Transgender

Representation and Categorization: Understanding the Hijra and Transgender Identities Through Personal Narratives

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Rajorshi Das
University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract:

Following the April 2014 Supreme Court judgment, several attempts have been made to define and specify what constitute the Indian transgender identity. My paper looks at Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s autobiography Me Hijra Me Laxmi as an important intervention in this debate. Using literary and cinematic works by her contemporaries, I shall argue that while the categorisation of the ‘third gender’ may be necessary to facilitate governmental policies for the community, one has to look beyond law as a legitimizing tool as evident from the uniqueness of Laxmi’s ‘celebrification’ and its impact within Queer activism.

Keywords: Third Gender, Hijra, Laxmi, Transgender, Queer, Supreme Court, Celebrity, Testimony

Introduction:

In December 2013, the Supreme Court reversed the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment, reinstating the constitutional validity of Section 377 originally introduced in the Indian Penal Code by the British government in 1869 to criminalise all non-procreative sexual acts. The major grounds cited for the decision include the lack of prosecution under this law and the insignificance of a “minuscule fraction of the country’s population” (“Supreme Court Sets”, 2013) that gets affected by it. Consequently it came as a surprise when few months later the apex court in response to a writ petition filed by NALSA and supported by activists like Laxminarayan Tripathi (Dutta, 2014, p. 225) not only recognised the transgender community as the ‘third gender’ but also instructed the states to make reservation for them in employment and education sectors. While activists have questioned the inherent contradiction between these two judgements, I argue that it makes a significant (though unintelligent) distinction between gender performativity and sexual orientation. As Jasbir Puar (1998) writes –“one must interrogate not only how the nation disallows certain queers but perhaps more urgently, how nations produce and may in fact sanction certain queer subjectivities over others” (p. 414). Any definition of the Indian transgender is bound to be flawed and limiting unless understood from its cultural context. Aniruddha Dutta points out that the two judges in the latter case failed to come to any definite understanding of the transgender: while Justice Radhakrishnan relies on gender self-determination, Justice Sikri identities surgical evidence as primary criteria and restricts the label to the hijra community (p. 231). This recognition of the hijra as a gender endemic to India is at the cost of excluding those who identify themselves only by their sexual orientations- gays, bisexuals and lesbians.

As someone not belonging to the transgender community, I cannot claim to authenticate any of the experiences testified in Laxmi’s book. However, as a researcher, I can try and understand the various strands of the identity politics by looking at the representations of transgender bodies. My choice of texts like Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra Me Laxmi (2015) and Rituparno Ghosh’s Bengali film Chitrangada: A Crowing Wish (2012) is guided their primary focus on the hijra and transgender subjectivities respectively and problematization of these identities due to the celebrity status of the artists/subjects. I will also consider A Revathi’s Our Lives, Our Worlds (2011)—a collection of testimonies based on the theme of izzat–since being written by a fellow hijra, it not only authenticates Laxmi’s narrative but also probes into the specificities while contesting any attempt to homogenize them under umbrella terms like ‘LGBT’. In this process I shall also explore the relationship between gender and genre as evident from Laxmi’s work that heralds a new form of life-writing…Full Text PDF

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The Curious Case of Shanthi: The Issue of Transgender in Indian Sports

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Sudeshna Mukherjee, Bangalore University          

Background of the study

Shanthi Soundarajan an Indian runner was born in 1981 in the village of Kathakkurichi in Pudukkottai District of Tamil Nadu, India. Soundarajan, a dalit by birth belongs to poorest of poor category. She grew up in a small hut devoid of toilet, water or electricity. Her mother and father had to go to another town to work in a brickyard, where they earned the equivalent of $4 a week. While they were gone, Shanthi, the oldest, was in charge of taking care of her four siblings. Sometimes, Soundarajan’s grandfather, an accomplished runner, helped while her parents were away. When she was 13, he taught her to run on an open stretch of dirt outside the hut and bought her a pair of shoes. At her first competition, in eighth grade, Soundarajan won a tin cup; she collected 13 more at interschool competitions. The sports coach at a nearby high school took note of her performances and spotted her. The school paid her tuition and provided her with uniform and lunch. Athletics gave a new dimension to her life engulfed with struggles.

She had very impressive track record to her credit. At a national meet in Bangalore in July 2005 she won the 800m, 1,500m and 3000m.In 2005 she attended the Asian Athletics Championships in South Korea, where she won a silver medal. In 2006, she was chosen to represent India at the Asian Games held in Doha, Qatar. In the 800 meters, Soundarajan took the silver in 2 minutes, 3.16 seconds, beating Viktoriya Yalovtseva of Kazakhstan by 0.03. This win and a subsequent failed gender test lead to Soundarajan becoming embroiled in an ongoing, unresolved debate over the issue of transgender and sports (BBC News ,2006).She was told results indicated that she “does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman” (BBC News, 2006). Soon after the results of the sex test came out, she was stripped of her silver medal.

In this backdrop, my descriptive, diagnostic study, based secondary data, would like to trace the plights of transgender sports personnel in India and abroad.

Conceptualizing Transgender:

A person’s sex is rooted in biology. Sex is “either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species…distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). On the other hand, gender is a socio-cultural construction. It is the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. Transgender is an umbrella term that describes “individuals whose gender identity doesn’t match the gender identity commonly experienced by those of the individuals’ natal sex” (Buzuvis, 2011).

Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individual, behaviors and group involving tendencies that diverge from the normative gender role (woman or man) commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society.Transgender is the state of one’s “gender identity” (Self-identification as male, female, both or neither) not matching one’s assigned gender”(identification by others as male or female based on physical/genetic sex) Transgender does not imply any specific form of sexual orientation, they may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual or asexual. The precise definition for transgender remains in flux, but include, of relating to or designating a person whose identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender, but combines or moves between these.

A transgender individual may have characteristics that are normally associated with a particular gender, identify elsewhere on the traditional gender continuum, or exist outside of it as “other”, “a-gender”, “inter-gender” or third gender.

According to S.Kessler & W.Mekenna (1978) in theory, transgender is a challenge to the Social Construction of gender. In practice, it is usually transgender people in one way or another not place them outside the conventional male/female dichotomy, yet live in social world that recognizes only females and males. In the light of three possible meanings of trans, they considered to deconstruct gender.

The prefix “trans” has 3 different meanings. Trans means change, as in the word “transform”. In this first sense transgender people change their bodies to fit the gender they feel they always were. Transgender in this sense is synonymous with what is typically meant by the term (Kessler & Mekenna, 1978).

In the second sense “Trans” means across as in the word “transcontinental”. In this sense a transgendered person is one who moves across genders. This meaning does not imply being essentially or permanently committed to one or the other gender and therefore has a more social-constructionist connotation. The transgender person in this meaning does not leave the realm of two genders. The emphasis is on the “crossing” and not on any surgical transformation accompanying it such a person might say “I want people to attribute the gender “female” to me, but I’m not going to get my genitals changed. I don’t mind having my penis”. It is more like a previously unthinkable combination of male and female (Martin and Nguyen, 2004).

Third meaning of “trans” is beyond or through”. In this a trans gendered person is one who has gotten through gender, beyond gender. No clear gender attribution can be made, or is allowed to make. Gender ceases to exist, both for this person and those with whom they interact (Martin and Nguyen, 2004). This third meaning is the most radical, which talks for elimination of gender.

The term transgender was popularized in the 1970’s describing people who wanted to live cross-gender without sex reassignment surgery. In the 1980’s the term was expanded to an umbrella term and became popular as a means of uniting all those whose gender identity did not mesh with their gender assigned at birth. In the 1990’s the term took on a political dimension as an alliance covering all those who have at some print not conformed to gender norms, and the term became used to question the validity of those norms or pursue equal rights and antidiscrimination legislation, leading to its widespread usage in the media, academic world and law. The term continues to evolve; Transgender identity includes many overlapping categories including transsexual, cross-dressers, and transvestite and so on. Among these the term “transsexual” requires little elaboration, as it is closer to the term transgender.

Transsexual is a subcategory under the transgender umbrella. Three criteria are used to classify a transgender individual as transsexual: “(1) persistent discomfort about one’s Birth-Sex, (2) at least two years of persistent preoccupation with acquiring the sex characteristics of the other sex, and (3) having reached puberty (the age at which the reproductive organs mature)”( Pilgrim,2003 495- 501 ) .Transsexual people have deep conviction that the gender to which they were assigned at birth on the basis of their physical anatomy or birth gender is incorrect. That conviction often compels them to undergo hormonal or surgical treatment to bring their physical identity into line with their preferred acquired gender identity.

Transsexualism is not the same as cross-dressing for sexual thrill, psychological comfort or compulsion. It is not the same as being sexually attracted towards people of the same sex. Many transsexual people wish to keep their condition private, and this must be respected and they should be treated as members of their acquired gender…Access Full Text of the Article

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The Portuguese Queer Screen: Gender Possibilities in João Pedro Rodrigues’s Cinematic Production

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Antônio M. da Silva, University of Kent, UK

Abstract

The Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues has developed a significant cinematic production that has attained international recognition. The three feature films he made in the first decade of the 2000s (Phantom, Two Drifters, and To Die like a Man) engage with queer identities from different perspectives. This article examines the ways in which Rodrigues depicts these and argues that the films provide a spectrum of ‘performatively constituted’ identities that represent a challenge to patriarchy’s hegemonic subjectivities. It contends that such identities consequently represent abjection in a society that ignores them but also that the filmmaker gives them visibility and shows that their subjectivities do matter.

 

The transgender character Tônia in João Pedro Rodrigues’s Morrer como um homem/To Die like a Man (2009) sings a Portuguese fado in the final sequence of the film that opens with the line “Oh, how I’d like to live in the plural!” This line encapsulates how gender identities are constructed and depicted in the three feature films discussed in this article: they are ‘performatively constituted’ in the sense of Judith Butler’s (1990) assertion that “there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; […] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (34). In other words, these identities are ‘floating’ and not restricted to the biologically born gender.

In this trilogy-like set of feature films, which comprises his debut O fantasma/Phantom (2000), Odete/Two Drifters (2005), and To Die like a Man, Rodrigues offers the viewer a number of possible queer subjectivities. Queer means, in this case, all the identities that do not conform to hegemonic norms regarding gender and sexuality, including homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism. Moreover, it can be argued that queer is also what represents “abjection” (Kristeva 1982), which is a view patriarchy exploits to keep heterosexual identities in place. This happens in a rather symbiotic relationship that arguably needs the queer as an opposite to reaffirm what heterosexual identities are (or what they are not). Such a symbiotic relationship is evident in many patriarchal contexts where masculinity is defined mostly in relation to queer: one is either a ‘proper man’ (whatever that means) or he is queer and thus subject to punishment.

Context therefore plays an important role in queer subjectivities, particularly the urban space where such ‘abject’ identities are less susceptible to punishment and are, to some extent, ‘freer’ from severe regulations. This is evident in the three films discussed herein, which show that Rodrigues’s characters become part of the Portuguese urban space, represented in the films by the capital, Lisbon—as will be developed later in this article. However, as Trindade (2010) argues in relation to the Portuguese film Lisboa, Crónica Anedótica/Lisbon, Anecdotal Chronicle, such characters are Lisbon dwellers but they do not constitute a collective entity (or identity). This is a crucial point regarding these three films because the characters’ ‘failure’ to represent the identity of a group (a ‘category’) to the detriment of each individual’s has been an issue critics have picked on. In other words, Rodrigues’s films show the viewer a spectrum of gender identities but these are based on the individuality of the subjects he portrays rather than trying to create a collective queer identity. Despite this, his approach to queer indicates that such a term can work as an umbrella under which various kinds of gender subjectivities are possible. This is strongly indicated by the director himself stating in an interview that each film is a unique story, even if it could be related to the outside world (Lim 2009).

The aim of this article is therefore to discuss the queer subjectivities Rodrigues constructs in his films and how these are related to the urban space in which the characters are placed. It will refer mostly to Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection while discussing the characters’ subjectivities because these queer characters are part of an urban environment that allows them to get on with their lives as they are but makes them ‘socially invisible’ by treating them as ‘abject’ and refusing to see their existence…Access Full Text of the Article


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The Politics of Global Gay Identity: Towards a Universal History

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Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract

Through the years, the LGBT community has established a universal network of social relations for homosexual people, defying social, cultural and political borders. What is promoted is a global community that shares a common historical past and an array of invented/established traditions that venerates it. Historically, the LGBT community has valorized the Stonewall riots of 1969 as the nodal point of gay and lesbian politicization and June has been set up as the month of LGBT Pride in order to keep the memory of homosexual revolution and liberation alive. Yet, the Stonewall riots along with the impulse of the LGBT movement and its subsequent traditions have been defined as solely Western practices that predominantly derive from the American experience of the incidents, thus excluding non-Western perspectives. Furthermore, the ideal global community often requires a common, unified identity based on codes and symbols of LGBT history. In my paper, I would argue that the politics of the gay community, despite its Western-oriented milieu, have managed to promote and affirm a universal gay identity through invented traditions in order to provide a “home,” to project an imagined community that evades cultural, social, and racial frontiers, but above all to make this idea of “home” an available option.

Perceiving the world as a global village where cultures converge and information is freely shared has been contested. Indeed, the conundrums posed from the effect of globalization have redefined this idea of the global village and nations have turned to set up physical and cultural barriers again in order to protect their own cultural heritage from external corruption. Glocalization is now forwarded as the ideological discourse that moves towards supporting ethnic distinctiveness, yet does not completely obstruct intercultural exchanges. Nevertheless, it is still hard for people to shake off the remnants of globalization and the need to belong in the vast global village is still prevalent. This sense of belonging, as inextricably tied to bonds within communities – where one “feels at home” – is an idea based on and solidified by common experiences between groups of people. The LGBT community – or simply gay community – stands paradigmatic to the realization of this idea, hence promoting a universal history for the formation of a global identity. Seeing the 1969 Stonewall riots as the nodal point of the gay and lesbian movement, the history of LGBT culture has been rendered universal, thus embracing social, political, cultural and racial diversity through practices of established traditions and codes. However, the Western impulse in the historicity of the culture is hard to miss, a matter that has instigated sociological and academic debates in defense of non-Western cultures threatened by homogenization. In this paper, I would argue that the politics of the gay community, despite its Western-oriented milieu, has managed to promote and affirm a universal gay identity through invented traditions in order to provide a “home,” to project an imagined community that evades cultural, social, and racial frontiers, but above all to make this idea of “home” an available option…Access Full Text of the Article


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The Invisible Closet: Pressures and Difficulties of the ‘fringe-queer’ Community

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Joe Weinberg, University of Minnesota, Crookston

Abstract

LGBT studies is generally focused on the members of the queer community who are/were at some point ‘in the closet.’ That closet becomes a focal point of their identity, and the process of coming out of the closet is seen as an important and momentous occasion in that person’s life. But there are some groups that fall under the wide umbrella of the queer community that live in an ‘invisible closet.’ While their particular practices are not considered ‘mainstream,’ they are so tightly focused that sharing that identity with others is tantamount to involving others in their sexual practices. In particular, the fetish community lives in this invisible closet. If they tell anyone of their interests, they are literally sharing the details of their sexual activities, something that is often seen as “none of their business.” When a homosexual ‘comes out’ to friends and family, they are not providing details or involving these groups in their sexual activities. This ‘coming out’ instead allows them to express their identity freely, but maintain a modicum of privacy. When someone involved in the fetish, kink, or bdsm community ‘comes out,’ they express their identity, but by the nature of the beast, they do NOT maintain that privacy.
That said, the ‘invisible closet’ is no less restrictive to those within it, and often times it is a worse place to be, because the person inside has a conflicting desire: they want to maintain their privacy, but also be true to their own identity.

This balancing act is all the more difficult to maintain because it is invisible. While those within invisible closets don’t have to worry about the same discrimination faced by other members of the LGBT community, as they can easily ‘pass’ or ‘hide,’ this very capacity makes the pressure to break out of the closet even stronger. It is frequently driven home, both by society at large and by the members of the LGBT community who DO and CAN come out, that members of these other groups face a much more subtle, but no less intense, discrimination. By drawing attention to this closet, it can be seen how important it is to allow these subcultures to identify themselves without facing discrimination. There are no laws or even politically correct trends that support these groups, and while it is easy for them to hide, it is nonetheless incredibly hard ON them to do so.

Introduction: Coming out of the Closet

Coming out of the closet can be seen as a sort of rite of passage for the queer community. And the closet is not limited to homosexuality. As Sedwig writes: “The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay people” (p. 68); anyone who does not fit into the heteronormative definition of sexuality is potentially in a closet, and coming out of that closet is a significant moment. This moment where a young man informs his friends and family of the identity that he has hidden from them for so long can be cathartic, can be dangerous, and can be freeing. Sometimes it is met with anger. Sometimes it is met with misunderstanding, suggesting that maybe this is a phase, something that can be gotten over. Some people come out of the closet to support and applause. Some come out only to find that no one was surprised in the slightest.

Whatever the reaction, the moment of coming out of the closet is a significant one. When a girl tells her parents that she is a lesbian, she is exposing her inner most self, raw to their criticism and desperate for their acceptance. But she is also doing it with the knowledge that things may end badly, with results ranging from ostracism to outright physical violence. Somehow, though, the possibility of acceptance has finally outweighed the fear of rejection. Maybe she wants to bring a girlfriend home for the holidays. Maybe her parents don’t have the same authority they once did. She has finally come to terms with her identity, and is ready to present that identity, that true self, to those whose opinions truly matter to her…

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