The dust rises when Darshan raids. He charges across the brown mud court, tags a defender, and spins back to his side before they can pin him down. His teammates slap their thighs hard, a crack that carries across the Queen Mary’s College ground. The wind takes the sound and scatters it over the trans flags snapping at the background — white, blue, and pink — alongside a rainbow flag. Fred Rogers moves between the water bottles at the edge of the field, checking them, re-checking them, keeping busy. His shelter, Urimai Kural Trust organised the event, designed the jerseys, the logo, and the custom medals in trans colours for Tamil Nadu’s first kabaddi tournament for trans men. The team spent months making this day happen.
Thirty-two players came from across Tamil Nadu, organised into four teams of eight on Saturday. They had one practice session before the tournament. Aryan, a kabbadi player, said, “This is the first time a trans men’s kabaddi event has been organised, and participating in it is a very big thing for us.” The point, he said, was to be there at the historic moment.
Gold Rajendran, an Asian gold medallist in kabaddi who coaches at Queen Mary’s College, watched from the stands. He says the players have talent and that they should be encouraged. He said, “We have almost sixty lakh kabaddi players in Tamil Nadu. We should definitely include more participation of trans people.”
That is why Fred, director of the trust, mental health professional, and trans activist, chose the game. “Kabaddi is the state game of Tamil Nadu. We kept asking ourselves, why not kabaddi? Why should we not play kabaddi? That question stayed with me.”
Darshan heard about the event through a contact at Mahalakshmi Women’s College. He had never played kabaddi in a formal setting. He played anyway. Another player, Fazil, came with teammates from the Sahodaran-Thozhi trust. A friend told him about the tournament.
Invisibility within invisibility
Trans men in Tamil Nadu occupy an unusual form of invisibility. The word “transgender” in public discourse — in welfare schemes, in legal frameworks, in the popular imagination — almost always means trans women, pointed out Fred. Trans men are AFAB (assigned female at birth), and the systems designed around them were built for people who remained female. The families they grew up in expected femininity, marriage, and silence. When a trans man asserts his identity, he breaks something that patriarchal households consider a matter of honour. The responses, Fred described, are severe, including emotional and physical abuse, forced confinement, withdrawal from education, and, in some cases, coerced sexual violence.
Even within trans rights spaces, trans men fight to be seen. The equation of transgender with trans women alone, Fred said, excludes AFAB gender-diverse communities from policies and welfare support that could protect them. Sports, with its own rigidities, compounds the exclusion. The transphobic argument that trans women do not belong in women’s sports and trans men do not belong in men’s sports rests, Fred said, on the same logic. “It comes from not seeing trans men as men.” He addressed the physiological argument. “Our bodies are estrogen-dominant, and some of us go on testosterone as part of our medical transition. Some are not able to undergo medical transition,” he says. Since trans men cannot be physiologically compared to cisgender men on testosterone-dominant physiology, Fred argued that a separate category is not a consolation prize.
Aryan made the same case, more personally. “People say we are doing this [being trans] just as a choice. How can someone undergo chest surgery, uterus removal, take monthly injections, and do all this just for attraction?” He paused. “It is not something casual. We change because we want to live as ourselves.”
New beginnings
The logistics of the day were harder than the game. Many participants from other districts worked the previous day. Getting them onto the bus in time was a challenge. At the event, the winner received Rs 14,000, followed by Rs 10,500, Rs 7,000, and Rs 5,250 for second, third, and fourth place winners, respectively. Fred said, “We wanted to compensate every participant so that nobody feels they do not belong or gain nothing.”
The event’s tagline, announced that afternoon, was ‘Engal Paalinam Engal Urimai’. Our gender, our right.
Among the attendees was Glory Gunaseeli, a government official from Juvenile Justice Board. Calling it a first event of its kind, she said, “If you have one category like this, it will help them to shine more.”
Also present were DSP Vinayagamoorthi of the Cyber Crime Wing, Chennai, who came with his wife Mythili, superintendent of the Tamil Nadu Government Music College. They distributed the prizes. Aspy, another member of the Juvenile Justice Board, also attended the event.
By the end of the afternoon, people who had met that morning were calling each other friends. The coach stood on the sidelines and shouted — pipe eduthu kodu, motor podu — urging the volunteers to water the field.
Fazil, coming off the court after a raid, shared, “When we see people like ourselves, we feel that we should speak to them. If someone is alone, we feel like telling them to come and join us. That feeling exists among us, and that is there throughout the tournament.”