Can Trans Women Ever “Identify” as Women in India?

It was a quaint winter evening. I was on a date with a cis-het guy at a cafe. The conversations had those awkward silences characteristic of first dates between two incompatible people. He broke one such silence by telling me how he had seen my Instagram and liked that I was into “art and culture.” I smiled and thanked him, thinking to myself how “sociology and politics” would have been better terms to define my videos on the internet. I could tell that this observation was his way of segueing into a fact about him that he thought would be of interest to me. In the very next breath, he told me about how he had been gifted a traditional sword at his naming ceremony – a custom he said was practised by many “traditional” families of his (Kshatriya) caste.

This fact did interest me. Not for the art and culture, as he had presumed, but for the sociology and politics behind such a ceremony. His attempt at telling me something interesting about him highlighted to me something interesting about being a trans woman in India. A trans person entering a relationship with a cis man in India would not just be up against cis-heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the gender binary – but also caste.

Contrary to pop-feminist “born in the wrong body” discourse on trans identity, being a woman in India has never been a matter of merely identifying as one. I identify as a woman. I navigate the world as a woman and fall in love as one too. In my experience of being with cis-het men, my body has never really been an issue. The issue has always been more social. Ideological even. Some trans women might look like cis women, but are any trans women able to occupy the same roles, legal status, and social status as cis women? Not really: Indian society limits our access to womanhood simply because we cannot perform the duties that Indian society culturally expects from a woman – a key one being able to reproduce along caste lines. Womanhood in India, then, does not exhaust itself with “passing.” Which is to say, in India, womanhood is deeply enmeshed with caste.

In A Monsoon Date, Konkana Sen Sharma plays a trans woman. In one scene, she meets a Hijra/Kinner/Kothi trans person at a signal and begins to see her pre-transition self in them. In the more recent Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, the film’s protagonist Maanvi has a similar experience. By depicting trans women as almost cis women and by drawing a hard line between trans women and the Hijra/Kinner/Kothi trans communities, Bollywood places a lot of emphasis on visibly transitioning into a woman when it tries to tell trans stories. At the same time, however, Bollywood has been instrumental in perpetuating the idea of “womanhood” that inherently excludes trans women.

As a trans woman who has mostly dated cishet men (sadly), Indian pop culture depictions of love have always felt unrealistic. Not only because of their flawed understanding of transness but also their restrictive understanding of womanhood. No matter how much Bollywood tries to tell trans stories, it fails to understand that merely passing (looking like a cis woman) accords very limited womanhood to a trans woman in India – and if it does, it is a womanhood that barely holds any weight outside the bedroom.

How does a “traditional” family, still holding onto casteist customs (“parampara pratishtha anushasan,” if you will), understand the role of a woman in their household? Would a trans woman be capable of fulfilling the duties of a woman as per these “traditional” families? This is not to seek access to the traditional family. It is to say: I might identify as a woman, but a caste society — founded on the premise of cis women biologically reproducing caste — will never affirm my identity that way.

Western second wave feminists had some ideas on what being a woman even means – a fundamental question to unpack here. When Simone de Beauvoir said “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” she did not just understand womanhood as a sociocultural identity but also identified that there was a process to becoming the said sociocultural identity. Judith Butler, our enby trans icon, said something in their essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution that I am doomed to quote for eternity: “to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman’, to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialise oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.” (Clearly, our icon isn't an icon for how easy they are to read.) Butler here understands womanhood (and gender) as a set of historical and sociocultural ideas.

However, it’s impossible to see gender in India only through de Beauvoir’s and Butler’s lens. We also need to see it through Dr. Ambedkar’s.

In his book, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, Dr. Ambedkar defines caste as an “enclosed class.” This enclosure is ensured and maintained through the process of endogamy (marrying within one’s own caste), which is an instrument for maintaining “purity” in a Brahminical society. This strict enclosure ensures that material resources like land and capital can be withheld by the select few at the top of the caste hierarchy. In other words, women’s bodies – and reproductive capabilities – is how caste power reproduces itself.

In the very initial talking stages with cis-het men, there is usually a weird moment when the man realises that I am not a person with a uterus. It is really not baffling to me that cis-het men know nothing about trans bodies. What I find interesting is their disappointment at knowing that trans women don't actually have uteruses. Once, I was having a cringe, “future planning” type conversation with my ex boyfriend (a cishet upper caste man), when I told him that I would prefer adopting rather than raising his kid through surrogacy. This led to a fight and him telling me I was being “unreasonable.” To him, it was unreasonable for his future wife to raise a kid of another man, an outsider, a man of another caste.

It reminded me of the Bollywood trope, which it has reinforced in various forms over decades: the pregnant woman with an unknown or ambiguous father. In the 90s classic Mrityudand, Madhuri Dixit asks a pregnant Shabana Azmi (whose husband was impotent) “Didi yeh bacha kiska hai?”. In the early 2000s, Paheli’s dramatic tension peaks when right before Lachi (Rani Mukerji) goes into labour, the real Krishnalal (Shahrukh Khan) shows up and creates uncertainty about the child’s paternity. The 2010s culminated with Good Newwz, whose star-studded cast of Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Diljeet Dosanjh, and Kiara Advani update this paternity fear to fertility treatments like IVF. This trope tugs at the middle-class, upper-caste society’s deepest fears: a woman conceiving the child of another man; another/an Other caste.

Age-old Indian traditions ensure women are reminded of their objectified existence as the mere wombs for endogamous reproduction at every turn. Almost every state has a ceremony dedicated to celebrating a girl’s first menstrual cycle. From Thirandukalyanam in Kerala to Tuloni Biya in Assam – all celebrations of a young girl’s first menstrual cycle. These ceremonies have two things in common: First, the young girl, menstruating for the first time in her life, is told that she is now a young woman (honestly, how gross). And second, a grand, almost wedding-like celebration is held to announce her “coming of age” to the entire caste – because caste society is literally obsessed with the fertility of women. This obsession sorts us into distinct categories – separating us by our ability to reproduce caste, imposing violence on anyone who crosses the boundary from either side.

This is perhaps also why Indian trans audiences could not relate with Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui – despite it being one of the only rom-coms with a trans character in the lead. In the film, Manu Munjal, a bodybuilder and Maanvi Brar, a Zumba instructor, fall in love. Manu is a cis-het man, Maanvi is a trans woman. The film is set in today’s India, where the socio-political climate is anxious about growing anti-caste consciousness and the government is exploring bills that would require parental consent for a love marriage. All of which betray the state’s anxiety to maintain caste endogamy through reproduction. This is what makes the fact that Maanvi and Manu end up married – with both their Kshatriya families accepting them – highly improbable to Indian trans audiences. The film ignores the central questions, like: who is a woman in India, and who is allowed to love, love freely? Not a woman like Maanvi. She might be Kshatriya, she might identify as a woman, but does that make her a Kshatriya woman with a happily ever after?

Upper caste anxieties around caste endogamy tend to also result in cis-het people categorizing us in broad strokes; adjudicating whether we are "real" trans people or not. You don’t have to look at the courts, the columnists, or the clergy – today, even meme lords and edgy Instagram boys can decide that some trans people are “real” and others are not. In a recent viral video, an influencer – whom we shall call “Bhaiyaji” for the purposes of this article because he doesn’t deserve to be platformed – starts with saying he “respects trans people.” He then immediately corrects himself: “I respect real transgenders.” His definition of “the real transgenders” only included Hijra/Kinner/Kothi people. He then calls trans women “men who are chopping their penises and calling themselves women.” Bhaiyaji’s video sits at 2.5 lakh likes and almost 30 lakh views. That’s 2.5 lakh people who endorse the notion that, in India, one form of transness is valid while the other is not.

Such complicated distinctions between valid and invalid forms of transness are also upheld by the Hindu right wing, who see Kinner trans people as practitioners of “ancient Hindu traditions.” However, they posit that transgender men, women, and non-binary people are influenced by “Western Ideology.” And while these Hindu right-wingers might like Kinner trans people, they do not approve of Hijra trans people. Why? Well, Hijra trans people trace their existence back to Islamic rule in India. A Hijra person interviewed in Gayatri Reddy's book With Respect to Sex said: “the Muslims brought us closer to them instead of pushing us away." Many Hijra trans people practise Islam; unlike Kinner trans people who are mostly Hindu. The discomfort such right-wingers have with Hijra trans people is a complicated amalgamation of transphobia and Islamophobia.

The fondness that these edge lord Bhaiyajis have suddenly found for the real trans community, then, is not out of some grave respect for Hijra/Kinner/Kothi communities' gender identities. Their fondness is for the process of social renunciation that these communities practise. Their "respect" is contingent on their perception of Hijra/Kinner/Kothi communities as lying outside the fold of the endogamous gender binary — or being trans without transgressing into their world of endogamous reproduction. That's why, trans women, who identify as women without the ability to participate in endogamous reproduction, make the Bhaiyajis deeply uncomfortable.

Caste society has also defined womanhood for cis women in very violent ways. As Dr. Ambedkar explains, one of the ways in which caste enclosure has been maintained was through Sati, or burning a woman on her husband's funeral pyre. It was a way to ensure that the womb meant to produce “pure” caste babies burns with the man whom it was supposed to serve. As many women succumbed to death during childbirth, child marriage ensured that men’s access to women – wombs – of the same caste never depleted.

Sati isn’t legal anymore. However, despite many states providing lakhs of rupees in cash incentives for intercaste marriages, the practice of endogamy still governs marriage and reproduction in India today. Data shows that just 5% marriages in India are intercaste. Clearly, Indian attitudes to maintain this graded hierarchy run deep. With the telecom boom in India, endogamy went digital. Today, websites like brahminmatrimony.com and kshatriyamatrimony.com help people find eligible suitors of their caste beyond familial connections.

The first step to changing how gender is understood and treated in India — for all of us — is annihilating caste. A society that understands womanhood (and gender) as the ability to reproduce caste will inevitably gatekeep it from people who are incapable of doing so, and imprison those who are. When Mumbai Pride stops people from chanting "Jai Bhim," they also stop any real progress for trans rights in this country. We can have perfect representation – with love stories written by trans women and acted in by beautiful trans women – but its impact on the lived realities of trans women of the subcontinent will be limited. If there is any impact at all.

The only valid gender in a caste society is that of a cis Savarna man. Cis women, while celebrated for their reproductive and caregiving abilities (abilities that must be exercised within their caste) are never seen as fully realised human beings, with dreams, aspirations and honestly, complete personhood. Everyone other than cis Savarna men are tools for them to maintain their dominance.

The current social realities of India thus produce two distinct forms of womanhood: One for cis women – a womanhood devoid of personhood. And another for trans women – an aspirational womanhood that is never complete.