Navigating The Genders

I am a 23-year-old boy. But even though I am a boy, I feel like a girl inside. I’ve always liked to wear girls’ clothing, like skirts and bras, and I have felt this way from my childhood itself. I feel that I am totally a woman. Can you tell me why this is happening to me? Are there other people in the world like me? Can I really change into a woman, and if so, how do I do this?
–J

I have to apologize to you, J, because I received your letter about a month ago and I put off responding to it because the question you’ve posed is just so dauntingly large. I’m sorry for making you wait so long. To answer your query, it sounds to me that you are a transgender woman (or gender-variant and genderqueer—I’ll be using all these terms interchangeably although there is quite an argument in the community whether it is really accurate to do so). That is to say, you are a person who has been born with the biological characteristics of a man but who identifies yourself as a woman. India has a rich heritage of communities of people who transgress and transcend the blindly accepted gender binary of “male=penis” and “female=vagina”, and who are redefining what gender means on the ground Essentially, the argument of many gender activists and theorists is that one’s gender is not necessarily linked to biological characteristics, that there are more genders under the sun than just “male” and” female”, and that it is necessary as a society to expand our socially accepted definitions in order to reflect the diversity of how gender is lived and experienced in the real world. For example, many people who identify as hijra state openly that they consider themselves women, plain and simple, and yet there are also others who identify as transgender and say that they fall into a third gender category that cannot be defined as either male or female. And that’s all to the good. The beauty of engaging with gender-variance is that it pushes all of us (including transgender individuals) to question our assumptions about gender and sex and to acknowledge the fluidity of such identities. It also allows non-genderqueer individuals to push the boundaries of their own genders: if a butch-presenting lesbian and a very femme transgender individual both identify as women, then they are both challenging assumptions about what womanhood means and expanding the limits of gender identity and embodiedness for us all—gay, bisexual, straight, transgender, and queer. All of this gender theory is my way of telling you that you are not alone. Not by any means. There are many communities of hijras in the north and aravanis in the south that you can tap into as sources of support and guidance. (You may, for example, have seen the recent news reports about the addition of “transgender” as a gender category to official documents and government applications in Tamil Nadu.)

Now, you raised the question of how to “really” change into a woman. In my book, you already are one. But of course, not everyone will see it that way, not among the aravanis and transgender population. In the opinion of many in the transgender community, one cannot truly call themselves male or female until they have undergone the sex-reassignment surgery. (This surgery essentially creates either a new set of genitalia and secondary sex characteristics for the person who elects to go through it and is often preceded and followed by a long-term course of hormone therapy.) However, the surgery is expensive and carries certain health risks, and not everyone chooses to do it. Does that make them less authentically the gender they’ve chosen? In my opinion, no. It’s ultimately your decision to make, and you have to be comfortable with it since you’re the one walking out of that hospital. We’re dealing in profound issues of identity here, and when it comes right down to it, only you can define who you are and set the terms of your own selfhood. Not me and not anyone else. It’s your right, J. So claim it.

Alphabet Soup

No serious question here or anything. I just want to know what the full expansion of “ LGBTQ” is. Thanks!
–Just Curious

Excellent question, my good sir, madam, or whatever. There’s a lot of debate in the LGBTQ community over precisely the use of which term should be used to identify itself, and this is a good opportunity to lay out a little bit of the history of queer identity politics within India and at large. LGBTQ stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer”. It’s an umbrella term for all the people out there with gender identities and sexual orientations there that are not straight, but many individuals who are part of the community have issues with the use of just about all of the words in that acronym (particularly “queer”), since they are all English words and thus the domain of privileged, English-speaking Indians who have access to that kind of politicized self-identity and the luxury of defining themselves through the lens of Western labels. A same-sex desiring man or woman in a rural village (or, not to put too fine a point on it, in Washermanpet) wouldn’t call themselves gay or lesbian because they simply don’t know this exclusionary Western terminology—or so the argument goes. I’ve heard of the acronym being expanded to include kothis (the commonly accepted word for femme-presenting gay men in India), aravanis (the Tamil word for transgender women), hijras (the Hindustani word for transgender women), intersex individuals (people with indeterminate sexual organs), and people who are “questioning” their orientation or gender—LGBTQQHIA. (Quite the mouthful, isn’t it?)

Personally, I think the argument about questions of exclusionary terminology on the basis of language, while valid, doesn’t really go anywhere since most of the Indian terminology is unequally gendered anyway. There are words for men who desire men and for biologically-born men who experience their gender as women, but there are no available Indian-language words for same-sex desiring women or biologically-born women who experience their gender as men. The ability to name, identify, and ultimately define oneself isn’t simply the purview of educated, English-speaking urbanites, but arises out of a practice of unequal power relations that implicates all of us, not just people who are not in the know. The argument about the inequality of identity labels is flawed for precisely that reason—the inequality runs deeper than just the use of language and isn’t predicated solely on sexual orientation, but contains an element of gender inequality as well. My answer to all of this? Call yourself what you want but continue to express solidarity with others who answer to different names. A queer woman shouldn’t hate on a lesbian woman, and vice versa. We’re all in the struggle together.