Hair and hormones

Mayakudurai by Kutti Revathi

(Translated to English by V.Umapathy)

For a friend, the body is but a showpiece

For a mother, it is perpetually holy, but for God, it is trash

For a father, it is wealth - to be safeguarded and preserved

When caught amongst the fish in the local water tank, my body was shredded

Different parts were snatched and used as playthings on floating lotus leaves

On those green leaves, they shone like little diamonds

Grandma has then told that it is a small jewel-like trinket

For a tiger, it is its own forest

For my infancy, it is a sun that does not set

For a lover, it is a surface on which the lotus blooms

For me, it is a magic horse I mounted of my own free will

No part of my body is subject to any restraint

Day-to-day emotions and feelings have simply disappeared

For me, it is a magic horse I mounted on own free will

Those parts that flew away for me to bring home

That magic horse that I nurture knows no gender nor belongs to any

Hair and hormones

In the latter half of my pilot study (part of my ongoing ethnographic work), I went to Coimbatore to spend a few days with my mother,our neighbor had passed away, and she had been feeling low. I felt disturbed by how much she cried; she never liked our neighbor and always complained about her being nosy and loud. The neighbour was an old lady living with her son’s family. Whenever she saw me, she asked me when I would get married. I gave her a different answer each time she asked. I would tell her that they’re looking for a boy, or that I have a boy that I like, I’ll ask him to marry me soon, and sometimes I would just say I don’t want to be married.  She would fire back and say don’t keep studying so much, you keep studying, then when will you get married, I laughed and told her I’ll try to marry someone soon. The last time I spoke to Aunty was in May, I promised to drive her to a temple nearby but forgot about it later.

I felt guilty when I went for her Kaariyam (function kept after death). Amma seemed to feel worse. She said that it was good that I didn’t see her on the day of her passing, and that her body looked so small and tired in the glass freezer box. After the kaariyam, my mother spent a lot of time talking to Divya, her friend; they would video call each other often. Divya was much younger than my mother and was closer to my age. I was surprised that they had a lot to talk about. The day I was leaving, I heard Amma speaking to Divya again, I heard her say, ‘how could she just pass away like that, she was just talking to me a few days before, this happened because she only did the cooking and cleaning and fell sick, her daughter- in- law never helped her’, Divya comforted and distracted her, she told her to look at the hairs growing on her chin, she said,’ I feel like I’m turning into a man because I’m taking care of everyone and everything around the house’, this made Amma laugh.

Once I came back to Chennai, I met Anil, my interlocutor. He recently enrolled in a data science course and was going to college soon. We went out for lunch, and he insisted I take the Nandu kozhombu (Crab gravy). I struggled to eat the crab. Anil laughed and then instructed me on how to bite and break the shell and scoop out the meat. He said that eating crab was difficult, but he liked the taste. It reminded him of how his mother would prepare it in rasam and add lots of pepper to it whenever he fell sick. As we ate, Anil whispered to me that he knew the man sitting behind us and that they went to school together. I asked him if he wanted to go and speak to him, but then he explained to me that the man knew him before he transitioned and wouldn’t recognize him now. So we ate quickly and then left.  We went to the shop for some shirts. Anil’s semester was about to start, and he wanted to wear something new. After we bought a couple of shirts, he treated me to some jigarthanda (a cold sweet drink). Anil complained about how expensive it was now, and that it’s just 30-40 rupees in Madurai. He used to drink this after school so often. We spoke about college and his friend Kamal. Kamal was a young transman who had just begun taking his testosterone shots. Anil brought up how Kamal’s periods became irregular even before the hormone treatment. He said that this happened to him, too, and some other transmen. Anil told me that his periods became infrequent and the days of bleeding even reduced before he began taking testosterone. He seemed to view this occurrence as a bodily confirmation of some sort.

Revisiting some of these instances, I want to explore the way people understand their bodies, and feel their bodies are listening to them. With Divya feeling forced to be a man and Anil wanting to be a man, the two of them associated certain gendered experiences with their bodily changes. The unwanted hair and the unwanted bleeding had come to represent a disturbance in their way of being and maybe also represent them in some way. While Divya probably plucks her facial hair regularly and has not expressed the desire to transition to become a man, she can’t help but feel like a man.

Rather than juxtaposing Divya’s ‘cisness’ with Anil’s ‘transness’, I’m interested in the way Anil’s and Divya’s experiences can correspond with one another.  Through my research, I hope to address the fragility of the reification of our gendered experiences.

Practicing for the Kadhaipoma

Anandita is a 21-year-old transwoman who attended the tailoring classes in the NGO

I volunteered in. Between 2pm -6pm a tailoring instructor was invited to teach a class on

7-12 transwomen how to stitch clothes as a part of the NGO’s self-employment initiative. Anandita would get scolded by the tailoring instructor for not paying attention in class or  for making mistakes while stitching. She would sit close to Thenuka so she could watch her stitch. Thenuka (26 years old) had been with the NGO for some years and told me about all the events and functions she had attended and beauty contests she took part in. Anandita was yet to attend any function, but recently she was invited to a ‘kadhaipoma’(storytelling), an event where transwomen and transmen were asked to recite a poem and speak about themselves. She practiced her lines with the others in the NGO. Anandita was nervous about this event; unlike the other transwomen, I’d never seen her in a saree. She was really thin, and simply wore a shirt and a veshti (unstitched cloth used to wrap around the waist), she grew her hair out and wore it tied up or in a single plait and adorned it with jasmine flowers every now and then. Her face was tinted yellow from using turmeric, and her forehead was marked with ash. On days she didn’t shave you could see her stubble.

For the Kadhaipoma, Anandita was told to wear a saree, she wanted to pair the saree with the blue blouse she had stitched in the tailoring class. I asked her why she never wore sarees, she explained to me that she lived with her parents, although they knew she wanted to be a woman, they didn’t let her wear a saree. She said they just needed time because they did let her pierce her ears and grow her hair out. She said she promised her parents that she would leave home to mostly go to the temple, or visit her guru and come for her tailoring classes. She spoke highly of her guru, and mentioned that she’s never asked her to go begging or do sex-work for money. Anandita alternated between living with her parents and her Guru. I asked her if she wanted to undergo any surgery, she said her parents won’t approve so she didn’t think much about it.

One day I saw her stay back after class, she was trying to put on a padded bra. She said that her chest looked too flat in the blouse, so she wanted to wear a bra with padding for the event. She wore it over her shirt and then asked me if I could hook it from the back. I told her about  a trick I learned from a girl in school; how to hook the bra from the front and then twist it around and put on the straps. I showed her by wearing the bra she got over my shirt, I took it off and watched her do the same. It was a handy trick.

I saw other transwomen in the NGO practicing for the Kadhaipoma as well, I overheard Suvedha ma’am (head of the NGO) coaching another transwoman, Poornima (27 years old) on how to deliver her story, she scolded Poornima for speaking too quick, and said, “when they ask you when did you know you were trans?, you tell them, It’s a feeling you’ve had since you were young. And that within you there is a woman who longs to be seen.” All of them laughed as they watched Suvedha ma’am comically flip her hair, touch her chest, and coyly smile.

I felt embarrassed listening to this; it made me think about the questions I had only recently asked some of my interlocutors.

I’ve played around with different questions like ‘When did you realize you were trans, what made you want to transition  etc’, etc. These questions seemed to want to trace an origin and meet with an epiphanic response. I stopped asking such questions later on in my research.

The kadhaipoma went well. Anandita wore her saree and the blue blouse she stitched in the tailoring class. Folks in the NGO praised her appearance and performance. Reflecting on the kadhaipoma, I ask, what invites someone to produce such an account of themselves?

A poem followed by a speech about who Anandita really is or wants to be has taken the stage; it’s to inform the audience ( a kind of public) about what it means to belong to an identity. To be trans and to feel trans is to undertake the task of reifying an identity that bleeds across gendered borders,it erects walls around its spills, but more importantly, it relies on the porosity of its own walls. Its porosity simultaneously recognizes and refuses essentialisms that form it.

Maybe to be/feel trans for Anandita means she can go back as much as she goes beyond or sometimes stays in between. Since the Kadhaipoma, I’ve not seen her wear a saree. Anandita continued to attend the tailoring class in her shirts and veshtis, possibly stitching a new blouse to go with another saree.

Love torture/love failure; soup boys

I visited X government hospital on a Friday; the hospital had set up a separate transgender clinic with various medical consultants and assistants in one room. This clinic operated free of cost for the patients and was open once a week from 9 am to 1 pm on Fridays.

I went with Kamal and Pratheek, Anil’s friends, because Kamal had an appointment that day. We saw a transman had come in with a girl, and they joined us in the waiting area, where we all were seated. We learned that Shiva had begun his hormone treatment recently and came for a follow-up. Mallu, his girlfriend, accompanied him whenever she could. She diligently held on to his files.

While Shiva and Pratheek were talking about their treatment plan. I turned to Mallu. She was a pretty girl with a really small oval face. I couldn’t help but notice how thin she was. I asked when she met Shiva. She told me that she and Shiva had been together since school and that his previous girlfriend had cheated on him and left him, and that’s when they met. She pulled his arm to show me his scars and said, ‘See how much he loves me.’ I asked her why he cut himself. She said they had gotten into a fight, and she had told him that she wouldn’t talk to him anymore. Shiva overhead us and unbuttoned his shirt and showed us a tattoo of her; his skin was dark, but you could make out the greenish-black outlines of Mallu’s face. She told me about their plans to marry and to have a family. I asked if she would adopt, she said no, she touched her stomach and said that they will have a ‘test-tube baby’.

Similarly, Krithika from the NGO made plans about her future with her partner, Rafiq. Krithika is a young transwoman who worked as a cook in the NGO I volunteered in, on the side, she did make-up gigs. She told me Rafiq helped her buy a makeup kit, using that she does makeup for brides and girls who have their period function (a ceremony held for a girl, when she attains puberty). Kritik had worked in the NGO since she was 14 or 15. She knew Suvedha ma’am for a long time and back then she was really nice to her and gave her the keys to the office and let her watch music videos on her computer, but now Aliyah had come to the office. There was an unspoken competition between Kritika and Aliyah. Who was a better makeup artist, who was the better cook, who was the better chela. Both Krithika and Aliyah would compete with each other. Seeing me spend a lot more time with Krithika meant that Aliyah would ignore me too.

On days that Suvedha ma’am or older transwomen shouted at Krithika, she would tell me that Rafiq can take good care of me and that she didn’t have to work here. I asked her about him, she said they met when some boys were teasing her on the way home from work. Rafiq told them to stop and said that he knew her. He didn’t know her then, but he just said that so his friends would stop teasing her. She showed me photos of them together. There was a picture with her name tattooed on his chest and a picture of his hand bleeding and glass pieces on the floor.

I was familiar with these intensities of love, torture/failure back in school.

‘Why this Kolaveri di’ from the film 3 made its rounds even well after its release, it was sung by Dhanush. He was well known for roles where the male protagonist experienced ‘love failure’. Boys in school could relate to him whenever they were heartbroken; they would playfully, tearfully, and even spitefully tell the girls they were in love with ‘Why this kolaveri di’ (Kolaveri- so angry you could kill, Kolaveri is also used when someone was frustrated or irritated).  They were referred to as soup boys;  some of these boys would cut themselves and try to grow a beard to express their heartbrokenness. Instead of usually saying pirichitom- (we separated, we’ve come apart, torn apart), people would also say ‘love failure acchuu’ (Love failure happened).

Rafiq and Shiva cutting themselves was maybe their way of showing their partners how much they loved them. Both Krithika and Mallu were moved by this act. In fact, I felt it seemed to deepen their love for them.

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Vasundra V.

Vasundra is a Phd scholar from Shiv Nadar University.

She's looking into contemporary gender affirmative care practices in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

Some of her interests include medical philosophy, fiction, and listening to kokomo by the beach boys on repeat.

She's trying to draw again and watch more films, but she truly enjoys the numbing effect of reality tv shows.

Reach Vasundra at - vasundravenki@gmail.com