Chapter 2

Positioning Trans Autobiographies and the Voices

How do we really experience the inner self without the body

factoring in the equation? The society has placed identity markers

on bodies, used bodies to categorize and compartmentalize

humans for millennial now. Sex change has been read as the

central theme of their autobiography, however, I feel that their

autobiographies have been about their lives and their pursuit of

achieving their potentials in a society obsessed with normative

bodies. Without the pressure and forceful conformity of society,

most probably sex change would be a passing reference in their

autobiography, with them focusing on the incredible work they

have done. Sex change becomes an important part of our lives as it

is a definitive moment in our access to everything and anything

that society has to offer. (Sai Bourothui, Appendix 1)

Autobiographies are self-narratives in which authors try to present

themselves to readers in a way they want to be seen. Hence, apart from being

collective as well as personal narratives, autobiographies also offer its creator a

chance to have made sense of their lives and experiences as they answer the

question, ‘who am I?’, as observed by Diane Bjorklund, who researched on the

genre of autobiography (Bjorklund 89). Autobiography writers/Autobiographers,

being aware that their work is going to be read by a future audience, accordingly

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organize the events of their lives into a narrative structure that contains a central

point around which it revolves. Transgender autobiographies, on a similar plane

of thought, centre around the body. Having the body as the central point, the

different experiences and life events are narrated. Hence their autobiographies

transpire into body narratives.

Historically, autobiographies have been primarily those written by men;

moreover, those holding positions of political significance, which isn’t surprising

since positions of political power are, even today, predominantly held by men.

Autobiographies by men, by virtue of their being penned by those who benefit

from the privileges that are accorded in a heteronormative patriarchal society, are

defined by a confidence expressed through the dominance of the ‘I,’; they are

clearly set apart as the subject of their narrative. Men’s autobiographies of note

are not only accounts of personal growth and struggle, but also narratives that

seek to have a larger message for humanity. While being an account of an

individualistic self, it also belies a conviction that the experiences of men hold a

significant lesson for everyone, or that their actions affected everyone in the

community, irrespective of gender. In other words, the male experience is seen

and presented as synonymous with a human experience, while also being borne

out of a confidence in its unique self.

In this genre of autobiography writing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s

Confessions can be considered to be a pioneer. Completed in 1769 and published

posthumously in 1782, the Confessions ushered in modern autobiography as it

delved on the notion of self while pitting the public self against the private self,

all the while stressing on the fact of how his autobiography can be understood in

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terms of both together. His autobiography initiated the fashion of autobiography

writing which was immediately followed by his contemporary writers. While

narrating his life story, he dealt with themes of defiance, self exploration, self and

identity and a search of his own personal existence. He writes:

I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have

no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men, a man in all the truth

of nature; and this man is to be myself alone” (Rousseau 5).

Rousseau’s notion of the public and the private self can be best

described in the words of Angela Scholar in her Introduction to

Confessions, “Rousseau’s Confessions may justifiably be called

the first modern autobiography because they combine for the first

time two revolutionary ideas about the self. One is the uniqueness

of the individual personality and irreducible sense of self which

can be distinguished from all social, cultural and religious

identities, and which is indeed is experienced most intensely in

reaction against those identities. The other is the mobility of that

self, a capacity not only able to play a wide variety of roles

(Rousseau boasts of having lived on every level of French society

except the throne), but in addition to identify so passionately and

successfully with a new role as to transform oneself, at least for a

time, into a different person. (Rousseau, Introduction vii).

Men’s autobiographies, it has been observed, are also often a means to

justify their success, setting their life narrative as an example for the future

generation. Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, published

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in the year 1994, coincided closely with the moment of independence of South

Africa. Nelson Mandela admits “I was literally carrying on my back the history,

culture and heritage of my people. That day, I felt myself to be the embodiment

of African nationalism, that inheritor of Africa’s difficult but noble path and her

uncertain future”(56). In The Hero’s Story: the male leader’s autobiography and

the syntax of post colonial nationalism, Elleke Boehmer states how Mandela’s

exemplary stress on embodiment and inheritance shows the object of attention in

the autobiography is at once the individual and national past, where the leaders’

experience, character and physical presence are set up as a metaphor for the

national experience and consciousness. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography

(1936) and its partial sequel The Discovery of India (1946), considered as

foundational texts of India’s struggle for freedom, Nehru went into lengthy

reflections on current debates and policy issues, the legacy of the Indian civil

service and communalism in the subcontinent. Mahatma Gandhi’s My

Experiments with Truth became the autobiography of the nation through which

Gandhi justified his actions, admitting his mistakes with confidence and laid

down his visions. In all these instances, the autobiography of the male leader is

meant to serve the useful purpose of writing the leadership into the nation.

Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth, ironically about his self-taught

lessons on selflessness through self-denial as a way of attaining self-fulfilment,

holds at its centre a very deep and assured idea of the self, despite the self being

the subject of colonial rule. His account of his life is in itself meant to serve as a

lesson in morality and spirituality. Having undoubtedly been a significant public

figure, his actions as a lawyer and political influencer, and his public actions

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compose a majority of the narrative; however, the more ‘personal’ aspects of his

autobiography are also centred around himself, rather than those in his personal

life. Notably, his wife Kasturba, since the age of 13, is of little significance in his

narrative, and is strikingly absent, except when serving as a plot device to

substantiate a point he is trying to make. In a chapter titled, “Kasturba’s

courage”, the majority of the chapter is dedicated to Gandhi’s mind-wrestling

with Kasturba’s doctor, who is with her in Durban, while he is in Johannesburg,

with Gandhi asserting the importance of maintaining vegetarianism, as the doctor

insists he needs to give her beef-tea. Kasturba is portrayed as quietly suffering

her illnesses, and is only voiced to validate Gandhi’s “conviction” in

vegetarianism, declaring that “her mind is made up,” and will remain unshakable

on the question of beef-tea. While Gandhi lauds her strength, he fails to show any

inner conflict. Later on, when Gandhi, at the age of 37, decides on voluntarily

abstaining from sexual relations, it is a choice he makes for a personal quest of

achieving Brahmacharya– a choice made as part of his philosophy of selflessness

and self-restraint, which, on the one hand, does not take into consideration his

wife’s desires, while at the same time, by extension becomes a choice that he

makes for her, because his abstention implies her abstention too.

According to Jacques Lacan, the child’s psyche develops from the stage

of identifying the self with that of the mother into the Narcissistic mirror-stage,

where the child identifies first with their own image and then with others. For

women, the identification of an individual self is in association with others,

whereas for men it comes in the form of dissociation. In male autobiographies,

the man is the centre of the narrative, the dominant ‘I,’ set apart from others,

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while the woman speaks of herself as one of a collective or speaking from the

margins of the collective mainstream. Even in the fictional autobiography of a

male protagonist, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem, whose life’s

events seem to find parallel in the events taking place in India, is able to make his

own life’s narrative as large as that of the country, even affecting public events,

and not just a mere consequence of it.

Up until the latter half of the twentieth century, critical theory on

autobiographies continued to dismiss women’s autobiographical text, dictated as

they were by ideas such as Georges Gusdorf’s in his influential essay,

“Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (published in French in 1956, and

widely known in its English translation in 1980), wherein he upheld

autobiography as an “art” and a “representation of the best minds of its time

because it “recomposes and interprets a life in its totality” (Gusdorf 38).

Where autobiographies of men locate the self at the centre, Shari

Benstock in her work Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writing

notes:

The self that would reside at the centre of the text is decentred and

often is absent altogether in women's autobiographical texts. The

very requirements of genre are put into question by the limits of

gender – which is to say because these two terms are

etymologically linked, genre itself raises questions about gender

(Benstock 20).

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 For a woman, the autobiography is often a means to survive the traumas

of childbirth, illness, deaths of spouses and children, loss of cultural identity and

personal regard, fear of loss of beauty, while the narrative is their struggle to find

a voice to express. She cannot experience herself as an entirely separate identity

as she is aware of the fact that she is being defined as a woman whose identity

has been pre-determined by the dominant male culture. While on the other hand,

male autobiographies enforce a unity and identity across time by reconstructing

the ego as a safeguard against disintegration, and they seldom admit their internal

fears and insecurities, hesitations and ruptures, only to glide smoothly over gaps

in memory and blind spots. The basic masculine self is separate and not

connected to the world.

A seminal work identifying critical differences between men’s and

women’s autobiographies was Women’s Autobiographies: Essays in Criticism,

edited by Estelle C Jelinek, in which she writes that men set themselves apart as

“success stories and histories of their era” (Jelinek, 10) focusing on their

professional lives, whereas women emphasize personal and domestic details as

well as their connections to people in their lives. Further, she says men “idealize

their lives or cast themselves into heroic moulds to project their universal

import,” (Jelinek, 14) women on the other hand, seek to find validation, “sifting

through their lives for explanation and understanding” (Jelinek 15). And while

men’s narratives are characterized by linearity, harmony and orderliness,

women’s stories are irregular, disconnected and fragmentary.

In her essay, “In the Cultural Hall of Mirrors: Issue of Gender Genre

Incompatibility of Women's Autobiography" (1998), Dr Ranjana Harish contends

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how the restrictive notion of the autobiography being about the centrally located

isolated self has obscured the significance of women’s autobiographical writing

as well as that of other marginalised people. A broadening of what is understood

as an autobiography, then, has been necessary to make it more inclusive of voices

that do not find themselves at the centre of their own narrative.

Thematically, women’s writing has often been identified as being

concerned with the personal and private, rather than the public and the political –

more so, in the case of autobiographies. In Women's Consciousness, Man's World

(1978) Sheila Rowbotham writes, a woman defines herself as belonging to a

collective that has been assigned a role by the dominant masculine culture. Her

journey is that of a dual consciousness – one of the self that is defined by culture,

and the other is of that what she creates for herself apart from cultural

prescription (Rowbotham 31). Theorising on women’s autobiographies, Mary G.

Mason in her essay “The Other Voice” argued that it is women’s status as the

alternative or Other that informs their identity as relational rather than

individuating, “The self-discovery of the female identity seems to acknowledge

the real presence and recognition of another consciousness, and the disclosure of

the female self is linked to the identification of some ‘other’” (Mason 210).

Moreover, women’s experiences are identified as representative of

women as a collective, unlike autobiographies of men which are seen as

encompassing a human experience. It is therefore, not surprising that women’s

accounts centre around their body, which in a patriarchal society is an object of

external occurrences, rather than being a subject of its own making. By extension,

it also follows that their accounts, borne out of a social structure where a woman

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is recognised by culturally prescribed attributes which posit her as the ‘Other’ of

the dominant male culture, are also confined in the personal sphere and defined

by their social relationships and performed roles as daughter, wife, and

(grand)mother.

Women’s writing, also termed ‘feminine writing,’ has been characterised

as having attributes such as being concerned with the ‘details’ and the ‘diary,’

categorizations that Rebecca Hogan interrogates in “Engendered

Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form.”Again, both these are outcomes

of women’s confinement to the personal sphere of the home, wherein the ‘details’

being referred to are the everyday activities deemed small, insignificant and

mundane by the masculine public sphere, and the ‘diary’ being the only space

(literate) women found a voice and medium of expression, because even in the

home, their identity was defined by their socio-cultural gender roles. Needless to

say, the significance of the details and the diary has been severely undermined in

the literary canon as having little value.

While on the one hand, women’s autobiographies could be analysed by

having been limited to personal experiences, which it has to a large extent, this

particular aspect has also opened up the interrogation of the personal as political.

Perhaps one of the most influential works which has broken this barrier is an

unintended autobiography, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, which as a

consequence of its being set in its particular historical and political environment,

characterised by the targeted suppression and elimination of Jews, becomes a

significant voice for the marginalised and threatened group. It clearly illustrates

how the personal is, indeed, political.

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 While conventional autobiographies are written for the purpose of being

shared with an audience, even in journals and diaries there is an inherent implied

audience. The diary itself is personified in the role of an ideal audience, always

available, listening and sympathetic. In the case of Anne Frank, she addresses her

entries to an unidentified “Kitty.”The importance of acknowledging an audience,

whether real or implied, even in a private genre like a diary is its impact on what

is said and how it is said. This acknowledgment is necessary for recognising even

this intimate genre, especially in the case of The Diary of a Young Girl, which

was published posthumously and never intended by the author to be an

autobiography in the conventional sense, as it brings legitimacy to the diary form

in the autobiographical genre. Even Anne’s implied audience reflects an act of

self-construction in her writing.

One of the most critical reasons that necessitates the expansion of the

realm of the autobiographical genre is simply that it is a powerful medium to tell

ones story. The very word ‘autobiography’ suggests agency and control to create

a self, and a medium to voice one’s thoughts. Indeed, for those who are

marginalized in mainstream society, an autobiography can become an

empowering tool to assert their presence. The very act of writing their story can

become revolutionary, a defiance of status quo, and most of all, a powerful

political statement.

Over the course of the twentieth century, feminist theory has successfully

brought attention to a great body of women’s writing, including autobiographies.

Much has also been done on expanding the genre of autobiographical writing

itself. The value of expanding genres and bibliographies has been recognised as

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having a transforming socio-cultural effect for marginalised cultures and

collectives, including gender, sexuality, race, class etc. Many prominent lesbian

and gay writers have also stamped their presence through the autobiographical

form. Radical feminist Audre Lorde in her autobiography Zami: A New Spelling

of My Name(1982) uses her own narrative to create a new style of writing with

the term “biomythography,” – a style of narrative building in which she weaves

together autobiography, cultural history, and myth, and in the process, recreating

the way we experience ourselves and our lived experiences, thereby elevating the

story through imagination.” In her novel, she creates an image of her childhood

self, dressed in a way that society deemed appropriate for young girls in 1930s

and 1940s Harlem, New York.:

My lifelong dream of a doll-baby come to life had in fact come

true. Here she stood before me now, smiling and pretty in an

unbelievable wine-red velvet coat with a wide, wide skirt that

flared out over dainty little lisle-stocking legs. Her feet were clad

in a pair of totally impractical, black patent—leather mary-jane

shoes, whose silver buckles glinted merrily in the drab noon light.

(Lorde, 37)

Later during the McCarthy Era when even wearing a pair of jeans could

have women arrested, she writes, “You never could tell who was who, and the

protective paranoia of the McCarthy years was still everywhere outside of the

mainstream of blissed-out suburban middle America. Besides, there were always

rumours of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay-girls with

fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for

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transvestism, which was illegal. Or so the rumors went.” (Lorde, 138) In the face

of blatant targeted oppression that wants to stamp out the very existence of her

sexuality and the community she identifies with, she uses her narrative to create a

self that was denied to her by mainstream society. Her genre and her work have

since been deeply impactful in inspiring countless women of colour and members

of the LGBT community to tell their own stories.

The medium of an autobiography as a fundamental tool in the act of

creating a self and establishing an identity is profoundly relevant for the

transgender/transexual community, in particular, as for them that self comes

through a long (and painful, in the case of transsexuals) process of (physical)

change and taking on of a completely new identity. The dual consciousness in

trans autobiographical narratives, being unable to find themselves in the

reflections of cultural representation, create a dual consciousness that posits the

self as culturally defined and the self that they transition into as their true self.

From this division, comes the experience of one part being strange and alien, cut-

off from the other which continuously tries to find a voice. They are never

together in one place, always in transit, travelling into alien territory. Gender/sex

transformations being an important part of the plot, the focus is on the body and

the narrative intertwines in and out of the mind and the body. Their

autobiographies act as a means to survive the trauma of self-realization and social

realization, sex change and loss of identity, acclimatizing with the newfound

identity and empowerment.

In order to reveal the constructedness of heterosexual identities, Butler

centre stages the figure of the (transgender) drag as destabilising heteronormative

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structures through parody. However, critics have also asked questions of the

viability of any agency for effecting subversion without a pre-discursive subject

in the first place. For Prosser, it is crucial that “the bodily matter of gendered

crossings” (Prosser, 4) be acknowledged as it devalues the “transsexual

trajectories, that aspire to be that which this scheme [i.e. performativity]

devalues…there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative,

to be constantative, quite simply, to be.” (Prosser, 32)

The autobiographical narratives of transsexual people, according to

Prosser, serve to validate their need to bring their self and body into alignment so

that their body image finally falls into place with the actual image or appearance

of their body. For this to happen, it is necessary to acknowledge a sense of self

and body beyond the constructedness of gender, which would require reflexivity

within queer theory to recaliberate its understanding of sex and gender, self and

the body. The conflation of sex and gender, and the denial of the body and the

self, as is the case in queer theory which is deeply influenced by Butler, have to

be examined so as not to subsume all trans experiences as one, as that would

imply that all lesbians and gays are ultimately transgendered as they violate the

gender norms of heterosexuality, and that all transgendered people are queer as

they disrupt notions of gender binaries – this, Prosser writes, dilutes the

experiences of transsexual people.

Narratives or self-inscription, give form to and legitimatize the process of

gender identity coming-into-being. Stories codify gender reality and space. It

allows emergent varied gender identities to be performed. By looking at the trans

narrative genre, the story of the growth to self-consciousness to self and social

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acceptance, presents the body as a metaphor symbolising the inner self. Trans

narratives operate as symbolic text shaping and justifying the transformation

including the interconnection of dual consciousness and gender politics. The

transgender autobiography helps legitimatize the gender specifics of the

performing individual through the body of the narrative, where key transgender

touchstones, such as Sex Reassignment Surgery are presented as predominantly a

matter of (and means to) self-acceptance, social acceptance and dignity. The text

which can be assigned a crucial place at the very point of inscription is the

autobiography by Vidya.

Vidya’s autobiography exemplifies this continuous conflict apparent in

Indian trans autobiographies. Vidya, a transgender or Tirunangaiii from Chennai,

details the struggle undergone while transforming hirselfiii from a male

(Saravanan) to a female (Vidya). In the narrative, one can discern that the

beleaguered self and body of Vidya is the central point throughout. Vidya’s

emotional and sexual conflicts along with issues of conformity of hir multiple

selves become prominent right from the beginning. And it can be observed that

through the process of writing the autobiography, Vidya is actually creating or

constructing a self literally, out of the many selves. Thus one sees how the

transgendered body is obsessed upon and also out of many epiphanies, Vidya’s

sex change with surgical help was the greatest one. After having gone through the

painful process of removing male genitals, Saravanan finally got rid of his male

identity and changed into Vidya. To quote from the text:

Yes, what I saw in that moment was death. They had removed that

part of me over which I had silent tears of rejection from the time I

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 could remember. I saw that my penis and my testicles had been

excised. I was sutured and applied medication after that. I could

feel all that very distinctly. Ah! Nirvana. The ultimate peace.

Inside I was at peace. It was a huge relief. I was now a woman.

Mine was a woman’s body. Its shape would be what my heart

wanted, yearned for. This pain would obliterate all my earlier

pains. (Vidya, 16)

Even Butler conceded in her later work, Bodies That Matter: On the

Discursive Limits of Sex, the limits of the transgendered individual in sustaining

the notion of the body as only a literary category. She admits that “transsexual in

particular symbolizes a carefully sustained ambivalence around sex,” (Butler 14)

which necessitated the conceptual splitting of the transsexual from queer as well

as acknowledging the materiality of the body. Through the figure of the

transsexual, sex as distinctively male and female returns, the queer is repressed,

unsettling the idea of gender as performativity.

In addition to Vidya’s, Laxmi’s autobiography on the other hand, seeks to

make hir readers aware of the hijra culture, setting it apart as unique, but also

seeking respect and inclusion in society. While the autobiography, naturally tells

hir own story, ze also tells the story of the hijra community, to which endeavor ze

dedicates the final chapter. Ze begins with the meaning and origin of the word

‘hijra,’ derived from the Urdu word, ‘hijar,’ used to refer to someone who has left

their tribe or community, in this case, men and women, usually men, who do not

fit the heterosexual norms, leaving to join the hijra community. Ze establishes a

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written history for the hijra community by documenting their complex social

structures and hierarchies of the various hijra gharanas (houses) with a nayak

(chief) followed by gurus, who take on chelas to mentor. They have their own

system of governance and redressal. And most significantly, they have strong

rituals and customs surrounding the initiation rites of becoming a hijra.

The characteristic of association identified in women’s autobiographies,

where there is the sense of belonging to and being representative a collective of a

marginalized section, is far more acute here, because for members of hijra

communities, their complete identity as well as experiences of family and

livelihood opportunities become defined by their being a part of the community.

Along with this is also the conscious use of the autobiographical form as a body

narrative to facilitate coming-to-terms with hir own hijra body, but also to enable

the transition into hir hijra identity to society at large. Ze places hir own story

into the larger socio-cultural and political presence and influence of the

community by drawing on the long history of the hijra community in India in

mythology, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, in medieval history through

the courtly traditions of Muslim kings, and also in the current political context by

speaking of enabling laws in favour of hijras, as well as hijras who have

contested and won elections.

There is also the awareness of the power of the autobiographical genre as

a political tool by virtue of locating hir personal experiences in the larger context

of the hijra experience in India, through its history. The autobiography becomes a

vehicle for hir transition into society as a hijra as well as being advocating for hir

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community – the transformation is not just of hir identity but enables the same for

the community through the medium of literature.

Speaking of hir childhood, when Laxmi was an effeminate male child,

still unaware of hir gender and sexual identity, se writes “Yet is is true that I was

like a women. My mannerism, my walking and talking style were all feminine.

But why was it so? I did not know. I wasn’t of the age to answer this question.

Loner that I already was, I drifted even further into my cocoon.” (Laxmi 4) While

not having understood what hir difference implied about hir identity, and without

it even being a conscious act of declaring oneself hijra, ze was being made aware

of how she wasn’t ‘fitting in’ and duly punished through rape from the age of

seven. As a result of this, someone who already “preferred to live an internal life,

the life of a loner” was “transformed” by these sexual assaults into a “secretive

and incommunicative” person, bereft of their childhood, “grown up before their

time.” (Laxmi 7)

It is, hereafter, with the growing consciousness of hir body, gender and

sexuality, and most of all, hir difference from the norm and hir vulnerability as a

result of it, that ze realizes the importance and the necessity, even, of speaking

out – a realisation that culminates in the autobiography, creating a body narrative

for hirself, and establishing a history for hir community. She writes, “I discovered

that passivity did not pay. It might endure me to society, but it came with a price.

I decided at that moment to raise my voice against the things I did not like.

Henceforth, I would not do anything against my will.” (Laxmi 8)

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 Although, hijras, under the umbrella term ‘transgender’ have been

recognised as the third gender by the Supreme Court of India, their sexuality is

still criminalized under Section 377, which was decriminalised by the Delhi High

Court in 2009 but then overturned by the Chief Justice of India in 2013. But even

with the legal recognition of rights, their social standing is still that of the

marginalized and persecuted. What is necessary also is examining the many

forms of oppression – legal rights only go so far if sex work is still the primary

occupation available to most hijras. It is in this capacity that literature and

academia have a primary role to play. While in I am Vidya, Living Smile Vidya,

confesses, “Literature and solitude were my companions,” in Revathi’s

autobiography The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story, a precursor to Laxmi’s

story, she states her motive for hir writing hir autobiography as an act of

reclaiming lost spaces, something which ze had to do in hir own life when ze was

disowned and denied hir property rights by hir family.

Commenting on the hijra experience, Laxmi writes “Hijras are born as

male children biologically. Psychologically, however, they feel they are female.

Sexually they are attracted not to the opposite sex, but to their own sex. The

conflict between their biological, and psychological and sexual identities is borne

out by their body language – their gestures, mannerism, movements, and

expressions all belong to girls rather than boys….thus, there’s a feeling of

entrapment, of being jailed in the wrong body” (Laxmi 172).

What Laxmi describes here, resonates to a large extent with the

transsexual experience as talked about by Prossner, as being distinct from other

‘queer’ experiences. In fact, Laxmi distinguishes all transgender experience from

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other queer categories, “Hijras are referred to as transgender. To me, the term

transgender means transcending gender.’ In the formulation ‘LGBT,’ ours is the

only category that refers to gender. All the other three categories – lesbian, gay,

and bisexual – refer to sexuality.” (Laxmi, 180) While this explains why Bulter

chose to use the figure of the transgender as a destabilising force for

heteronormativity, it also asks for an acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of

the transgender experience. This is especially since the lesbian, gay, and bisexual

experiences are always already at a state of being, but the transgender experience

is one of transformation or becoming, particularly so for transsexuals, before

being.

The hijra experience though is still more unique. It has elements of the

transgender as well as the transsexual trajectories, with being neither at the same

time. Becoming hijra also involves initiation rites into the community. Laxmi

describes a “parallel social structure” (Laxmi, 174) and calls being a hijra “a

social not a biological construct. One cannot be born a hijra, though one can be

born a hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite has both male and female sexual organs,

whereas a hijra is always born as a male.” (Laxmi, 173)

There is also the matter of castration which is critical to the hijra identity,

whether one has undergone it or not. Laxmi details the rituals around the event of

the castration, but stresses that it isn’t “compulsory,” adding that it is a “spiritual

process. One has to be ready for it. It cannot be imposed.” (Laxmi, 175) R. Raj

Rao, one of the (Marathi to English) translators of Laxmi’s autobiography,

describes hir hijra identity as “anti-essentialist” i.e. she doesn’t regard hir hijra

identity as what defines hir, unlike Revathi’s “essentialist” account – and traces

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this to the fact that while Laxmi – at the time of hir writing hir autobiography –

has not had hir castration, Revathi has. This bodily fact informs how they are

treated by their families. Revathi is persecuted and constructs hir narrative as that

of a victim, whereas Laxmi is accepted by hir family and positions hirself as an

empowered activist. About being a hijra ze says, “Had I not become a hijra, I

might have been any ordinary effeminate homosexual guy. Being a hijra made

me glamorous and militant…the shy, timid Laxminarayan of old, faded out of

existence, and the Laxmi you see before you, aggressive, ready to fight the world,

stood his place.” (Laxmi, 169)

Rao interrogates Laxmi’s positioning hirself as an empowered hijra, who

has also found acceptance with hir family –an ideal situation, according to Laxmi

– but it is not without its fault lines of compromise on hir part. In an article by

Rushdie about his meeting with Laxmi on AIDS in the hijra community, he

writes “Laxmi is a rarity among hijras; she lives at home, and to avoid upsetting

her parents, dresses as a man when she is with them. They call her by her male

name, Laxmikant, or by her family nickname Raju…” (Rao, 208-209) For the

family – the physical presence of Laxmi’s male genitals plays a crucial role in

deciding their attitude towards him, while still allowing hir to enjoy privileges

that come with being male in a patriarchal society. Ze quite literally is living out

hir dual consciousness but in a reversed situation where ze is a male-woman

(male by body, woman by gender) pretending to be a man at home, but a male-

woman being a woman to the outside world.

While both the transsexual and hijra experiences are subsumed under the

category of transgender, they are distinct in their own ways with the role of the

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body defining the difference. Unlike the transgender, the transsexual is someone,

born either male or female, who apart from transforming their gender identity,

has also transitioned in their body to a sex not of their birth. On the other hand,

hijras, usually born male, could have undergone castration or not. Even if they

are castrated, they would not be the same as a transsexual person who has

undergone a sex reassignment surgery, as the castration is often crudely done,

unlike a sanitized hospital environment, and does not involve hormone therapy,

due to which the hijra always retains aspects of their ‘maleness.’ There is also a

strong socio-cultural context to hijras – they form a community and culture unto

themselves, which involves voluntary ghettoizing, as opposed to the end goal of

transsexuals which is to assimilate into mainstream society. These varied

experiences cannot quite be covered under the umbrella term of transgender –

conflating experiences of sex, gender and body.

Prosser, as a transsexual, through his academic writing, seeks to mark out

the body as a separate entity. The paradox, here, though – as also for the hijra

experience – is that for the transition of the transsexual individual to be truly

complete, they would have to cease to be trans, and fully be their desired sex. The

conflict is that since transsexual people still having a trans identity implies they

are yet to let go of their earlier self (gender), which ultimately undermines the

validity of the desired gender and body identity they want to become. To be

authentically and completely embodied, they need to not be transsexual. Though

not having been castrated or undergone sex reassignment, Laxmi’s autobiography

subconsciously belies this conflict, as it is apparent in the dual roles ze plays of

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man versus woman, hijra versus heterosexual. Always in the nonzone, Laxmi

straddles both worlds in a quest to find acceptance.

That nonzone Prosser speaks of as characterizing the transition never

ends, the transition remains incomplete, as even the transsexual never ceases to

be trans, and never fully becomes heterosexual. What Butler celebrated in the

transgendered subject – the destabilizing force, Prosser presents as a space of

anxiety and discomfort for the trans person and for those in the mainstream

society interacting with them. The body narratives of Laxmi, Revathi and Living

Smile Vidya, while evidencing the materiality of the body, continue to navigate

the fault lines of sex and gender. The narratives become not just what is explicitly

stated but also allow a glimpse of the many conflicting voices in their heads. As

explained by Laxmi, despite taking on the identity of a woman, the last rites for a

hijra, “When a hijra dies, an artificial penis made of cotton or wheat flour is stuck

on her body before she is burnt or buried. This, in order not to forget, that the

hijra in question was born as a male.” (Laxmi, 176-177)

The autobiographical genre has come full circle from being an exclusively

male prerogative to becoming a space for marginalized communities to gain

political legitimacy and social acceptance. Trans narratives in particular have

paved the way for greater possibilities in interrogations of the ‘self,’ especially

through the prisms of gender and body, and have opened up to readings of not

just what is explicitly said in the text, but of what is left unsaid. This necessitates

more academic research on trans autobiographies for a deeper understanding of

the critical issues raised though the trans narratives. Especially since these

transitions still remain incomplete. Perhaps it need to be taken a step further from

87
the writing of these autobiographies their actual culmination in realizing social

change – enabling the trans narratives to have a choice of moving from the

unstable nonzone to a state of being or dwell in the intermediate nonzone,

embracing the multiple, the fluid and the undefined.

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End Notes :

i
Appendix -I. “Pallabi Baruah In Conversation with Transwoman Sai

Bourothu.”
ii
Transgendered persons in Tami Nadu prefer to be called ‘Tirunangai.’
iii
Leslie Feinberg has introduced the pronouns hir (in place of her/his) and ze (in

place of he/she) to describe hirself. Following her and Cressida J. Heyes, I will

be using these pronouns in this chapter.

89
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