– Gee Imaan Semmalar
“For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for the reclamation of the human personality”. – Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
Structures of oppression like caste, class, patriarchy and racism function through creating inequalities that are maintained and perpetrated through institutional support. And hence structural violence often, is carried on for so long that it invisibilises and often legitimizes itself and its operations to even the very people on whom the violence is inflicted. Rather than an individual acting out an oppressive behaviour, it then takes on the form of an entire edifice of oppression operating in subtle as well as direct ways to violently exclude, oppress and dominate.
Existing scholarship or popular culture on transgender people in the Indian subcontinent pendulate between depicting us as phantasmagoric beings who don’t belong to either gender (linked to myths and monsters in Hindu epics), or freezing us in narratives of victimhood. This paper attempts to look at the kinds of structural violence faced by trans people in order to make the machinations of power more visible. Relative protections and vulnerabilities of course, depend on factors like caste, class, whether you were disowned when you were young, which region you live in, whether you have transitioned into manhood or womanhood, whether you can ‘pass’ (be socially recognised as binary gender) etc.
It is a known fact that there is a high dropout rate of trans people from school. The reasons may be many, including constant ridicule, discrimination in marking systems, sexual harassment from fellow students and teachers, punishments for gender non conformity etc. A lot of trans people are also disowned by their natal families due to the notion of shame which originates from caste patriarchy. Trans women or gender non conforming youth raised as boys are disowned at a higher rate than trans men, partly because femininity is culturally seen as a sign of weakness rather than masculinity which is seen as a sign of strength or courage.
The lack of education and homelessness at a young age are partly reasons for most trans women across caste engaging in street based labour like sex trade or begging. The other major factor being brutal and deliberate exclusions in employment which close off all other options. In fact, Living Smile Vidya in a conversation titled “Transphobia as a type of brahmanism” talks about how begging and sex trade have almost come to be like fixed caste occupations for trans women/hijras.
The only employment options for trans people apart from sex trade/begging and traditional roles like badhai are the lower rung positions in NGOs that receive HIV funding. Since trans women/hijras are engaged in sex trade, they were identified as a ‘high risk’ groups and subsumed forcibly under the category of MSM (men having sex with men) under HIV intervention work. Though the top down structure of these NGOs retains feudal power relations, a section of trans women/hijras for the first time, managed to get jobs as community mobilisers to distribute condoms and encourage people to undergo screening and treatment for HIV. Later, when some of the HIV intervention networks expanded to include a rights based discourse, some of them were promoted as spokespersons of the NGOs in media advocacy. Though the NGOs give a semblance of dignity during work to this section of trans people, the pay scale remains low and their decision making power, negligible.
The exclusions faced by trans people in employment result in a high rate of vulnerability. It is a well known fact that violence during sex trade is faced by all women engaged in it. Police violence is also very high against trans communities with almost no recourse to legal protections available to us in case of crimes against us. In fact, there is a high rate of hate crimes, rapes and murders against trans communities. Even when cases are registered, they are done with great difficulty following which no investigations, let alone convictions take place. For instance, there was a concerted effort led by trans women in Hyderabad recently, demanding one trans murder case to be investigated after almost 30 non lethal physical assaults went unheeded by police despite FIRs being filed.
On November 26th, 2014, more than 47 members of the transgender community were picked up from various places across the city of Bangalore and illegally detained at the Beggars’ Colony, an infamous ‘rehabilitation centre’ for people engaged in begging. They were detained under the Karnataka Prohibition of Beggary Act, 1975 although any trans woman who was in a public place was randomly picked up regardless of whether she was begging or not. The Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, the public nuisance and indecency provisions are also routinely used to criminalize trans women occupying public spaces. The Karnataka Government in April 2011 amended section 36A of the Karnataka Police Act to criminalize the hijra community, giving police stations the authority to keep a register of hijras and their details like place of residence etc.
The laws used to criminalize trans people are informed by a caste based morality of keeping public spaces free of the ‘polluting presence’ of all people engaged in begging, including hijras. It is significant in this context of understanding the attempts to keep public spaces caste puritanical, that religious mendicants are exempted from being criminalized under the Beggary Act. So, we see that while begging and sex work are fixed occupations for the hijra community, similar to imposed caste occupations, they are highly stigmatized, offer no dignity and are criminalized. The same caste morality is in play when trans women are denied housing in all residential areas except the slums. The residents of the slums, mostly from lowered caste and working class backgrounds, along with trans people across castes, face issues of access to water, right to food and nutrition, healthcare, sanitation etc.
The exclusions in the field of health care, as we know, are stark when it comes to low income families from dalit, Adivasi and Muslim backgrounds. Trans people across castes face difficulty accessing health care. Medical practice categorizes trans people as having a ‘gender identity disorder’. Though the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association replaced the diagnostic term ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ with the term ‘Gender Dysphoria,’ it is still listed as a “disorder” in the International Classification of Diseases of the WHO. So, to access trans specific health care like hormone replacement therapy or gender affirming surgeries, it is mandatory for the person to get a certificate after psychiatric counselling stating that they have a “gender identity disorder” (most Indian government hospitals follow the ICD of the WHO). The process of medical transitioning is a long and arduous one with the struggle to identify the few hospitals that provide the service, navigating a difficult and insensitive bureaucratic process, lack of medical knowledge in medical community about trans specific health needs, poor quality of services provided etc. Due to the fact that breast augmentation is a procedure perfected for cis women under patriarchal medical practice, trans women are also able to access only this particular surgery with relative ease. But as a whole, since the trans community is not a socially powerful group, no funds are sanctioned for new research on trans specific health care which results in no improvement to the poor quality of health care provided. The private clinics have begun to identify this population as a vulnerable one that is in desperate need of accessible services and have begun catering to a growing clientele at a prohibitive price. The poor quality of surgical interventions in private as well as government medical practice show an apathy to the trans community which is enabled to a great extent by the impunity from legal action for medical malpractice. The inaccessibility of the justice system to trans people greatly reduces the possibility of medical negligence cases being filed. The recent death of a 25 year old trans woman, Alisha, in Peshawar, after receiving delayed treatment as the doctors were determining her gender during emergency treatment, shows that accessing general medical support which is not trans specific health care is also impossible. The situation is the same in many parts of the world including in India. Last year, we lost a 22 year old trans man in a private hospital in Delhi due to a problem related to the administering of anesthesia before a hysterectomy. The hospital had no records of his admission and refused to provide even a death summary.
The Supreme Court on April 15,2014 ruled that trans people could change their legal gender markers without surgery or hormonal interventions. In spite of what was widely celebrated as a progressive judgment, there has been no implementation of the judgment and trans people are still routinely being denied the right to change their legal gender on identity documents without fulfilling some arbitrary criteria of surgical interventions. When persons are denied basic identity documents that match who they are, what is in fact denied to them, is a whole gamut of citizenship rights. Without documents that reflect who you are, everything from accessing the Public Distribution System or the educational system to get employment becomes tedious, if not impossible. Unemployment even among the few trans people who have accessed formal education is often due to the fact that gender markers on school pass certificates and educational degrees cannot be changed. The violence is enacted by the very act of erasure of the selfhood and allied citizenship rights of trans people. Many would ask, but why do you want to be legible to the state to enact its oppressive governmentality on? Such a question comes from a position of immense privilege of citizenship rights and fails to understand the relationship of subaltern communities and the state. There is no doubt that all subaltern communities bear the brunt of brutal state violence. But most subaltern communities often, work towards accessing full citizenship rights under an imagined welfare state with its attendant protections and benefits.
Trans women/hijras are often referred to as ‘eunuch’ by state policies, judiciary and media. The word ‘eunuch’ finds mention in The Hyderabad Eunuchs Act, which is based on the Criminal Tribes Act Amendment of 1871. The British, in 1871, included ‘eunuchs’ among other tribes, castes and social groups considered criminal at birth. In 2005, the central government introduced an E category in passport application forms where E stood for ‘eunuch’. There were protests from the trans community at the use of the word and it was later revoked. The linguistic violence/erasure runs deep. It is symptomatic of, and leads to further structural exclusions/violence against our communities.
Structurally, trans people face exclusions in language, history writing, medical care, housing, employment, legal system and education. When the exclusions are so grave, indeed, the very act of living is a revolutionary one. I believe that when the lowered caste trans woman engaged in street based labour receives full citizenship rights under a welfare state without discrimination, the struggle for social democracy and justice would have made a serious headway. Currently, the issues of trans people are yet to be taken seriously by groups engaged in transformative, democratic struggles. Meanwhile, this many centuries old struggle for the reclamation of human personality continues to inspire many younger trans persons like myself.
Gee is a writer and artist based in Bangalore and can be reached at gee.ameena@gmail.com