By Emily Geminder
26 July 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community is increasingly defining itself as a global one, with struggles for equality playing out in countries formerly marked by impermeable silence on the issue. From pride parades in Cape Town to efforts for transgender legal rights in Thailand, the world is beginning to heed the call of change.
Nowhere is the global negotiation of boundaries more apparent than at the United Nations, to which, after a lengthy battle, two non-governmental organizations addressing gender identity and sexual orientation issues gained consultative status this week. Activists and civil society members called the victory a monumental step towards achieving international equality.
As the struggle for equality plays out on a global stage, Rose Venkatesan is challenging inequality in her community in India one stigma at a time. Poised atop a lotus-shaped stage, set lights cascading over her throngs of designer sari sequins and headache-inducing jewels, you might think you’d stumbled across a goddess reincarnate. Or at least, an Indian Oprah Winfrey – a name Venkatesan has been compared to frequently. You wouldn’t be far off. Venkatesan too wields her lacquered talk show persona to tackle taboo issues from premarital sex
to divorce in a country that remains, in many ways, rigid in its traditions – particularly when it comes to sex and marriage. But many, not least among them the 28-year-old herself, believe she is uniquely poised to broach the questions society does not want to address: disarmingly articulate and self-possessed, Venkatesan is also transgender.
“I wanted to do something in the media because it is in the media that you can make a major impact,” Venkatesan told MediaGlobal from Chennai, formerly known as Madras.. Six months ago, at the show’s inception, her life was very different. Kicked out of her family home and unable to find work due to her feminine attire, she slept in the walk-in room of a sympathetic local organization providing health resources to sexual minorities. On the streets, she was confronted with near constant harassment, which sometimes ended in violence, and she was briefly forced into sex work to survive.
“During this period of extreme pain and trauma I was facing, I realized enough was enough, I had to do something,” Venkatesan recounted. “I started looking at the media very seriously, and I started hunting for opportunities.” The first two networks Venkatesan approached laughed her away. But the third, Vijay TV, taken with her eloquence and charm, signed her on. In February, the first episode of Ippadikku Rose (“Yours, Rose”) aired to an audience of 64 million viewers. The numbers have only risen.
Venkatesan addresses the unique challenges of her community in part by drawing on its strengths. Many aspects of Indian culture, she notes, are traditionally accepting of unconventional gender identities and non-heterosexual practices. “It was with British rule that things changed,” she said, “because previous to that, Hindu culture was very inclusive of sexual minorities in the name of third gendered people. They were seen as divine.”
Indian culture’s erratic stance toward gender minorities is perhaps best exemplified in the role of the Hijra community. Hijras, India’s largest and most well known (though far from its only) third gender community, were long considered an auspicious presence at weddings and births, but increasing marginalization has led to the primacy of sex work as the community’s means of survival. “They’re completely ostracized,” Venkatsan said. “They’re untouchables. People are highly uncomfortable with the subject. People don’t even want to see them.”
Due to stigmas surrounding sexual and gender minorities and sex workers, as well as healthcare that fails to address their needs, transgender individuals in India are at a disproportionately high risk for HIV infection. On the streets, they routinely face sexual violence – not least from the police, who exploit the criminalization of non-heterosexual intercourse still enshrined in Indian national law. According to a report launched today by the United Nations agency for HIV/AIDS, the epidemic’s prevalence among vulnerable communities – especially men who have sex with men – is on the rise in India.
While Hindu extremist parties tend to produce frenzied uproar at any display of sexuality defying the narrow paradigm of heterosexual marriage, Hinduism can also be remarkably inclusive. “We have transgender gods – can you believe that?” Venkatesan noted. “We have a god who was born of intercourse between two men. The British didn’t like that. They wanted to cleanse this country of what they viewed as evil. They even destroyed a lot of cultural artwork that depicted homosexuality, untraditional sexual acts, and sexuality in general. They imposed the modern idea of rigid heterosexuality.”
Amara Das Wilhelm of the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association also sees a dynamic interplay between traditional and modern forms of acceptance, with the current movement for queer rights drawing on India’s long tradition of the “third sex.” Das Wilhelm told MediaGlobal, “So-called traditional views in India are beginning to slowly change. Homosexuality and other gender variations were formerly accepted and accommodated in Indian society. Only in recent centuries has it become a ‘tradition’ to ostracize and exclude these groups. Some Westerners have a problem with accepting a third sex category but for Indians and Hindus it is an easy concept to grasp and most are aware of it as an ancient Indian tradition.”
While colonial rule may have suppressed the multiplicitous gender expressions of its day, Venkatesan seeks to reclaim the inclusive voice of popular media. “I wanted to use the media, because it was using the media that we were first ostracized,” she said.
And her voice is being heard. Two months after the first airing of Ippidikku Rose, the Tamil Nadu government established a transgender welfare board, hailed as the most progressive legislation on transgender issues in India. Some of its efforts so far have included distributing food ration cards to transgender individuals and creating an official third gender status in government records – including forms for admission to educational institutions, which are now required to accept transgender students.
One student will be Venkatesan, who recently enrolled in a course on camera work and editing. Among the projects she intends to pursue are transgender cast and themed feature films and a reality show depicting her upcoming gender reassignment surgery and transition.
When she is not on the set, Venkatesan conducts trainings for law enforcement officers and the medical community on sensitivity toward transgender issues. She also answers fan mail. “Not just transgender people,” she said of her admirers, “many people have been marginalized by society and are looking for inspiration.”
She is theirs.