Aniqa/ Zafar Dar
Societies around the world are socially and culturally conditioned to be unacceptable of gender identities beyond their comfortable belief of the gender binary.
Hence, people who don’t identify themselves with either the masculine or the feminine, do not find acceptance among society. People of the Transgender category are the most common example of this unacceptability as their existence challenges the norms of this binarism.
Equal participation in the social or cultural life for them is out of the question when they are abused and ridiculed for existing. It never bothers us when a transgender is being made fun of, openly in the public spaces; neither does it occur to us that why is it normal to make fun of them for just being themselves.
A video shot around the Dal Lake area of Srinagar is doing rounds on social media platforms across Kashmir. In the video, which is captioned as ‘Dangal on Dal Lake’, (fight on Dal Lake), ‘World War 3’, ‘Kahan se aate hain yeh loug,’ (Where do such people come from), a man (cis-gender male) and a transgender (identifying as female) can be seen engaging in a physical brawl. The comments, this heckling, the abusing and making fun of the transgenders is a mirror reflection of the societal apathy transgenders in any society face.
The Kashmiryat team fact-checked the video and found out that the video was shot on the 25th Day of March this year and has been shot at the Boulevard road of Srinagar. We also managed to establish contact with the transgender who was being thrashed by the person in the video.
The transgender in the video, identified as Khushi Meer (a graduate student and a social worker), hails from Srinagar says, “We are routinely heckled and abused. We, in Kashmir, are no different than any society which is apathetic towards the transgender. Men and women beat us, abuse us and believe it is their moral and religious right to do so.”
Khushi issued a clarification by uploading a video of her in which she explained what actually had happened that day. Khushi, speaking on the viral video, said, “It was March 25, I was out with a friend when suddenly an unknown middle-aged man started chasing us. We got scared as he followed us for more than a kilometer, then he came and sat beside us.”
What happened on 25th March was, for Khushi and transgenders like her, a continuation of several years of harassment and violence against them. Struggling for their gender identity within Kashmir’s social patterns, Khushi has faced denials and rejections while growing up. Many of them are forced to quit schooling merely because of their gender. They are bullied in buses, colleges, streets and markets.
Khushi continued her narration of the ordeal by saying that while they were walking on their way, a drunk man hurled abusive comments at them. “The Situation turned ugly when despite several requests to not follow us, the man kept chasing us and hurling abuses at us. I would not have hit him, but he passed a coarse comment, for which any human being would have slapped him as I did,” Khushi said.
The most shameful part in this episode, Khushi feels, was the fact that instead of holding the man back and trying to break the fight, the bystanders (men) started clicking photographs and making videos of the incident. The video was shot for several minutes and the man in this viral video can be seen slapping Khushi and trying to toss her onto the ground. “Yet nobody stopped him, in fact, they were making fun of me,” she added.
The video went viral, but it did not shock Khushi. She also added, “We have turned into such a society where the sufferings of others become a joy for many. Before even commenting on the video, nobody tries to find the other side of the story. People just want entertainment. This is not a funny incident. It is a collective shame for the Kashmiri society.”
Khushi expressed shock that the video went viral on Facebook, a few days earlier. And the unfortunate incident had pushed Khushi into mental trauma. She was appalled that people do not share the videos of hunger, poverty and other issues prevailing in the society and instead devote their time in humiliating the marginalized on social media.
Khushi was also quoted by news reports as saying – it took her a month to come out of the mental shock she underwent after the incident. “I did not react to our abuser but it was disheartening to witness the silence of the public watching the entire incident,” she confided.
As a social worker, Khushi works for the welfare of the Kashmiri transgender community, which is deprived of any means of income due to their stigmatized presence in the cis-gender community.
“I believe Allah does not teach us to discriminate. Our God is the same. There are no differences in Islam among genders, religions, castes, and the like,” she added.
Walter Bockting, a professor of medical psychology and the co-director of the LGBT Health Initiative (NY State Psychiatric Institute), says that Transgender refers to having a gender identity that differs from one’s sex assigned at birth. “Gender identity” refers to the basic conviction of being a man, woman or another gender (e.g., bigender, genderqueer, gender questioning, gender nonconforming).
Some transgender people do transition and others do not. Transition refers to a change in gender roles and it is not for everyone. A change in gender role may also be part-time or involve changes in some parts of gender expression and not in others. For example, some transgender women only present in the female gender role at the time of their choosing while socializing.
Bockting believes that the child appears to be negatively affected by stigma attached to gender nonconformity. He says that the child is showing signs of experiencing gender dysphoria, which refers to the distress they may experience as a result of a conflict between sex assigned at birth and gender identity/role.
Khushi is proud of her gender identity and believes that it is high time for the people to make themselves aware of the identities existing beyond the ones encouraged by the heteronormative world.