Dedicated to all the trans people, all the gender-nonconforming people, all the outsiders and the others that have had their life stopped, halted, ended, constrained due to violence. You/ We/I deserve more,” reads the first page of the script for Burgerz. Performance artist Travis Alabanza became obsessed with burgers after someone threw one at them and shouted a transphobic slur – the obsession has resulted in the play Burgerz that exposes our own complicity as a society in the violence experienced by trans and gender non-conforming bodies.
I watched Burgerz a few days ago, came out crying and bought myself a copy of the script. Burgers are hardly the go-to street food in a land that has an abundance of roadside barotta and biryani, but the relevance of Burgerz (the play) to us is indisputable because it is about the fault lines as much as it is about food. More so now than ever before, if we looked at the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019, passed by the Rajya Sabha last week as the flung burger. Passing of the Bill in spite of what people have had to say about it is the violence.
The Bill itself is the violence against the very people it claims to protect. The Bill is also violence because it violates directly the NALSA judgement it was born out of. The silence that we have maintained about this Bill that affects thousands of people even as we have screamed our hearts out in the last week for violators of one body to be given capital punishment is the violence of cis-persons who have been sloganeering at pride marches, of those that celebrated the decriminalising of homosexuality last year, of organisations that converted their logos to rainbows, of movements that transpersons have long been a part of. The Bill is the burger and the box it comes in.
The box that promises the burger, but a disappointing one. The box that tries to pack bodies into it even as it squishes them and oozes blood on the side, the box that claims to cover, to protect, but only closes in and confines, the box that promises new space that in actuality is boundaries been drawn. “What came first?” asks Travis, “The Burger or the Box for the Burger.
Man or Woman. Or the cages made for man and woman. The person free from man or woman. Or the person in charge of capturing the person free from man or woman.” The answer is clear – the Bill was never meant to accommodate those wanting to stay out of the boxes, in fact, it draws up a new box for them. The state got the order all wrong, but can we hang the state? No, we can’t, but we may as well reject the burger and demand another one that does the meat, the sauce, the bun and the box right.