Source: newindianexpress.com
CHENNAI: A week after Mylapore’s Raga Sudha Hall played host to some highly talented yet very unlikely guests — Tamizh musicians who have taken up the cause of environmental activism on behalf of the oft-ignored north Madras — it set the stage for a host of transgender artists and activists for the first time. A place that has long since been synonymous with Carnatic concerts and Bharatanatyam recitals was witness to poetry readings and record dance performances by transmen and transwomen, offering them a passage to the mainstream. All thanks to Chennai Kalai Theru Vizha’s insistence on extending inclusivity to marginalised arts and people.
Making a shift
“A platform like this did not exist 15 years ago. We had to organise events ourselves; we’d call 10 people and they would be people of our own. But now, I am starting to see this shift to the mainstream. It is nice to see so many new faces among the audience. For our work spreads only through word of mouth. So long, we had been talking among ourselves; now, with the Kalai Vizha, we have been able to reach more people,” pointed out Sankari of Nirangal, one of the two NGOs that Kalai Vizha had collaborated with for its first Thirunar Vizha.
Day one of the weekend event had many artistes from the trans community putting up their work on display as not just a celebration of their art but also a quiet declaration of their everyday travails. Between her hard-hitting poetry readings and art installation, The Red Wall Project, the inimitable Kalki Subramaniam — artist, activist, writer and author — called for the need to discard the debilitating stereotypes the world still held on to; she also placed the onus of reparations on the society that had been the cause of strife in the first place.
Identity struggles
With a solo theatre performance that has had global attention in as long as a decade, the astounding A Revathi, writer and activist, offered a glimpse into the life of ‘your neighbourhood transwoman’ — detailing the identity struggles, need for self-assertion, the born-again journey of adopted ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’, the value of such trusted kinship. This, alongside the barrage of assault and abuse that’s thrust upon the people just living life on their terms.
Despite the exemplary work of these women — Revathi’s books are prescribed text for Gender Studies in many colleges and universities, Kalki’s Sahodari Foundation continues to offer a platform for the empowerment of the community — a brief interaction they had with the audience showed how much more there is to be achieved in the arena of inclusivity and sensitivity.
Spectators, most likely well-intentioned, had only to ask them about their sense of fashion (too loud, in his opinion), sex reassignment surgeries and ways of sexual pleasure. While they could have easily been dismissed at any other forum, Kalki and Revathi took the time to provide them with meaningful answers. Even as Kalki thinks it’s a breach of privacy. “As a person, as a woman, as a transwoman, I feel that I shouldn’t answer that. Let him go to Google to find it. But as an activist working for the community, there is a compulsion to answer. If some ignorant person is asking this question, it is also an opportunity for me to answer it to a hundred people for they may have it too,” she explained.
Perhaps if the society did not have such rigid norms for sex and gender, we wouldn’t need reassignment surgeries, quips Revathi. “Naan Bharathi oda meesai vecha penna irunthuttu poren, (Let me be Bharathi’s ideology of a woman — but one sporting a moustache),” she remarked to a question on surgery options.
Educational reforms
It was to address these trappings of the society that the Vizha featured the works of transmen too, a section of people that gets even less attention and care than transwomen. It also offered a platform for the ‘record dance’ — a work that has provided a livelihood for many from the community. Even this came with a heavy dose of reality — a dance crew named after Tara, a transwoman, whose death in a police station in Chennai was quickly forgotten over the disruption that came with demonetisation.
While most of the society is happy doing the bare minimum for people it marginalises, the Vizha was a means to reassert the need for educational reform. Schoolteacher Mahalakshmi Kannan from Jawadu Hills and assistant professor V Sri Latha both emphasised on the importance of keeping children within the fold of the family and the education system to aid them through the transition, their identity crisis.
Neelam NGO’s Muththamizh Kalai Vizhi insisted on representation — a means to offer children a different narrative about the transgender community. Kalki, though she is happy to witness the change in certain quarters, thinks there’s much more that has to be done. She didn’t end the night without doing her part in offering an alternative narrative.
“You call it the third gender but we are the first gender, for we have transitioned from one state to another. Women come second for they are the creators. It is men who are the third gender.” Only then do you realise that it had to be said and it had to be said by her.