ark Street’s LMNO_Q was buzzing with anticipation on June 21 ahead of Stories for Everyone: Celebrating Queer Narratives, presented by t2 and Johnnie Walker Refreshing Mixer Non-alcoholic, a special talk to add to the ongoing Pride Month festivities. The panel featured fashion designer-artist Ayushman Mitra; author, columnist and podcaster Sandip Roy; Anindya Hajra, a transfeminist changemaker; and Anuttama Banerjee, psychologist. Fashion designer Nil of Dev R Nil was our commander of choice to steer the session forward that delved deep into the human psyche and what impact it could bring to the mind when equality is treated just as a “catchphrase” and institutionalised “them-and-us” becomes part of the system. Excerpts.
Nil: Anuttama, what happens when a person is not treated equally, forget about sexual identities, just in general?
Anuttama Banerjee: Equality is not about considering everyone the prototypes of each other. That’s a misrepresentation of equality. It’s about equal rights. There are general equations — sexuality, class, caste and what and whatnot in our time. So all of that has certain roles to play. The moment I realise that I am not being given what I am otherwise supposed to be receiving for a certain condition that you think is ‘unhealthy’, that has a huge impact on a person’s mental health, and I would also like to reiterate that we do not say Queer Day. Why not queer? Why Pride? Pride is an assertion where we try and tell the world, “I am proud of who I am even though I am deprived of certain rights that you are not giving me because of your misconceptions and other reasons. That does not make me any less than who I am.” So the statement ‘pride’ has certain connotations because it stands exactly at the opposite area of shame. So we are actually trying to eradicate that self-shaming, self-blaming because we encounter that at home. People who come to me often talk about that formal ‘coming out’, which is something different; coming out to oneself is a huge struggle when you are constantly told this is not right or normal. So when one first confronts that ‘I am who I am irrespective of what you think of me’, I think that’s the most challenging part and through all these conversations, we are just trying to create a conducive space for self-assertions.
Nil: Seriously we needed to know what Pride means to the rest of the community that way. I will take this question directly down to Anindya. You are working with the trans people and you know exactly what being deprived means. How far have we come and what is the way ahead?
Anindya Hajra: Often when we speak about transness, we also speak about transness as a space of deprivation. We also forget that transness is also a lot about joy. All the kindness happening around June is especially pushed by a lot of corporate interests, and then what happens during the rest of the year? A person who comes here as a spokesperson and is facing discrimination in their housing society, is that getting addressed? If the tenant is choosing to throw them out, is that getting addressed? We live multiple lives. I identify as a trans person and of course, I was brought up with a lot of privilege. I had a decent education and my family is supportive. I have social and cultural capital in the city, which I can easily encash. You might have seen people in the traffic signals, and wondered what their lives are like. They say: ‘What really feels bad is that people do not even bother to roll down the windows and speak to us’. So the question is we have minimised our social interactions, the spaces where we could have conversations. Forget transness, the real conversations take a back seat. We never have a space to have a heart-to-heart; today our friendships, our situationships etc are defined in so many ways by Instagram and social media that we have forgotten the art of having conversation.
In transphere lives, and it is also tied to the question of marriage. There is a whole bunch of trans people saying, ‘Marriage is not the only kind of legitimisation that we are seeking, there are other sorts of relationships, non-familiar partnerships. Bobo and I could be living in the same house as queer persons, as friends, and this is the reality for a lot of trans/ queer people in this city and cities across the world. It is not a counterpart of heterosexual monogamous relationships that we see around us. There are multiple, fragmented, problematic, funny, fuzzy, queer — these kinds of relationships do exist. There are a lot of straight people in the city I know who live in a queer relationship. Queerness is not defined by either my sexuality or my gender identity per se. There are many ways of reading it. My friend who is a Manipuri transperson, struggles with her transgender identity when she goes to Delhi because in Delhi she is called what people of the Northeast get called in Delhi. So her transness is a double kind of disability or disadvantage.
Nil: Seventy-five years of Independence and I think we are just about addressing them. I think the conversations have started. We need to go beyond conversations. Sandip, you were living in the US around 30 years ago. So you have seen things change there. Our queer movement is very different from what the rest of the world has gone through, but still, at least it gives us hope that things have changed out there. As a society, as much as we think they are open-minded, they are quite conservative. What changes have you seen?
Sandip Roy: For a lot of people of my generation, we see America as a place of hope. That is the place you go to if you have the privilege and the ability. Now we are living in a city with all the problems that Anindya has mentioned. I think the biggest changes that have happened are people feeling confident enough about their identity in a way. Even in the US, when all of this was beginning in the 1950s, the first group that was fighting for the rights was called the Mattachine Society. They were privileged gay men who were basically asking for tolerance. In June of 1969, it was the drag queens in Stonewall who rioted because they were treated disrespectfully. The difference is the gay men from Mattachine Society who were asking for tolerance knew how to pass in society so that they looked like everybody else but the drag queens in Stonewall did not have that privilege. They were attacked and abused. It is important we realise that it is not about fun, parties and cocktails. It is history… you become equal but not identical.
Nil: Bobo, you have used your artform as a powerful tool today. In our friends’ circle, he is known as the ‘dream child’, he is always dreaming. I would like to ask you what would be a utopian world for you.
Ayushman Mitra: I would like the utopia to start from where the child goes to learn, see and dream — dream begins there.
Nil: I want you to just generally talk about what are the agonies that queer people are going through at this point in time. Where are the signs of hope and how far have we come? This whole idea of non-acceptance, firstly from their own part to their family and friends...
Anuttama: While I was listening to Bobo, I was thinking, once I was teaching in this institution as a consultant, and I knew there were students who are in same-gender relationships, and indirectly because institutions are particular about choosing words, they were given all sorts of reasons why not to embrace their identities and relationships. For example, one is studying hospitality management, this student is told, ‘See if you do not dress up like this, you will not be getting a certain programme. I have no problem with your identity otherwise!’ And, what do you mean by ‘I have no problem with your identity otherwise?’
These people are questioned in their own classrooms. The teachers and the way they behave, and these are colleges. There are times when the student has said, ‘Fine, let me talk to the counsellor’. They were sent to the psychologist implicitly with the hope that they would be ‘corrected’, ‘fixed’. So that’s basically the idea of times I come across when I talk to the parents.
Things are changing, and it is not about the place or education because I have also come across mothers who came and told me: ‘I have no idea about all these things. I am a god-fearing woman. I do not know whether God will permit this person or not. I do not know how I will handle society but I just want my child to be happy.’ I said, “Let’s start from there because society will not come and ring the bell and will not tell you how your child is doing. You are the society. It starts from you.’ So the dialogue can start, and, most of the time, we think ‘it is absolutely non-permeable and this person will not understand’. From my understanding, I would say that whenever I meet people from the community, my friends in my own life, I have often seen that there is no other way than embracing your truth. You can run away from everything but not your truth. Your truth shall follow if you are very much convinced about who you are and how you want to take it forward.
Sometimes there is guilt involved in it, that ‘I understand but I do not want to hurt my parents or such and such people’. I often say in these cases that you are not intentionally hurting them. You are who you are, and that does not make you a criminal; maybe you can hold a conversation that ‘I understand baba that you are being hurt, I am sorry that you are sorry but I am not sorry for who I am. I am not apologetic for my position’. We have to see what is stinging me and how we can create different dialogues within ourselves. In order to make everyone happy about my choices, I cannot live that person’s life. Life is not always going to be Instagrammable. Life is life. There will be random changes. Take your reality as your truth and let’s take the conversation forward.
Nil: Anindya, tell me about a day in the life of a trans person, since you have worked with people from the community. Lockdowns brought to the fore their struggle.
Anindya: The very perception of transmen is that we will spot them at traffic signals and get them to perform in a ceremony after the baby is born. We do not recognise their labour in different professions. I know a lot of trans people who work in factories. I know of a trans person who works in a biscuit factory in Baruipur. After working for a year, she was told by the contractor, during the recruitment drive, not to get another person like her. Guess what she did? She got another trans person! Out of the 1,500 people working in the factory, she was the only trans person working there before. When you try to break through the glass ceiling, what is the resistance you face? That person got her trans friend along and today it’s just the two of them standing up for each other. During the lockdown, we have seen the complicated, difficult lives of the migrant workers, and we have seen the situation of transgender people here. I have my colleague Julie here who works with a feminist resource centre. She is not at the traffic signal. She works for a women’s rights centre and she is fundamental to our organisation.
Diversity is a big buzzword today in the corporate sector. It’s because of structural reasons like lack of education and opportunities and falling through the cracks, trans people have not been able to complete education or go to the space where they would be absorbed in formal workplaces. There are multiple ways in which that labour, along with their gender identity, gets invisibilised.
My colleague Julie is a registered union member of the hawkers’ association, and she is required to go to political rallies. What is her identity in that space/ at that intersection? Is it her identity as a trans person or a hawker who is fighting for the hawkers’ rights? Doesn’t identity exist in a very complex intersection? Which is what most of our identities are. None of us live a single-identity life. We have multiple identities based on our interactions with other people. And often we miss out on one aspect of their identity or the other.
Nil: We realised during lockdown, we can do two things. Raise funds, go out on the streets and feed people in general or whoever is coming to the distribution centre. Anindya chose a set of 70-80 trans community people and then we realised we were going all across the city.
Anindya: This is part of what many people did I suppose. The realisation both of us had when we were doing this was the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.
Nil: The realisation was they were running the kitchen for their families, not only by giving food but also other things. We realised that their family needs medicine but they don’t have money because their resources have stopped.
Anindya: A lot of us trans people, we see ourselves as caregivers. Like a lot of women in this room are. Caregiving, though it should not be, becomes very gendered. The whole matrix of caregiving for a trans person is not just related to their immediate family, it’s to the larger family and the ecosystem.
Anuttama: The whole fabric is very important. How exactly I am viewing my binary role plays an important contribution too.
Nil: How do you see love from your perspective today, in this Pride Month?
Ayushman: I have been surrounded by a family where my grandfather was a painter and designer. I grew up in a studio. I had a great life in college studying abroad in London. When I create a symbol, that literally talks about every single aspect of what I have absorbed in these years of growing up. I call them genderless kissing faces. You cannot figure who they are or their faces. When people ask me: ‘Are they two men or two women? Is this a couple?’, I am like ‘Maybe for me, it’s you and your alter ego, or maybe it’s you kissing your alter ego and accepting yourself’. That’s possible. Most of us have fights with us and within us. Who we are and the self-love we speak about. And not just self-love in terms of taking care of yourself mentally and physically, this is the entire idea of celebrating yourself. Our art becomes a conversation starter.
Nil: Describe what you see, the funny things happening around us...
Sandip: The whole point of being queer is you realise that at some point or early you don’t fit into whatever box the society has for you, and I think many people adjust with it, mainly through humour. Humour is one way/armour to address the pain of not fitting in. It is a way for you to be with the world where you are not sure you will be accepted all the time.
People who come to me often talk about formal “coming out” and that is something different; coming out to oneself is a huge struggle when you are constantly told this is not right or normal. So when one first confronts that ‘I am who I am irrespective of what you think of me’, I think that’s the most challenging part and through all these conversations, we are just trying to create a conducive space for self assertions — Anuttama Banerjee