thus, from the violence on the streets to the brutality of the police, from struggling to get home to fighting for a passport, from job discrimination to denial of health care and housing – survival is still a battle for transgendered population.

If as a Trans woman, she takes on a new avatar as Revathi after her transition to a woman through surgery, in Sangama she takes on yet another avatar as an activist. Sangama, a Bangaluru-based Organization for the rights of sexual and gender minorities, opens several new avenues for Revathi, where she not only gets acquainted with several harrowing stories of sexually marginalized individuals but also starts advocating for the rights of Trans men, who are even denied by the hijra community itself. Unlike trans women, who have an alternative social support system such as the jamaat, and live together, trans men have no such support structures. These people find it nearly impossible to find a suitable female partner who accepts their identity as trans men. Thus, their lives are at a crossroads, and many do not know the best way forward. To them, Revathi becomes a mother figure. As Revathi recounts in her book, A Life in Trans Activism, that she joins Sangama even with a meager salary of 2500/- because for her it is a liberation, “liberation from the demeaning street-based sex work that [has] robbed me of my dignity and [has] subjected me to numerous violations” (68), but soon enough she realizes her joining Sangama holds a larger purpose of liberating others who are equally marginalized, stigmatized and exploited by the society. A Life in Trans Activism, gives an insight into her journey from a peon to the director of Sangama, from a member of the “excluded and exiled community” criminalized by law to a leading spokesperson for the rights of the highly invisibilized sexual and gender minorities.

Narratives about the Hijra community occupy a special significance in the Hindu mythology. The concept of “tritiyaprakriti” or “napumsaka” had been an integral part of the Hindu mythology, folklore, epic and early Vedic and Puranic literatures. “In India, Ardhanareeswara, the half-male and half-female form of shiva, is worshipped. Why then would such a country abuse hijras? How could those of you who have read the story of Shikhandi in Mahabharat refuse to understand hijras? (2) questions, Revathi in her Preface to Our Lives, Our Words: Telling Aravani Lifestories. A similar claim seems to come from Devdutt Pattanaik, an Indian mythologist and illustrator, who in his 2014 book Shikhandi And Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You, argues that the celebration of queer ideas in Hindu stories, symbols and rituals is in stark contrast to the ignorance and rigidity that the Indian society today stand for. He further points out that, following the political freedom from British Raj, our founding fathers of the Indian republic have given rights to all men and women, irrespective of caste, creed or language but not to the queer people. The courts of India have always upheld secularism and human rights. But this courtesy was not extended to the queer people. To DevDutt Pattanaik, when the queer is pointed out in Hindu stories, symbols and rituals (‘why does Krishna braid his hair as a woman’s plait and wear a nose ring like a woman?), they are often explained away in metaphysical terms and no one has ever bothered to question those. Thus, queerness has been made visibly invisible. In this context, he celebrates the Indian hijra community:

But the hijra, perhaps the most vocal manifestation of queerness in India, refuses to stay invisible. Ignored by the mainstream, often rejected by her own family, reduced to a joke in popular entertainment, she claps in the crowded streets demanding to be seen. The hijras challenge not just the boundaries of gender, but also the boundaries of religion, for it is not uncommon to find a hijra with a Muslim name, using Farsi words (the court language of the Mughal era), worshipping a Sufi pir, alongside a Hindu goddess. (Pattanaik 29)

Thus, he cites thirty such examples from Hindu mythology that talks about queerness like, Shikhandi, Vishnu, Urvashi, Arjuna to name a few. Not only are hijras mentioned in Hindu mythologies but were also an integral part of Mughal palaces where they served as handmaidens of the queens. Some blame the British for making Indians defensive about being so ‘feminine’ and for criminalizing, amongst many others, queer communities like the hijras and everyone else who indulges in ‘sodomy’ (a biblical word for sexual deviation that was practiced in the ancient city of Sodom). To believe it, then, it will be no wrong to say that the present condition of the transgender community owes to the colonial master’s ideology and is therefore, a kind of ‘colonial   hangover’.

On April, 15, 2014, the Supreme Court of India has passed a landmark judgement, that acknowledged the Transgender people as the ‘third gender’ and affirms that the fundamental rights granted under the Constitution of India will be equally applicable to them, including equal opportunities in education and employment and give them the right to self-identification of their gender as male, female or third gender. They are formally recognized and accorded special status as OBCs. The judgement adopted a humane and compassionate view of the widespread stigma and discrimination experienced by members of the transgender community. Describing them as individuals whose ‘mind and body disowned their biological sex’ (211), transgender persons have been ostracized and ridiculed by society. However, Revathi poignantly states “Like Babasaheb Ambedkar [has said] [that] legal change without social freedom is meaningless. Even the best legislation in the world is of no use if people’s mindsets and attitudes remain closed” (218). A similar idea is propounded by Judith Butler, as she says in an interview with Cristan Williams:

…nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world. This will happen only when transphobia is overcome at the level of individual attitudes and prejudices and in larger institutions of education, law, health care, and kinship (Williams 2015).

Revathi does convey her heartfelt gratitude to the eminent lawyers and NALSA team, who spearheaded this initiative, but is also critical of the loopholes of the judgement. She raises several problems in the judgement, like the judgement’s use of the derogatory word ‘eunuch’ and describing them in terms of the lack of reproductive capacity, the several significant omissions, the discrimination and exclusiveness in the language used, and non-recognition of the experiences, needs and concerns of trans men or female to male trans persons and the implication of the term ‘transgender’- who are included or excluded within this term? The judgement quotes a small section from her 2010 autobiography, The Truth About Me without even acknowledging her and passing off her experience as that of another non-transgender person’s. She strongly rejects the use of the term ‘eunuch’ and objects it as a ‘colonial medicalized usage’. But the most potent question that Revathi raises is this: ‘Is it necessary to have a separate category as the third gender’ (214). In all likelihood, this existence of the term ‘third gender’ inadvertently aggravates the stigma and discrimination of an already marginalized community. Trans people become highly visible and are signaled out for being ‘different’. Revathi urges us to see beyond this gender binary and all such heteronormative terms: “I strongly believe that we need to go beyond male-female distinctions and learn to look at people as human beings” (17).

Revathi cites, the Tamil Dalit writer, Bama as her inspiration and indeed one finds similar claims for self-respect and dignity in both of them. Bama’s influence in her is felt when she states- “Just as how dalits have come to oppose the violence inflicted on them, why cannot we hijras get together and fight for our rights?” (247). If Bama is a born dalit, Revathi becomes one in the course of time. The humiliation, rejection and exclusion that Bama faces as a dalit, as is registered in her autobiography Karukku (2012), Revathi faces the same as a trans woman, which she narrates most explicitly in her autobiography under discussion. In so far as it speaks of and for a community, qualifies as an atrocity narrative that documents trauma and strategies of survival, Revathi’s autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story represents a group experience and is more like a testimony to that experience and one wonders if this can be aptly considered as a Transgender testimonio, much like a dalit testimonio. Thematically it reflects a dalit testimonio by situating her narrative in the material sufferings of the transgenders.

Revathi, therefore, provides a firsthand experience of the transgender community of India, and now for us, the readers to know and understand this radically ‘different’ foreign within the very sovereign, one needs, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms “a surrender to the special call of the text” (Spivak 183). The way Revathi records, listens and witnesses the unsung stories of the transgender lives in Our Lives, Our Words: Telling Aravani Lifestories, she unmoors the hijra life story from the shackles of those grand narratives and reclaims the lost subaltern agency. As the non-heteronormative, she desperately tries to uproot the popular discourse that the populace holds. For the world to understand the socially, politically, culturally, economically and sexually marginalized ‘other’, there must necessarily emerge a deep-seated consciousness. In this case, Revathi calls for a transgender consciousness. It is only through a collective consciousness that one must negotiate with a life stuck at the crossroads of sexual identities. The transformation in the transgender world is underway, yet “In many parts of the world, having a trans identity still puts a person at risk of discrimination, violence, and even death” (Whittle xi). Revathi, the transgender who has been denied, all the fundamental constitutional rights, the basic human rights, ends up embodying the true spirit of our Indian constitution, when she reflects on her definition of freedom or liberation: “For us to be liberated from gender oppression, we must also be liberated from caste, race, and religious oppression. Our struggle must be against all these systems of power and not just one” (114). Thus, Revathi envisions a world devoid of any hierarchies and binaries whatsoever, and so we too.

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