BENGALURU: Sonu, the subject of Akhil Sathyan’s documentary That’s My Boy screened in the city recently, says, as a child, he had been taught to fear ‘hijras’.
“Whenever we travelled by train, we were told they demanded money, and if we didn’t give it to them, they would, hit, kidnap, even murder us,” he says. “So we would pretend to be asleep the moment they got on.”
But when Sonu, born a girl in Thiruvananthapuram 33 years ago, went to Mumbai in 2004, he found himself gradually opening up to these transwomen. “They respected my feelings, not my body,” he says.
Over time, he realised their struggles were not that different from his -- they too felt they were trapped in the wrong bodies.
When he was little, Sonu and his mother would would argue over the clothes he wore. “I wanted to buy pants, but she would tell me I was a girl and had to wear frocks,” he recalls.
While in Class 3, he felt attracted to a girl, a year his senior. “I would imagine she was the heroine and I the hero, whenever I listened to film songs,” he says. Back then, however, he didn’t know of transgenders.
He enjoyed playing with boys his age, and was even part of the women’s cricket team. “I cropped my hair short, using cricket as an excuse,” he says. His mother was more supportive of his passion for the sport. “She rebuffed relatives’ taunts.”
Pressure to dress like a girl was partly responsible for his dropping out of PUC too. “I went to a women’s college and the principal told me I had to follow the dress code. Students often judged me too for the way I walked and talked,” he says. “I really wanted to study, but I couldn’t continue going to college.”
Soon afterwards, his mother fell sick and passed away in 2003. Three to four months after his return from his visit to Mumbai, he left for Bengaluru, once more citing cricket as the excuse. The city has been his home since.
“I work with Sangama, an NGO that works for the uplift of sexual minorities and sex workers,” he says in fluent Kannada. He learnt of his rights here.
While awareness about male-to-female transsexuals have increased, the struggles of others like him are harder still, he says. “And it’s not just female-to-male people, it’s all girl or women sexual minorities, including lesbians and bi-sexuals, because social restrictions are greater for women.”
Thanks to this taboo, other transgenders like him are more afraid of coming out, he says. Many are married off in the hope that their ‘psychological problem’ will right itself. “I know people on whom husbands have forced themselves. One even became pregnant. It’s not at all easy.”
Those who have had the surgery done often just pass themselves off as men, something he would like to do as well. “Why call us the third gender? We are men or women, same as everyone else,” he says. “People should understand that the vagina or penis that someone is born with doesn’t determine the person’s identity.”
Transmen friends of his tell him not to go near their neighbourhood for a week or two if he has spoken in the media, for they would rather not be identified, he says with a laugh. And relatives back home -- he lost his father early on -- don’t know of him as a man.
He has found that accepting his gender has been “hard for some feminists and female-to-male transgenders” too. “The latter often ask, we go to all this trouble to become women. God has given you everything, then why don’t you be happy?”
They are more understanding after he relates his experience to theirs. “Feminists have become more accepting now, he says.
Awareness among medical professionals too is low. “Doctors are equipped for breast removal for women with breast cancer. But they are still not used to the idea of performing the surgery on us,” says Sonu, who had the surgery a couple of years ago, following hormone therapy.
He’s still saving up for uterus removal. “As for penis implant, I’ve only heard of one or two people who have gone abroad to have it done. The government should encourage doctors to go abroad and learn, and make sex reassignment surgeries free,” he says.
That’s My Boy
The film by Akhil Sathyan is one of two documentaries made in the country selected for the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ohio, USA. The other is Leslee Udwin’s India’s Daughter.