Protest against Transgender Bill today
CHENNAI: The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2016 is ready to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament. Activists from the State have arrived at New Delhi to protest against it. About 50 trangenders rights activists from the State will stage a protest near Parliament on Sunday, urging the government to not pass the Bill.
The new Bill 2016 will violate the fundamental rights guaranteed by a landmark Supreme Court judgment to intersex and trans people, according to activists. In 2014, the Supreme Court passed the famous NALSA Judgement which affirmed the fundamental rights of trans people and upheld the right of self-identification of their gender as male, female or transgender, irrespective of hormonal therapies and surgeries. However, the new bill rolls the power of gender identification into the hands of doctors and psychologists or psychiatrists among others.
Transgender persons’ rights activist Grace Banu, who will also be part of the protest in Delhi explained to Express, how this could drastically impact the lives of transgender persons using her past as an example.
Most doctors outside urban areas are unaware that our gender identity is natural, she says. They think it’’s a phase, a farce or worse a mental health disorder, she rues.
“I was 15. A school-boy whose body language had given away that I was a transgender person,” recalls Grace Banu. “The worst nightmare of my life struck me then. I was expelled from school for being effeminate.”
After endless waiting hours outside the principal’s office and repeated persuasion from her parents, the school management agreed to take her back on one condition. “I was asked not to talk to any another student forever. I had to sit outside the principal’s room.”
Young Grace who couldn’t take the gender-based ‘apartheid’ soon dropped out of school. Her parents were sure that their son had gone mad and decided to take him to a mental hospital in Thoothukudi, where they lived.
The therapy started with asking the young boy to do yoga and meditation. However, this soon escalated to solitary confinement.
“It was white-walled room. A fan and a window kept me company. I was lonely and sleepy,” says Grace. She remembers the doctor walking in thrice a day and injecting a red coloured drug into her. “I’d sleep soon after,” she claimed.
Finally, Grace herself lied to the doctor that she had completely changed and identified as a man. She got out of the hospital in a traumatised state. Within weeks, she took to her heels and found safety among a community of transwomen before she identified herself as one of them.
“Most times, doctors are clueless that this is not a disease to be cured, but that it’’s an identity to be accepted,” she said fearing that moving the power of gender identification from the individual to third-party committee, would lead to systemic discrimination and abuse of transgender persons.
