“I don’t believe in being labelled as man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, lesbian. I am in a space where I feel like a man sometimes, I feel like a woman, I feel like a hijra sometimes. That’s exactly who I am. There are no boxes for my gender expression and there are no boxes for my sexual expression,” says Sumathi, a musician and activist who identifies as gender-queer (someone who doesn’t identify as male or female or is gender-less).”
The gender binary — male and female stereotypes — is ingrained early in life. But in reality, the spectrum of gender identities is vast — ranging from gender-queer, gender non-conforming, and gender fluid to bi-gender. The language of self-assertion is key, feels Navadeep, research fellow at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad, who identifies as transgender-queer.
“One way of expressing gender is with your lifestyle and the way you live. But it is also about asserting yourself through language. When you don’t have the vocabulary, you cannot assert your identity — and not just with others, but with yourself too,” says Navadeep.
Aparna Narrain And the moment you don’t conform to the system that is prescribed, making you “fluid,” you’re destroying the structures of being male and being female, says Sumathi. “According to me, gender non-conforming and gender fluid is all part of being genderqueer.”
Recently, there has been greater visibility of gender non-conforming people abroad (for instance, many universities in the U.S. are now giving students the choice of using pronouns other than “he” and “she”) and celebrities are talking about being gender-fluid including actor Ruby Rose of Orange Is The New Black , while actor Jaden Smith shot for an ad campaign for Louis Vuitton’s womenswear.
But Alok Vaid-Menon, an artist based in New York City, who identifies as gender non-conforming, says "I find this to be pretty ironic because prior to colonisation, places like India actually had many, many genders that were socially and culturally recognised. The gender binary was imposed through colonialism. Now the West is pretending that it’s the ‘first’ to ‘discover’ gender non-conforming identities.”
The question, though, is: after the Delhi High Court judgement in 2009 on reading down Section 377; the Supreme Court reversing the High Court judgement in 2013; the 2014 National Legal Services Authority of India judgement on creating a third gender and recently, the Supreme Court deciding to refer the curative petition on Section 377 to a five-judge constitutional Bench, has there been a shift in attitude in the country?
Has a more visible and stronger LGBTQI movement created more awareness of identities that do not fall under LGBTQI? Alok says: “No, actually I think the visibility of LGBTQI movements results in the erasure of those of us who do not fit into these identities. That’s because LGBTQI movements themselves are so fixated on the idea of categories and identities. There’s no longer a space to be that is more complicated (or even ‘I don’t know!’). There’s a pressure to come out and now the identities are already fixed for you.”
But the mainstream media coverage of the issue has changed, says Sumathi. “It has understood these issues but then again they only look at either gay men or male-to-female transpeople. Other people who exist in the spectrum are not at all visible in the media. It’s actually not about being visible or not visible, it’s about being acknowledged. Recently, after the February 2 judgement, we went to Town Hall (in Bengaluru), there were either gay boys speaking or male-to-female transpeople speaking. Not one gender-queer, lesbian or a female-born person spoke. There should be some amount of balance, so the media should also think in terms of representation.”
There is still a very long way to go indeed, says Navadeep. “I will not nullify the judgements and say they mean nothing. At one level they do mean a lot to the community, but to what community of LGBT is the point. These judgements matter to the educated, elite, upper middle class, English-speaking LGBT community because they know the existence of law, they inhabit urban spaces where law operates in certain ways if not completely. We don’t live in a country that is nearly or completely run on constitutional legality. We live in a country and society that is run by religious morality, family — all which propagate traditional values of gender and sex. So a mere change in the judgement or announcement of a judgement will do nothing on the ground.”
There is much more understanding about sex and sexuality than there was before, says Nivedita Menon, professor and feminist scholar. “Society has changed a lot already because the queer movement has been around for 10 to 15 years. So it's not like you have to start from scratch. But certainly the media has a greater responsibility and has to be more alert and resist slotting the whole world into male and female and treating everything else as an aberration. Of course, this also has to happen in classrooms, in conversations, at parties and on social media. This kind of discussion and conversation has to go on continuously in all possible spaces and it has to continuously be in the public eye.”
The writer is a freelance journalist based in Bengaluru.
