What does one make out of the sociolegal environment in which queer and transgender people in India find themselves today? It seems to be a story of partial progress, or even paradoxical progress. There have been relatively progressive judicial verdicts and proceedings on transgender rights, decriminalization, cohabitation of queer couples, eliminating queerphobic content from medical curricula, disability, and mental healthcare. Yet, there are legislations like the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, which fall short on several important fronts like reservation in education and employment and unequivocal protection from harmful practices like conversion therapy. The National Education Policy 2020 upholds transgender inclusion, but is silent on issues of diversity in sexual orientation.
In this context, where are we regarding the mental health concerns of queer and transgender people in India, and in particular, the dangerous persistence of conversion therapy? Several associations of mental health professionals have belatedly taken a stand against conversion therapy, and yet the practice persists among qualified medical practitioners as well as quacks and religious or spiritual gurus (the latter often being the first option for alternative healing for many Indian families). How do we counter these practices?
These concerns motivated the mental health peer counsellors associated with Varta Trust to organize a community-based experience-sharing dialogue on the kind of interventions some of the queer and transgender mental health professionals in India and Canada have been engaged with – historically and in current times – on countering queerphobic attitudes and practices, including conversion therapy.
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The dialogue ‘Queer Worldmaking in the Face of Conversion Therapy’ was organized on January 18, 2025 at Kalinath Angan in South Kolkata. It was moderated by peer counsellor Meghjit Sengupta, who was in conversation with Meera Dhebar, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and Aritra Chatterjee, Kolkata-based clinical psychologist affiliated with Rocket Health, India; co-creator of G-STOP; and doctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology, University of Calcutta.
Meera, who is a first-generation Indian living in Canada, has embarked on postdoctoral research in India since 2023 to engage with queer and transgender mental health professionals, activists, and scholars. She shared her experiences as therapist, educator, and researcher. One of the outcomes of her doctoral research has been queer worldmaking to better understand the relational fluidity of gender and sexuality. Meera also spoke about conversion therapy being banned in Canada, and yet how the problem has not quite gone away as the activists had hoped.
Aritra spoke about insights from mental healthcare service-audits with queer and transgender service users in India, which has been a key area of her research interest. She dwelt on how conversion culture is present cross-culturally in non-western mental health classrooms and how it shapes the research outlook in scholars and clinicians concerning queer and transgender people.
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The rest of this article is an account of the dialogue through the eyes of two of the peer counsellors involved in organizing the event – Meghjit Sengupta as moderator and Surjo Pramanik as documenter.
Finding solace in community and everyday worldmaking – Meghjit’s takeaway
A point which connects the current state of conversion therapy in Canada and India is its secretive hangover in largely heteronormative societies, which still look at non-normative sexualities as something changeable. In Canada, while there is a strict ban on conversion therapy being practiced on queer individuals, Meera informed how well-off parents of queer individuals travel to a different country to inflict conversion therapy on their children. In India, hospitals and individual mental health practitioners have been known to earn money out of parents and guardians of queer individuals to indulge in this violent practice on young queer individuals – all in the name of a so-called therapy to ‘cure’ queerness, something that is not an ailment in the first place. According to Aritra, conversion therapy is not at all a form of therapy – it is a practice standing on dated and biased psychoanalytic theories that only ends up violating queer individuals and impacting their mental and physical health adversely.
Aritra reflected on the case of Abigail, a trans woman, who was forced to go to the hospital and was physically, mentally, and medically violated since the age of 14 so that she would adhere to the gender assigned to her at birth. Here, the role of pseudo-religious practitioners – self-proclaimed gurus and godmen – becomes interesting as they lay claim to true knowledge about how to make a person behave, act according to their parents’ wishes, and marry who they are told to marry. This too is a not-so-subtle form of conversion practice, an attempt to ‘change’ a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
As the moderator for the panel discussion, I felt a deep connect with the topic of discussion. The ease with which the audience related to the discussion added to this feeling. As someone who has experienced the calamity of desiring to force themselves into identifying as a cisgender man sexually attracted to women, Meera and Aritra’s words acted like balm on wounds still raw and pulsating with the increasing level of queerphobic developments globally.
How people go about with queer worldmaking, how they find that one minute of solace, and how they try to expand that one minute into several were a few of the major takeaways from this event for me. Worldmaking through friendships, conversations, music, and safe space constructions on an everyday basis coloured the conversation as Meera and Aritra exchanged glances with me and with each other.
While sex, gender and sexualities are complex and evolving, community-based practices should focus on building resilience rather than trying to fix the pressure to conform to society’s heteronormative standards. At times the search for peace consumes a lot of our energy and ability to engage with life, especially while dealing with anxieties surrounding the subtleties of conversion practices. There are times when we are made to question what we feel. The answer, according to Meera, lies in not just having individual peer counsellors, but peer communities and support groups that provide some form of sukoon or relief to troubled individuals who just want to be heard or bask in the glimmers of hope when everything around seems hopeless.
Navigating through despair, confusion, and hope – Surjo’s learning
Witnessing reinvigorated queerphobia in our daily lives through anti-trans legislations globally, hate crimes, and hate speech both online and offline, a discussion on conversion therapy seemed necessary. Alongside discussing it in the context of Canada and India, it was important to address the crevices of hope, which came in the form of queer worldmaking, the other seminal part of the discussion. As a young trans masculine individual in the audience, being with queer individuals from different generations was a reminder of our resilience, survival and daring to hope in desperate times.
The discussion began with an experience shared by Meghjit and echoed by many of us in the audience – the experience of being made to question our queerness. This self-interrogation is not rooted in self-discovery, but is a rebuke to ourselves to fit in with the cis-het patriarchal order. Before experiencing conversion therapy from medical personnel, we inflict it on ourselves through conforming and forcing ourselves to echo the norms around heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity. The interactive panel was helpful as we encountered questions from queer elders involved in the earliest mobilizations of queer rights in India regarding what had changed between then and now. Throughout the years since the 1990s in India (and earlier in Canada), despite seeing our identities and struggles becoming a part of public discourse, we were still gathered there to counter conversion therapy.
From the eyes of a young trans peer counsellor – Surjo
As peer counsellors in the making, an important point in the discussion was identifying conversion therapy when it is not visible in its usual form. Meera informed us about broadening the meaning of the term to include any ‘change efforts’. At times, contrary to the popular rhetoric of conversion therapy being forced upon queer individuals by family members, queer people themselves, too, seek such services. It is therefore essential to address the violent environment, shame and fear that surround a queer person, compelling them to choose the path of conversion therapy. As Aritra rightly pointed out, it is not even a therapy but blatant violence which employs outdated psychoanalytic frameworks to ‘fix’ queerness. A seminal takeaway for me was to understand how the terminology around medical issues can be restrictive, facilitating violence to seep its way into queer lives.
As Meghjit reminisced of a childhood that was devoid of positive queer figures and marked with prolonged bouts of alienation, peer counsellors in the audience shared their experience of providing support to queer peers in recent times. What came through was that in a peer counselling situation, there may be a shared sense of relief arising from confiding in another queer individual. This allows peer counsellors to be closely privy to how their queer peers are struggling hard mentally, something that may not happen in clinical settings with professional counsellors, given the history of such establishments pathologizing queer people.
Expanding peer counselling for queer individuals in the realm of community making opens spaces of trust, support, and confidence without judgement. However, it requires a nuanced understanding of people’s diverse socioeconomic positions in addition to their queer identity. Language is one such factor. A queer man in the audience described how he could use slurs for gay people in his mother tongue to explain his identity to his family, but such language is not accessible for the different identities on the spectrum. Finding equivalent words in our native tongues and exemplars of our identities thus becomes a Herculean task. To counter the bindings of language, Meera suggested a creative intervention of using descriptors like colours, characters, films, music, or lyrics to talk about or convey one’s queerness.
Meera said that another significant effort to bridge the gap between counsellors and their queer clients is to try and understand queer-trans lifeworlds. The popular narrative of therapy and counselling revolves around negatives, sorrows, and problems, which can be tweaked to discover what gives strength to queer folks, what makes them happy, and so on.
As queer-trans peer counsellors, I think it is important for us to understand the oppressive structure of bio-medical models of therapy incentivized by capitalism, religion, and the natal family, and how these lead to conversion therapy practices within and outside the medical field.
This discussion brought back memories of the recent past when accepting my trans identity was a challenge for me. Like many of my peers, I sought to adhere to hyper feminine expressions to suppress my trans masculinity. Today, I am part of community circles where there is greater freedom to be myself. Thus, it becomes increasingly important to make community building efforts, make our services accessible, and to be conscious of the diverse intersections of our identities.
About the main photo: Moderator Meghjit Sengupta (centre) and panellist Aritra Chatterjee (to Meghjit’s left) look on as panellist Meera Dhebar makes a point on queer counter-narratives against conversion therapy and queer worldmaking practices during the dialogue at Kalinath Angan, Kolkata. All photo credits: Pawan Dhall
