Lopamudra Mahapatra, Week 5

The Sexual is Political: Consent and the Transgender Persons Act, 2019

The Transgender Act 2019 passed recently by the Parliament, undoes the capacity of the trans subject to be a citizen by revoking their ability to consent. The Act takes away the consent from the trans subject in many ways under this Act. Firstly, of course, by denying the trans person with the right to determine their own gender. Further, the District Magistrate with discretionary powers to judge who is and isn’t a trans person. Yet, what the bill does is necessitate a regime of recognition in which the trans person must reduce their trans identity to that of the body and the body must be made into a “hieroglyphics of the flesh” where the scar has greater capacity for testimony in court than the speech of the trans person. The Trans Act takes away the sensuality of the trans person and hands it over for the enjoyment of a District Magistrate, the profit of the medical-pharmaceutical complex. It imposes the rule of experts rather than value the desires and speech of the trans person. By denying the trans subject the ability to testify to their own body, name their desires and act in ways that represent them, the Act denies equality before the law and legal person hood to trans persons. The Act shows how deeply the state is invested in maintaining the gendered ways of the world, ironically in the name of trans rights, and how the social contract is, at heart, sexual, nay, pornographic.

Transgender people hope for SC intervention

Transgender rights groups in Assam approached the Supreme Court to modify the appeals process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), arguing that the current process of document verification excluded large sections of the community. The final list of the NRC published excluded 1.9 million people from its rolls, also there was no separate figure for the transgender community, but the community leaders and activists say thousands may have missed the cut because the NRC process was designed keeping in mind men and women and not trans persons. Trans persons faced many hurdles in the NRC process, where one had to prove that they, or their ancestors, were present in Assam before the day war for Bangladesh’s liberation began. Firstly, they had to procure connections from their families that they were long estranged from. The irony was that they were themselves never accepted by their families. Secondly, in convincing the officials and family members of their identity, despite their name, variances and gender. 

Okay Nandini Krishnan, I read your book “ Invisible Man” , and here is why its offensive

The writer is a transgender person who does not identify as trans feminine or transmasculine. The writer has complete and unwavering faith in the source and expression of indignation and anger felt by the transmasculine community in the country and has some questions that revolve around accountability and ethics. It is somewhere safe to say that Nandini Krishnan is quite unaware of these terms except in their procedural sense. The writer will not go into nit-picking Nandini Krishnan’s words right now, because it is very clear that she has a way of twisting words to her advantage; what we call cis-caste-privilege. But that doesn’t mean that for a discerning reader her intentions are not clear. Krishnan’s central allegation has been that many of her naysayers haven’t read the work in its entirety. In a day and age where messages are often taken out of context to rip apart human lives, her statement holds some validity. It is the trans community itself which has criticized the work severely, citing misrepresentation and misgendering of the community as well as the Meitei community in Manipur. They have called out the casteism, ableism, and the Brahminical overtones among other problematic elements. Several rejoinders sprung up online and a public protest was organized in Imphal where physical copies of the work were set on fire.