Creating hierarchies of minorities within minorities is not helpful. We have to fight that fight together, not play the game of competing marginalities and disavowals of who we are historically and psychically based on fantasies of our own radicalism and supposed freedom to be who we are.
Merely making announcements in classrooms about helping people in healthcare without discrimination based on gender wouldn’t be the best solution to develop novice health care providers.
The change of one’s name only becomes official after being published in the Gazette of India. For transgenders, there is another additional complication of producing the SRS (Sexual Reassignment Certificate). The lack of a gender-corresponding ID card complicated things further.
Gender dysphoria is real! It can be related to anything; it can be when someone calls you with your assigned name or treat you as a girl, while going through security checks in the women’s queue.
RAQS (Resistive Alliance for Queer Solidarity) organized its first event on 24 March, 2017 in Svaraj Vidyapeeth, Allahabad on ‘Alternative Gender and Sexual Identity’
Even when I followed the patriarchal norms, my identity was questioned every single day, my soul cried every single day, my childhood was not fun, it was a struggle to find my real self
In the case of Meitei society, wearing phanek has come to acquire gender, moral and cultural values. So wearing phanek is my own battle to challenge patriarchal norms, values and heterosexuality.