By Ishika Sancheti
On the evening of September 6th 2018, as I walked into my coaching class and took my usual seat beside my friend, I couldn’t contain my joy. On my right sat a friend who had recently come out to me and the smile on her face said it all. She was happy. She was happy to be free, finally. And I could not be happier for her.
But on my way home that day, at the traffic signal was a child begging for alms. At the sight of the child, I was instantly reminded of the trans people or as they are called in India, the Hijra people. The child tapped on the window and after a few seconds when the light turned green, retreated and walked towards the curb, her head hung low.
It is no surprise in India to see the Hijra people show up at weddings or at the traffic signal, begging. This is a lineage from the British Colonialism we carry stronger than tea, and it has only hurt and oppressed. Section 377 criminalised gay sex, or any other forms of “unnatural” intercourse and it is appalling to note that the prison sentence for it exceeds that of rape, being 10 years and 7 years respectively. Scrapping of such an unconstitutional law is a big deal, seeing the fact that it was shot down in 2008 by the Supreme Court. But the question we need to ask ourselves is: are we there, yet? There here being a state of sex liberation and free of oppression for the LGBT community.
Certainly not. There are various forms of oppression that have pushed the LGBTQ community further down and have hurt especially the trans people for years, if not centuries and I don’t just mean legally.
Workplaces have grown from small offices to big buildings, have significantly become more diverse and have started to employ a large chunk of female employees, yet there are a lot of problems that we still need to talk about. With the gender pay gap being a significant issue for another time, the fact remains that not many companies hire or openly support trans people, and this is clearly seen when there are little to no trans people working a picket fence, 9-5 job in corporates. To many of us, these may seem mundane jobs and a product of capitalism trampling down by the bourgeoisie, but to have a stable income and a well paid and dignified means of income, is a dream to the trans people. The bottom line is, because not many trans people have access to a basic level of education in the first place, pursuing higher education becomes difficult and the prospect of a 9-5 job is pushed further away.
For anyone who has read about feminism, knows that sex liberation was one of the movement’s biggest achievements so far - beginning with criminalising sexual harassment in workplaces in the 1980s in the West. It is important to note that trans people are not just victims of systemic oppression that keeps shuts them out from opportunities, but also the people that form such systems. Trinetra Haldar, or as known by her Instagram id: ind0ctrination, spoke up on one of her posts about the kind of DMs she receives, people calling her a prostitute and asking her what she would charge for certain carnal actions. Imagine the plight of the 4 million trans people in the country, being shouted at for their appearance or being shot down by police officers who mistake them for a ‘man dressed in women’s clothes’or a man shooting recklessly at a Pride march.
The portrayal of men and women, not just in movies but also in books written about love often omit talking about “unnatural” forms of love, i.e. homosexuality. Representation matters, sure. But its lack thereof is a key to understand how much we have ingrained in ourselves as a country and a consumer, the stigma around talking about sex, talking about celebrating love and not just marriage. Because we grew up watching movies of Raj and Simran and reading only about heterosexual love, for anyone who lives cut off from the support system that the internet has for the LGBT community, anything besides the normal seems outrageously wrong and coming out is another ordeal that no one understands. Teenagers and often married people struggle to come to terms with their sexual orientations and do not speak up for years, if not at all, in fear of familial ties being cut off and shame following on its heels the minute they come out as gay.
How did we come to this? Inherent homophobia tangled with the inability to talk freely about sex- save for the item numbers we have kids dance to at weddings- have led these communities plummeting down a spiral. We have, as a country, recovering from the pains and abhorrence of the colonial rule, rejected all forms of liberation in matters like these as another Western tool to push us down or another Western idea that we were just supposed to reject, without understanding the depths of it.
Of course, things are changing. We have Pride parades organised in big cities each year and representation is coming with movies like ‘Shubh Magal Zyaada Saavdhaan’ and ‘Ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga’, the Amazon Prime Original ‘Made in Heaven’. More people are pushing for change by calling out government policies on social media and protesting against it. But without truly changing the way we think about sexuality and having an open and honest conversation about it, the abolishing of section 377 might at best save members of the LGBT community from the legal system, or at worst be just a symbolic victory.
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