Hands off our lives, our stories, and our bodies

 As a multiply marginalised trans woman who grew up in India before moving to the west at 23, I am incredibly disturbed by the specific patterns in which our lives, our stories, and the transmisogyny we face are appropriated by similarly racialised cis people, who are nonetheless our oppressors.   

I aim to illustrate these patterns using some of the Twitter reaction to Alina Boyden’s book, Stealing Thunder, which was explicitly based on Indian trans women that subsequently organise themselves into communities of hierarchical teacher-disciple relationships, forming a sociocultural identity known as the Hijra, or Khwaja Sira in Pakistan, or various other terms based on which particular locations in India these communities reside in , as a direct outcome of the need to survive after ostracization by brown cis people.

I find it remarkably disingenuous that this community structure is wrongly turned into a gender identity itself, and how cis narratives seek to bury our obviously transfeminine experiences with this erroneous conception to pretend that we aren’t legible to anyone else, not even other transfeminine people, elsewhere, but we somehow are to them, brown cis people that seek to control what narratives we have about ourselves at the very best and are perpetrators of transmisogynistic abuse and violence at the very worst. 
 
We are, in popular cis conception, regarded as a third gender that is neither male nor female. This is a characterisation that is normative in Indian cisiety, and a narrative that is spread to western academia by the likes of cis interlopers such as Serena Nanda.

These particular narratives often erroneously attribute an explicitly non-binary identity to us while allowing no room for self-determination (See visual footnote 1). This is the most basic problem at hand. At this point, I am not even going into the complexities of how sometimes marginalised communities are only allowed to define ourselves based on language created by those that have power over and oppress us ( this is also an astute observation Talia Mae Bettcher makes in her essay "Trapped in the Wrong Theory" ). 

 I became interested in this after learning that Alina Boyden was the first English-language novelist to have formally published a novel as a trans woman , centering an Indian trans woman, and I learned that she had actually lived with communities of trans women in India and had sought to combine her own knowledge of Mughal history with her expertise in Urdu and these experiences to create a novel that did not erase complexities in terminology that may not carry over to directly counter tendencies to whitewash for western audiences.

 It crossed my radar recently through friends that some of the reactions to Stealing Thunder have involved cis brown people (some queer) accusing her of cultural appropriation, as if our shared brownness somehow makes them far more authoritative on our lives despite the fact that brown cis people are major drivers of our oppression (speaking as a trans woman that grew up in India until I was 23, experiencing transmisogynistic abuse and being raised in an environment of transmisogyny that held trans womanhood as the only gendered position inferior to cis womanhood). I include some examples as a case in point here , with annotated responses.  

 Just so it is clear what exactly unites us in terms of narratives as trans women across borders - I was raised with the idea that begging and survival sex work were our only lot in life. I was raised with the mockery of transfeminine people. I was raised being brutalised at any hint of femininity and the failure to socialise as expected insofar conformity to masculinity was concerned.

 My memories are vividly marked with my best friend through high school running away in fear upon encountering an Indian trans woman. I have spoken to genetic relatives where I had to make myself vulnerable and hold space for rampant ignorance to even get supportive allies to say they no longer feared us and could be compassionate. These were all elements of Indian transmisogynistic socialisation – i.e, a process that Indian cis people are primarily responsible for.

 The cis people that push this line of course have to rationalise their self-appointed authority by pretending that the experiences of being transfeminine in India and abroad have no overlaps, or else they would have to concede that our struggles against our common oppressors – transmisogynists, which includes South Asian transmisogynists and western transmisogynists if we happen to migrate, would offer a much stronger basis for solidarity than our racialisation does in uniting our cis oppressors with us.

 Moreover, these narratives are used to deny the commonality that exists between us trans women across space and time, of which there is plenty. The struggle to be intelligible using the social modes that convey womanhood (or signifiers of femininity, to be technical), and the struggle to defeat the horrors of virilisation, and the obvious social stigma we run into that produces ostracization , socioeconomic subjugation, and a dependence on having to sell sex to survive, and of course, extremely high levels of sexual violence victimisation.

 My actual lived experience as an actual Indian actually having grown up in India is testament to the self-appointed authority Indian cis people give themselves in deciding that we are either androgyne or bigender, firstly, and then, secondly, deciding that this makes us implicitly inferior. Of course, being visibly trans, my treatment in the west has also involved implicit third gendering into a freak class, and the explicit othering into a named freak class that defines the Indian gender system is in no way actually progressive.

This is what rankles me about South Asian cis academics in western academia deciding that there is no way Indian transfemininity shares anything of material importance with the lives of trans women anywhere else. It only gets worse when the same people then concede they are, in fact, ignorant about our inner lives later (see image in footnote 2). It reeks of hubris that this ignorance does not prevent them from confidently declaring there aren't any material similarities between us Indian trans women and those abroad.

 In fact, what strikes me is that the South Asian diaspora trans women I know through local communities in Canada have had to struggle with many of the same transmisogynistic dynamics within their families and have ended up in similar situations vis-à-vis sex work or victimisation by sexual violence and abuse.  

 It only gets even more insulting when second generation descendants of Indian immigrants who were born and raised in the United States, such as Suleikha Snyder (see Visual Footnote 3) , i.e, someone who is as Indian as Irish Americans are Irish, then use their brownness to attempt to grant themselves the power and the control over who gets to share our narratives by trying to silence an actual trans woman like Alina Boyden , despite the fact that our transness makes for relatability that no commonality with cis people does. 

 Where is the evidence that you have chosen to actually listen to us? Where is the evidence that you have not uncritically swallowed the narratives that Indian cis people, i.e, our primary oppressors when we were living in India, created about us?

 When it comes to transphobia and transmisogyny, moreover, I have no reasons to trust that Indian diaspora communities are any less transmisogynistic than white communities , since a proportionate fraction of the transmisogynistic sexual violence I have experienced was perpetrated by racialised cis people. Your brownness does not give you the right to speak for us because it has not stopped you from oppressing brown trans people , either where you are racialised, or where you are the ethnic majority.

 The sooner you admit this, the quicker we can make progress on dealing with the horrifying transmisogyny that is rampant within our communities.

This is true, no matter how much you, and the white people that kiss your arse as you seek to rehabilitate Indian culture despite its treatment of us, like to pretend that transmisogyny and trans womanhood, are uniquely western phenomena.

Some of us have access to the same platforms that you use to stake a claim to owning us and our lives.

Your transmisogynistic objectification of us will no longer go unchallenged.


Signed,
AC
An actually Indian trans woman. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to @binaryAegis and @lisaquestions on Twitter for helping me find tweets since I am not on Twitter. 

Visual Footnotes

1 .Here is a clear example of how we are assumed to be androgyne or bigender with no attention to what our identities actually are by Indian cis people.This is vital to understanding that the artificial illegibility that is assumed of our experiences across time/cultures is often a consequence of how local cissexist practises shape what language is accessible to us as opposed to a reflection of material differences per se. Also note the hilariously ridiculous declaration that I have misunderstood what was always clearly a transmisogynistic joke my ex-mum made mocking the attire of trans women in Bangalore that begged for money at traffic intersections.This was from someone in my genetic family who has been one of my few staunch allies, mind.  

2. Here is someone patronisingly denying what I articulated about transnational similarities amongst transfeminine people and telling Alina Boyden off in one breath and admitting she is not equipped to talk about us in another. The presumption that she, despite her self-acknowledged ignorance, was in a position to assess the limits of Alina Boyden's knowledge of us is breathtakingly audacious, if nothing else.

3. Here is Suleikha Snyder - an American cis woman of Indian descent (she is second generation) , appointing herself the arbiter of whether we are actually represented and accurately so, attacking Alina Boyden's book (while endorsing a cis gay man writing a book about trans women, mind - somehow transness as a shared identity does not matter , and shared identity does not matter as long as cis people get to write about us). This is yet more audacity on display from cis people claiming cultural authority over us via a claim to shared brownness , while ignoring the necessity of shared transness juxtaposed with cross-racial class unity amongst cis people in upholding transmisogyny. 

Additionally , I am uneasy with the invocation of cultural misappropriation in general here - the social categorisations we are subjected to based on cis authority in Indian culture are themselves a demonstration of transmisogyny. It is wild seeing a trans sister being accused of appropriating our culture when that culture is transmisogynistic. The notion of appropriation as a concept applying to a manisfestation of systemic bigotry just cheapens the concept overall.