BENGALURU: It was a bright Sunny day. After morning rituals, Radha (name changed) glanced in the mirror, smiled at herself, and unlocked the door to go out. Just when she was about to step out, she found a baby at her doorstep, with a note tucked in its clothes.
She opened the letter and it read: “We found out that a couple of days back, you, a transgender, donated blood to our baby. We come from an affluent family. The baby is no longer fit to be with us. You can do whatever you want with the baby.”
Thirty-four-year-old Radha quickly rushed to the hospital, where hospital authorities told her that after she donated blood to the baby, the baby’s parents wanted to personally thank the blood donor. But when they found about ‘her’, they hesitated to meet her or even touch the baby.
Radha recalls about the day before the incident. “I and a group of friends used to regularly donate blood. We are healthy, fit and fine. We also regularly get medical check-ups done. On this particular day, through an activist, I was told that an anemic newborn in the hospital needs rare blood, which happens to be my blood group, on priority. I rushed, donated the blood and came back home. But after a couple of days, I found the baby at my doorstep,” she says.
It’s been almost six years since the incident and from then, Radha has been taking care of the baby. The girl, now six, goes to a private school nearby and Radha is taking care of all her expenses.
“We were both abandoned. Our tale is very similar, like parallel lines,” Radha smiles.
Radha, based in Bengaluru, was abandoned by her parents when they found out that their favourite son isn’t really a son anymore.
“I come from a well-read, upper-class family, who failed to accept me as I am. When they found out about ‘me’, they took me to temples, psychiatrists and to a number of doctors. Then they threw me out of the house because I’m not normal. With the help of a few activists who work for the rights of transgender, I am now at a place I always belonged to,” she smiles.
“I wanted to be me. God has made me this way and I am certainly not ashamed of it,” she adds.
Radha, a painter and caricature artist, sells her works to various organisations under a pen name, through an activist. “I earn enough to support the girl to become whatever she wants to be,” she smiles.
Unlike Mumbai’s Gauri Sawant, Radha wants her daughter to stay with her and complete her education and grow up like any normal person, despite being around transgenders.
This is the tale of Radha and her daughter.
Activists say that many Radhas’ aren’t allowed to donate blood because in 2014, National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) ordered that the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community (LGBTQ) as a high-risk group (for HIV) and banned them from donating blood.
This was revealed during an RTI reply to a Transgender activist. Prior to 2014, there was no official ban on transgenders to donate blood. Only a few private hospitals had voluntarily imposed ban on the transgenders donating blood.
Activist Harish Iyer says, “Isn’t everybody a ‘high risk’? If a straight person donates blood, is it offered to the beneficiary without conducting any tests? Then what is the need to earmark an entire community as high risk? Don’t the non-LGBT people engage in high-risk behaviour? Don’t they visit commercial sex workers? Do they not engage in drugs? Shouldn’t a uniform procedure be followed for everyone then?” He adds that the ban is just pigmenting the community. “Sad that we have started to treat people like disease,” he says.
‘Ban is just one aspect’
Another activist Srini Ramaswami says that ban is just one aspect. “If we flip the coin, we realise even when someone from the LGBTQ community is in need of blood, people usually don’t come forward.” Transgenders across globe are treated like stigma and are usually kept away from the society. The social outcasts deserve to live a normal life too. The Khoon Khas organisation has now extended help to the LGBTQ community to donate and receive blood.
(Radha’s interview was curated via email through a social activist and members of Khoon Khas foundation and its founder Chetan. Radha says she doesn’t want to come out [of her shell and be identified] until the girl grows up. “I’m afraid the society may abandon the girl because she lives with me. I don’t want that to happen,” she says.)