India's Ladyboys

I watched a really interesting documentary on BBC lifestyle the other day, shown as part of their extraordinary people aka freaks that we can gasp and laugh at season. The documentary was called 'India's ladyboys' and told the story of a group of Hijras living in a squalid flat in Bangalore, India.
In India Hijras are sometimes considered to be a third sex, this is in no way official but it is difficult to describe them as anything but. They are a subculture that includes cross-dressers, transgenders, drag queens, hermaphrodites and eunuchs.

The documentary featured a small group of Hijra's which then leads on to the wider spectrum of the entire community. By the end of the documentary the flatmates travel to Koovagam where there is an annual Hijra festival. The festival has religious roots in that it re-enacts the myth of Lord Vishnu taking the form of a woman to marry the Lord Koothandavar, who gets killed in battle the next day. The second stage of the re-enactment is when the Hijra's must then mourn their symbolic husbands and have their glass bangles broken. The festival also features dance competitions and beauty pagents. The contestants get all dressed up and for a brief moment in time they can flaunt the fact that they are neither man nor woman. The rest of the year they live in secret, if they can pass for women then they are women if they cannot then they continue to dress as men when in public.

The documentary was really touching not only to see the squalid conditions most of the Hijra's live in, the fact that most of them turn to sex-work just to make a living, cut-off from their families who sometimes even threaten to kill themselves should they ever see their sons dressed as women, but also because it is blatently clear how few options these people have in India. I take for granted the society I live in that allows a spectrum of deviations from the "norm". There are so many ways to express who we are, so many groups that will accept us even if our family's did disown us. In India there are none of these options! Homosexuality in itself is taboo therefore being transgender is something viewed with disgust and ridicule. These people get castrated in deplorable conditions because they cannot fit into "normal" India and must therefore fit into the Hijra society. Castration is not gender reassignment and they often experience problems with urination and cannot achieve sexual pleasure. They go through pain both physical and psychological. When you think about it this way, you almost want to say " Just pretend then! Why choose to be this way?!" Yet this illustrates, for me, the fact that it is so clearly not a choice. And how absolutely awful it is to discriminate against someone on the basis of something that they cannot choose.