Societal Prostitutes & Pride — Storytime
This isn’t going to be long-winded and researched like my other articles — it is more of a personal monologue with no prior preparation.
I was never really a great student. I was not a particularly well-mannered person either. People who have studied with me or at least associated with me at some point of time know my misgivings, what I’ve lacked, and how much of a misfit I was. I was the weird kid other kids stayed away from, the quiet kid who was always in the shadows, the person who blended into an empty room with white walls while wearing all black, the sort of person who commanded no attention or praise of any sort. I had no marketable skills, was deeply at unrest with myself, and not really good at social interactions because of a deep mistrust for the homo sapien in general.
I could go on about a lot of things that happened over the years, about the hardships I’ve had to face, the tears I’ve shed, and the tensions I’ve gone through while living alone, but I’m not going to simply because they don’t matter. I’ll start by saying that no one deserves the fate of being transgender, it is a mentally tormenting ordeal that I would not wish on any living individual. People often think transitioning is just about changing your appearance, taking hormones, and getting surgeries done but there is a whole personal angle that they don’t know. Your entire life changes, the way your body feels, sensations, interests — it is a complete overhaul of your senses neurologically. I don’t necessarily blame them for not understanding it because it is not only a very rare thing, but it’s also a very difficult thing to describe. 99.99% of humanity would not understand gender dysphoria, which makes accepting trans people rather difficult, and in addition, people like my parents refuse to learn more about it themselves because if they accept that this is an immense amount of pain that I (and people like me) have to go through on a daily basis, it wouldn’t be easy for them to dismiss as a delusion and as a choice, which they have actively done to other trans people. Science hasn’t really helped us either. There are no studies being conducted to find definitive neurological markers that understand whether a person is trans from, say, a brain scan. 100% of all people who have been or are diagnosed with gender dysphoria are done through psychological evaluation, which isn’t exactly an objective analysis, but works for now.
Anyway, the lack of understanding, awareness, and empathy towards trans people is particularly apparent in the societal setting. Whatever brand of queer you are, you will always stand out. That’s always going to happen because that’s just how we are wired, and most people will find it a bit uncomfortable because we don’t exactly fit into society’s normie standards of appearance. You can’t take the gay out of the gay and the normie out of the normie if that makes sense. Similarly, it is practically impossible to not transition or at least let some characteristics of yourself out at some point of time throughout the course of your life if you are trans. I’ll be honest, I do not understand non-binary people because I do not know what your experience is. To me, a person like Alok Menon was the nightmare I feared I would end up like, but this was before I realised that transitioning was actually possible. However, if you feel you are comfortable like that, if you feel at home with yourself like that, by all means, do so.
A couple of days ago, I had a discussion with my father as to what he thinks about my transition. When I say discussion, I do not mean that at all, but for all intents and purposes, it was one, albeit going nowhere. Out of a charade of things he said, he admitted that he could not accept me for the way I am simply because of the society he lives in. Now, I am quite an accommodating person, people who really know me will tell you. I have friends from all types of different social and political backgrounds and I am a person who believes that the more ideas I am exposed to, the more knowledgeable I become. However, there are only two types of people I will not be friends with — secessionists and people who want to denigrate my very existence. Even so, I believed that over the course of the three-odd years we had not talked, he would have changed his mind. Surprise surprise, he hadn’t. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he would not and could not accept me because he had to live in a society, and that he did not believe I was trans.
Now, while I disagree with the second part of that statement, I do understand the absurd negationism he purports. He needs to believe that I am, in fact, a man, because he has internalized it as a reflection of his fragile masculinity. If he accepts that I have transitioned on a social and biological basis, which I have, he has to accept, in his head, that he is responsible for it because he was supposed to be the ‘father figure’. He fails to realise that he is standing on a sinking ship with the salty sea engulfing his already impending irrelevance. He would rather stay on board and die than get on a life raft and save himself, simply because he feels responsible for the gaping hole he created by driving straight into an iceberg.
He also went on to say that it didn’t matter how much money I ever make, it wouldn’t matter because I could not possibly expect or command respect in any shape or form. He fails to realise that respect is earned, not given to you on a silver platter. However, I’ll tell you why he felt that way. My father is a very introverted character. He worked in the company he joined at the age of 25–26 for 10 straight years. He had no ambitions of personal growth, aspirations of getting ahead in life, providing better for his family — nothing. He just kept working there, denying his self worth, reducing himself to a job that meant nothing in a company that didn’t care. He finally woke up and realised this fact when a position that he had been rooting for was filled by someone new. He apparently was hurt, so he moved to a different company where he didn’t make much (because he was still working in Kerala) but he had a better position. He had to quit because of some reasons I’m not going to say here but the bottom line is he couldn’t value himself enough to demand a better position even though he thought he deserved it. It shows how meek a man he really is. So when he said I wouldn’t get any respect in society, I completely understand where he’s coming from. His perspective is of a defeatist loser who would’ve become the personification of today’s doomer wojak. His underachieving arse could not possibly fathom what aspirations mean or what self worth even is.
However, what really ticked me off is his audacity to think that he was a significant part of my life by saying he would not accept me. I could care less about his acceptance — I am an independent woman who is working her way up the corporate ladder with nothing but pure blood, sweat, and skill, and is managing all this while working through crippling dysphoria, poverty, and working on her own interests. If he really thinks his opinion matters, he is either clinically retarded or has accepted the fact that he is too much of a coward to stand up for his own child. Fun fact, when I came out to my mother on the 25th of June, 2020, the first thing she said to me was that I would not get a single job other than be a sex worker. I wish it had ended there, but it hadn’t — she went on to say that ‘these people’ (referring to trans people) do ‘this’ (sex work) and eventually kill themselves because they have no choice. Now, I would have been empathetic to this woman if she was an uneducated villager who was born and raised in some remote part of India with no electricity or running water, but this was a woman who apparently has a Master’s Degree from the most literate state in the country. Well, to be fair, it says literate, not educated.
Now, I don’t know in what universe saying such a horrendous thing is considered acceptable behaviour from the mother that gave birth to you. A person reading this might say, “Well, she was using that as a deterrent to make me rethink your decision” — and that’s exactly what my father said when I last spoke to him. Even so, I want to know if you reading this would say that to your child who has just completed their education and is actively looking out for a job. For the lesser educated and slower minds, I’ll give you a cisheteronormative allegory — imagine you as a parent telling your male child that whatever he does, he’s going to end up shooting drugs, raping women, riding his car recklessly and kill himself because ‘that’s what the media says about men these days’. Imagine you as a parent telling your female child that whatever she does, however good she does meritoriously, she’s eventually going to have to get married, make babies, not go to work, and possibly die in the process of it because ‘that’s what you know about it’. Even if you thought that was true, would you say that to your 20-year-old child, especially your first born? If you would, please stop being a burden to society and kill yourself right now because you have not only failed as a parent — you have failed at being a decent human being.
This came rather as a shock to me — you wouldn’t even expect this from your nosy neighbour who believes in the second coming of Christ, black magic, and astrology that states that the position of Uranus in the sky changes the consistency of your potty, let alone from your own educated mother. Those words haunt me to this day, I still haven’t healed from the trauma that has caused me, and I cannot bring myself to forgive her for it. I know I might seem like a selfish hag to a lot of people, but I have built myself somewhat of a self-esteem big enough to not forgive her for it unless she accepts it and apologizes for her actions.
This brings me back to my earlier point about ‘acceptance’. I do not need anyone’s acceptance. I have never asked for anyone’s validation — I have earned it. I worked on my voice, I am working on my appearance, and I have built myself a resilience that will outshine the Sun. Not to brag, but I work at an MNC firm right now getting paid quite modestly and I made that by sitting down, working on myself and minding my own business. Along the course of this journey, I made myself a group of people who I call family — people not related to me by blood, but who I know will give me their blood if the situation required it. When I was having a financial crisis, it was these people who helped me get myself back on my feet, both through guidance as well as financial support. I know those people are reading this, and you know who you are. When my life flashes before my eyes just before I die, you can bet your bottom dollar that the memories I have with you will be the ones I will cherish the most.
People like my parents are what one of my closest friends calls ‘societal prostitutes’. They sell themselves to this self-concocted delusion of social validation, and the further you stray from their herd, the more you are perceived as a threat to their status in society. At the tipping point, they will have to either stand by their child and help them brave the storm that is inevitably coming for them, or continue to bend over & take the pounding of the mediocre malarkey of this apathetic mob. They fail to realise that this society has done nothing for them, and never will, and that they have to take a stand to either move ahead in life or be left crying, unwanted.
You might think this is because of me being different or trans or whatever, but you’re wrong. Your parents are the same as mine, and if you think they aren’t, it’s simply because you haven’t touched them where it’s most sensitive. For some it might be religion, for others, it might be politics, and for some others, it’s caste — it’s always about finding the lowest common denominator. I have come to the realisation that these people are beyond the point of help, they have allowed society to put its long, hard, intrusive heads deep inside them, and the only way they will be able to get it out is to meet me halfway.
There were two other arguments that especially pissed me off. The first one was that I was just “confused” and that going to a doctor wouldn’t help because “they will only affirm your condition”. If you didn’t understand it, I’ll explain what it is. He said that I was just confused about my gender because of my sexuality (even though I’m bi) and that if I went to the doctor and told them my symptoms, they would agree with me as long as I said the symptoms were what I had told him. So wait, is a doctor NOT supposed to diagnose patients based on the symptoms that they present with? What are they supposed to do, pull symptoms out of my arse and disprove me? He also went on to indulge in the usual misogynistic trope of “you like cars and bikes, you like blue instead of pink, how can you be trans?” — and it’s true, I still do love cars and bikes, but there are women in wheelchairs with lifelong ambitions to ride motorcycles, so I don’t think it’s a fair argument for or against being trans, he’s just being an ill-informed imbecile. I mean honestly, if not for the arranged marriage system, do you really think half of India would exist right now? I know for a fact I wouldn’t have been born.
The second, more laughable part is that this was all because I was on my phone all the time. I wish I was making that up. He literally said that I "became like this” because I had gone and looked it up, associated myself with them, and decided to go ahead with transitioning.
Now, to all the cisheteronormative people reading this, let’s say I hand you an article saying “10 Reasons Why You are Transgender” — would you get “honey trapped” and agree with that article? Ok, let’s say you don’t understand. I’ll make it even simpler for you to understand — as a straight man, would you have sex with a man? Obviously not. No amount of academic literature and scientific jargon is going to change your sexuality — you’re always going to be attracted to women. The same applies to women. You know what you like, end of story. Now, why would I be confused about my gender when I know what will help me thrive, and in practice, evidently has? This shows that he lives in this fictitious world inside his head where everything is fine and no one knows about anything related to me — almost as if I didn’t exist. Taking into consideration that my father never called me once since I left Thiruvananthapuram, my hometown, it becomes clear that he prefers it this way.
There isn’t any pride associated with being gay or trans, or at least I don’t see it that way. I actively avoid bringing it up in conversations. The concept of pride becoming synonymous with the LGBT movement has to do with the movement’s strong stance against Christianity and its bigoted approach towards homosexuals. Homosexuality was condemned as a sin by the Church, with Thomas Aquinas calling pride the ‘worst among the seven cardinal sins’ and it is in retaliation to this that Pride parades started. I am not proud of being trans, I am proud of living my authentic life despite being trans. I am proud of the fact that despite the societal pressure to push me into a certain box because of the way they perceived me to be, I chose to take a stand for myself bending over like the rest of them. I am proud that every step I have ever taken has opened doors for me one way or the other, and that I was able to turn the very thing that my parents told me would end me into a symbol and instrument of my skill and power. No one can take that away from me, and whoever stands against me stands on the wrong side of history.
