I spotted my new red car on my mother’s
dressing table near her cosmetics. I found her ravishing red lipstick more
attractive than my new car. As I turned a toddler, my mother later told me, I
loved spending time with her cosmetics and applying them on myself. The members
of my family enjoyed as I dressed up like a girl in my early stage of
childhood. I went to a co-ed school. There I noticed the girls and yearned for
their company. I enjoyed studying their mannerisms – the way they talked, walked,
or dressed up for any school function. At home I would shut my bedroom’s door
and in front of the mirror I would imitate them. I have a younger sister and
soon I started taking more interest in her dolls than in my remote-controlled
cars. During puberty when everyone in my class started noticing physical
changes, I struggled with my mental changes even more. During any family
shopping I always preferred spending more time with my mother and sister in the
ladies section than in the gents section with my father. I also felt the desire
to try on girls’ clothes with my sister, but never said a word to my parents
about this exceptional predilection. I didn’t like playing football or cricket,
I preferred playing games that my sister liked to play. Boys of my school and
locality teased and taunted me since childhood about it and their voice grew
stronger, literally as well, with time and age. I, on the other hand, liked
being demure.
When voices are loud you cannot ignore it
for long, I realized it soon after we came to senior school. All the while I
didn’t care about people’s taunts when I walked past them. They called me a ‘girl’
as if it was an appellation. When we were small I had many friends, soon I
found myself sitting at a corner and having tiffin all alone.
At
home the scenario was not completely different but it was still better. My
family also became aware of the fact that I behaved more like a girl than a
boy, a truth that they wanted to ignore and also hide from the society. I
started facing a lot of problems in school, on the road and among the relatives.
Coping with this reality was even worse than the nightmares of failing in
academics. I failed to gauge the insensitivity of the people around me, most of
whom I called my own.
In
the final year of school, when my classmates were racking their brains to
choose their field for a career, I was desperately trying to create an identity
for myself and for people like me. I could not understand why I couldn’t dress
up like a girl in my teenage when I could do the same in my early stage of
childhood and people found it ‘cute’ then.
People
say college days are the best days of one’s life after strict school years but
I found it more difficult to survive there, not because of academic reasons but
because of my personality. But it was during those college years that I came
across people like me. We were all trying hard to carve an identity and a place
in the society. There also seemed to be a slow awakening from the torpor
amongst people in the country. Different LGBT communities joined hands and
arranged movements. The first real exam was taken up by people like us when the
file submitted by the Lawyers Collective in year 2012 on behalf of Ms Laxmi
Narayan Tripathy, a transgender activist, was successful in establishing
another gender, the ‘transgender’, other than the binary gender construct of
‘man’ and ‘woman’ of all times.
The journey is long and the road has innumerable rough patches, but somewhere on the horizon the silver lining glimmers, and I am confident we will reach there someday!
- Rhitobrita -First year Honours (Batch 2016-17)
No comments:
Post a Comment