The year has started on a happy note for Gopi Shankar. He has won the Commonwealth Youth Workers Award for using arts and sports as a social tool to empower young people with positive alternate space. He is the only Indian among the 14 awardees shortlisted from 52 countries. He was also recognised as agent of change for the remarkable work done by him in his community and awarded the Runners up trophy for Queen’s Young Leaders Award-2017. He has bagged a scholarship in Cambridge University for a leadership course.
Yet, a sense of loneliness hovers. “It is not about the awards that I have won,” he says, “but how I can use them for furthering the cause and welfare, acceptance and understanding of people from the LGBTQIA (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual) community,” says Gopi who came out the closet by the time he came out of his teens.
At the age of 14 Gopi had joined the Ramakrishna Math at Mylapore and from there went to Belur attracted that he was to all good things about different religions. But when questions of his own sexual orientation rose, he left. And, the struggle to assert himself always followed him.
“It was a process of self-realisation. I should accept myself as who I am before my parents or the society did,” says the young founder of Srishti Madurai, an organisation started in 2011 to spread awareness about the LGBTQIA community, run a 24X7 helpline and face-to-face counselling services to the community members in need. But more importantly, Gopi takes his work and organisation to the younger generation to make them more empathetic towards the often stigmatised and marginalised community.
Though many schools and colleges did not open their doors to Srishti, lot of human rights activists and independent scholars joined them along with gender queer activists to take the message forward. And what is that message, I ask him. “To be able to see the innocence of a child who knows nothing of society’s prescribed gender expectations,” he pleads.
“The transgender and gender non-conforming children are not confused but their parents are clueless. All we have to do is to listen to them, believe them and love them unconditionally because they know their inner selves,” adds Gopi.
Gopi tries to help people who struggle with their gender preferences. “We are trying to cultivate human values and allow a child to be raised in the expandable list of identities,” he says. “We are constantly fighting against a system to create an alternate space,” asserts Gopi who has authored the first ever book in Tamil on gender variants titled Maraikappatta Pakkangal (Hidden Pages). It is an insightful take on how a baby is born only as a male or female or intersex but grows up with 58 gender options. “The book has a bit of everything, from science and religion to sociology and anthropology, psycho-analysis, philosophy and politics of gender and also interprets references to alternative genders in Hindu mythology, the Quran and the Bible.”
From what started as a four-member group, Srishti Madurai today works round-the-clock with 15 permanent volunteers who address problems of families who are primed to reject their child for the queer behaviour that does not gel with societal norms. Earlier one or two complaints came in a week, now the helpline (9092282369) receives two dozen calls a week. “People are either ignorant, indifferent, vulnerable, shocked or depressed. They don’t know how to handle the situation and all that they need to be told is they are not alone or without options,” points out Gopi, who was instrumental in lobbying for the Transgender Bill to decriminalise homosexuality and organised Asia’s first Genderqueer Pride Parade in Madurai in 2012.
But it was his fight for the Indian athlete, Santhi Soundarajan who was stripped off her silver medal after a gender fail test in 2006. The incident made Gopi Shankar realise the ills of the system that refuses to give dignity to members of the LGBTQIA community and he stood with Santhi in her fight to get back her medal, prize money, respect and now also the job of an athletic coach in the State Sports Department.
The stress of gender minorities takes its toll, says Gopi, and there is an imperative need to rehabilitate them. “People from the community should be able to talk to their friends and family freely and feel accepted. Though many have come out of the closet, they still feel isolated because they do not fit into the straight system and the gap remains wide,” he says.
What about him? I am a free soul trying to help others, he smiles and requests, “if possible please use the gender-free neutral pronoun ‘ze’ for me.”
