Around 15 students from various disciplines gathered at the NCC Room at The American College last week, to listen to a lecture on a much relegated topic in academics – Gender and Sexual variation. The event was jointly organised by the college NCC and Srishti Madurai Educational Research Foundation. Gender activist Gopi Shankar elaborated how the month of October came to be observed as the LGBT History Month following a number of demonstrations and gender movements by activists in the US during the early 90’s. The day of October 11 is also observed as National Coming out Day in many countries to show how important it is for the families of gender and sexual minorities to accept them.
Gopi Shankar explained how though gender is talked about at various fora these days, the subject of gender minorities continues to be a taboo. “Even social media sites have included 54 gender options for any user. But the younger generation is largely ignorant about the other genders. Our society doesn’t look beyond the gender binary,” he said, pointing out that more awareness sessions should be held in academic spaces to enable students to open up on the subject. As a former student of The American College, Gopi noted how the institution was a forerunner in including third gender literature such as ‘Funny Boy’ by Shyam Selvadurai and ‘The Truth about me: A Hijra Life story’ by A. Revathi as part of syllabus.
The lecture aimed at sensitizing the youth to the issues of individuals belonging to gender minority, also touched upon the subject of intersex people. “Among the members of gender minority, intersex is the most misunderstood group. They are individuals born with under-developed sex organs,” explained Gopi. “Such babies are mutilated most of the times. It leads to various problems later in their lives. The World Health Organisation has condemned the mutilation of intersex babies.”
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Since the audience for the event were students belonging to the NCC, the lecture touched upon issues of genderqueer people in sports. Gopi cited various examples of how genderqueer sports persons have suffered due to their gender or sexual identification. He quoted from the famous cases of sprinter Shanti Soundarrajan from Kathakuruchi hamlet near Tiruchi who was disqualified from Doha Asian Games in 2006 after a gender test, South African sprinter Caster Semenya who was subject to gender test, acclaimed tennis player Martina Navratilova who came out as a bisexual publicly, to local instances like that of Swapna, a transgender civil services aspirant from Madurai who was denied a job even after passing the Group III exam.
A presentation on famous genderqueer personalities was run as part of the lecture that also elaborated on the references to gender and sexual minorities in Indian literature.
Lieutenant V.P. Sagimaynonathan, in-charge of NCC army wing, The American College, said that the student community is the best vehicle to sensitize the larger society towards the cause of gender minorities. Manoj Prabhu, a student, said he heard about genderqueers for the first time.
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“I have never known that there are people who feel and experience themselves as different from the gender binary set up.” N. Srinivasan, another participant, felt that the lecture made him feel sympathetic towards the sportspersons discriminated on gender basis.
Srishti Madurai will be conducting awareness lectures on LGBT issues at various educational institutions through this month.