ABSTRACT
Although various forms of gender variance have always existed in different human societies across the world, social acceptance still eludes transgender people as they still struggle with stigma, violence, transphobia, and human rights violations. The Western medical model, which relied on a dichotomized heteronormative worldview, considered transgender people to be sexual deviants and psychologically disordered individuals. However, with medical advancements in the 1950s, gradually the pathologizing of transgender people as aberrant and disorderly people by the dominant medical paradigm came under the radar. Since then, many scholars, psychologists, and activists have attested that gender categories are not stable or unified. This ideological and epistemic shift marked the beginning of active resistance by transgender people. Over the twentieth century, transgender activism gradually took on significance across the globe, through protests, lawsuits, lobbying, petitions, and strikes. In addition to challenging the medical and legal establishment, the transgender community began to question their centuries’ long subalternity through the medium of writing. Transgender writers in America expressed their anguish and also created awareness in the larger world through autobiographies such as Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974) and Canary Conn’s Canary (1974), with the trend continuing in the twenty-first century. In the Indian subcontinent, resistance through writing became pronounced only in the twenty-first century. In India, the rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender is enmeshed primarily in sociocultural and religious contexts, for example, the terms hijras, jogappas, aravanis, jogis, etc. are used for transgender people depending on their cultural orientation. The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010) by A. Revathi and A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi (2017) by Manobi Bandyopadhyay are among the most acclaimed autobiographies published in India. By providing corroborating evidence such as historical documents, photos, and art, self-narratives allow the victims of such dehumanization to deal with their pain and trauma. While there is a strong history of manifestos written by transgender people in the US, manifestos have not been commonly published in India. This study therefore examines only autobiographies and memoirs, and their role in creating transgender subjectivities, which I understand as the idiom or mode of expression for self-representation. By presenting a comparative overview of transgender self-narratives produced in the West and in India, I bring a cross-cultural perspective, mapping currents in the domain of transgender rights.
