The Supreme Court of the UK has, earlier this month, delivered a judgement that is equal parts confusing and horrifying. It has held that transgender women are not women and transgender men are not men, that women and men must be defined by biological sex, and that transgender persons are a protected class by virtue of the act of gender reassignment, but will not be able to access certain spaces and services in their desired gender identity as women or men.
In effect, the judgement has resulted in a bizarre statute that claims to protect transgender individuals, but does not honour their desire to identify as women or men. The gender identity that will matter for access to services, as the UK government is now clarifying, is the one assigned at birth, not the acquired or desired one. The Supreme Court was at pains to explain that this did not amount to discrimination against transgender individuals, yet allowed an obtuse form of discrimination against gender reassignment with the leeway that single-sex spaces have the right to refuse admission to transgender individuals.
The history of the definition of womanhood itself has long been contested, and the ideal biological characteristics of womanhood laid down in science, from hormonal profiles to physical stature to vocal ranges, are mired in racist and classist histories of exclusion and violence – many of which are still regularly deployed in settings like women’s sports where black and brown women are excessively targeted for not meeting required testosterone levels, a number decided upon testing of white women. If anything, the Supreme Court judgement has given the government of UK and the many trans-exclusionary organizations that are currently active on TERF Island as it has come to be known, has emboldened their stance with regard to transgender exclusion, almost giving them the legitimation that they had long sought for actions like transvestigating random individuals on the street or running smear campaigns against those who do not meet specific images of white, fragile womanhood at all. It also hurts transgender men, who find themselves gendered female for all legal purposes, and could, in fact, be forced to use women’s-only services at risk of bodily harm.
If there is anything that this seems to suggest is that the UK is on a very sharp slope towards completely undoing all progress that has been made regarding gender identities, the idea of self-determination, or even of the un-fixedness of gender as a concept. It is like the country is hell bent on returning to a world in which ManTM and WomanTM are monoliths which contain nothing within them. And it is not just the UK. The USA has defunded almost all research on queerness, in every single discipline, and is now actively making life harder for transgender people, not just in the USA but also by removing programmes that assisted them around the world, like here in India.
Let us travel to a little black box theatre in Kolkata on a sultry Friday evening
I had the privilege of watching a dear friend and genius Ahon Gooptu stage Item, a genre-fluid show that is dance, drama, drag, and conversation. Item tells the story of Zizou and his drag persona Zenia as they navigate changing places, spaces, and things to call home – questioning in turn what being at home means. Replete with Ahon’s biting humour and a tenderness that makes it burrow a hole into your heart and eat it out for breakfast, Item is a riot for all of its unbearably short 45-minute runtime. I will save the review, The Telegraph has done a pretty good job of that, but watching the show left me saddened as much as it left me heartened. It left me heartened, of course, because at a crucial level the show is the life many of us have led at some point – of desiring our parent’s jewellery, of queening out to Madhuri, of despising the very ‘male’ pastimes we were forced to take on – all different condiments to the same core recipe, and it felt comforting to see that the experience was shared among many like us. It left me saddened in one very, depressing way.
Zenia’s story depends on the American dream, or at large, a queer dream made available by the Euro-American West, of a world in which there is a possibility of leading life queerly as it may. The 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by what seems like the inevitable march of progress towards greater normalization of gender and sexual difference, and the hope that queer people will become for all legal and official purposes, no different from the straight folks. This constant narrative of progress has also offered queer individuals from places like India, where many feel unsafe and vulnerable in declaring their queerness, a respite, a chance to breathe, to figure out what it is that they want from themselves.
It is no surprise that the Trikone Magazine (1986-2014), one of the earliest queer publications from the South Asian diaspora started in the 1980s, was as successful as it was – the American dream was not merely economic. The dream offered the possibility of escaping everything that held back the ability to be truly oneself and attracted many. Zenia is a product of this version of the American dream, of a young, unsure Indian man who finds himself falling in love with the art of drag in its fullest, and embracing it as he embraces himself.
Item intentionally complicates perceived roles of gender, it breaks expectations of who should be what – it problematizes what it means to be a man, especially one bearing the weight of Indian patriarchy. Zenia’s story is dependent on the belief that there is a world where an exploration of the self is possible, by breaking through established gender roles, of looking for what one wants to be when one is not the ‘ideal son’ or the ‘perfect daughter’, where Zizou is not forced to perform a kind of gendered life that does not fit his desires. Zenia’s story hinges on the possibility of a world where there can be imaginations of what life can be like if one is given the language and the belief that one can live as one desires, without sacrificing an integral part of oneself.
Zenia’s life depended on a USA where there were still drag shows – despite all their problems, despite the racism, xenophobia and tokenism that racialized and minoritized bodies are subjected to, despite the exoticism and fetishism that a minority faces. If anything, it is because of the respite that Zenia Fauxbia Darling finds on the dance floor, in the swirling music and the beat, and the epiphany in that movement and atmosphere that she feels she can belong, survive, live!
That world is fast dying. The UK has already seen businesses take action to limit accessibility to gender non-conforming individuals and the government seems to be poised to follow. The USA is attempting to legislate queer and transgender people out of existence. The world that allowed for the exploration and self-discovery that led to Zenia is one that is repeatedly under attack from all quarters, and those attacks show no signs of abating. Which is what makes me wonder – will another Indian queer kid who is lost and confused and trying to figure out what it is that makes them ‘them’ be able to walk into a club and be faced with a posse of drag queens slaying it on the stage and then have a lightbulb moment that they so desperately desired all their lives, or will moving miles and miles no longer afford them the luxury of self-discovery as they try to keep themselves safe?
When the risk of being yourself in India and in the Anglo-American world increasingly seems to overlap, what does that movement afford you? When the depredations of the delusional and paranoid West that has been losing its mind over gender increasingly legitimate the global suppression and oppression of gender fluidity and the circumscribing of diverse forms of identification and selfhood, where will all the people who do not belong, go?
Can another Zenia exist when the environment that allowed Zenia to bloom is buried six feet under and demagogues hold the shovels?
About the main photo: Ahon Gooptu in a scene from the show Item. Photo credit: Abhilasha Das
Absolutely enthralling. Well researched, eloquently written. Kudos to Mihir for such a well written review of Ahon’s masterpiece. I am very proud of both of you!
What is happening around the world, amplified by the UK Supreme Court is plain wrong. It may seem like we are going backwards, but maybe this helps us to understand the folks like TERF better. It is time for all of us to stand by each other and refuse to let them make us fearful. The fight continues … and together we find power !
Ahon, more power to you . Keep bringing such queer stories out to the audience. Let them cringe, let them learn, let them understand, let them embrace.