Coming out is seldom a cup of tea for anyone but I finally did to my mother when I turned eighteen this year. She was supportive but also terribly afraid of my future and my existence in the world altogether. I felt guilty and responsible when mother told me not to be vocal and admitted that her friends may laugh at us. I wondered why my actions as an adult have any bearing on my family; that is a part of societal ethos that I will never understand.
Tag: Sexuality
আমরা অদ্ভুত /’amra odbhuth’/ ‘We are queer’. And there is now a café in Calcutta for those who know or imagine themselves to be odbhuth/queer: the Amra Odbhuth Café, in which people of various hues gather to talk about, and work on, dismantling identities and transforming them on the ground, at homes and offices, in the streets and markets, on buses and metros.
“Rainbow In A Brown World” is an entertaining, an educative and an animated film that depicts a day-in-the-life of a queer Indian woman as she goes about her daily routine and encounters various people who question her regarding her sexuality. The protagonist ‘Aarti’ is a young, queer woman who finds herself at the receiving end of an absurd, often hilarious albeit well intentioned questions about being LGBT. However, she answers these wittily and is often amused by them.
In July 2016, Railway Police Force (RPF) personnel arrested three trans women (male-to-female transgender persons) at a railway station in Kolkata, West Bengal. When a transgender activist contacted the RPF official about the arrests, the official told her that they were not ‘real’ hijras, and dressed up merely to beg for money. He said he could prove they were ‘artificial’ by stripping them and revealing that they had male genitalia. The activist tried to inform him about the 2014 Supreme Court judgment on transgender rights (‘NALSA vs. Union of India’, or the NALSA judgment in short), which states that one need not undergo surgical transition to be considered transgender, but the cop said he didn’t want to get into such legalities. This tendency of distinguishing between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ hijras or trans persons based on genitals is an old one: to give just another example, back in July 2012, the Times of India reported that four ‘fake eunuchs’ had been arrested near Kanpur after being medically examined and found to be ‘men’.
Safe, affordable and informed access to gender affirming procedures is a fundamental human reproductive health right. This basic right extends to self-determining which gender transitioning procedures feel safe, feel affirming (and for how long) within a context that is not medically coercive, manipulative and ultimately harmful.
Bamboo Shoots – a film by Steven Ao about a young boy and his mother troubles | Nagamese with English subs | 10 mins
No i don’t fit into your “India”, I am not a good indian girl, your definitions – they bind, restrict, constrict, They make me alien.…
When Sexuality Becomes Sex
From the flaring of the anus to unresolved mommy issues, various theories and sciences have sought to produce the homosexual definitively. The homosexual was the very being of sexuality is why each time the homosexual is caused, he is by a philosophy of sexuality. Take for instance medicine that has an imagined balance the body is in as tabula rasa. There is a minimum and an optimum. Some mix of anatomical unity, hormones and secretions, and (later) chromosomes reveal to the specialist who we are. Any incoherence only involves the restoration of this balance. The homosexual, for the longest time, could be found and cured in the same way since sexuality itself accrued from the alignment of these things that could be seen and extracted by magnifying glasses, needles, and tubes.
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