More On India…

I came across this article in FirstPost which I believe is an India website, the article is about the recent Supreme Court ruling about trans-people being a third gender. The article is about the difference between gays and lesbians, and trans-people, but that is not what I want to write about this morning. What I want to write about is oppression.

Transgenders cut across all classes. As do gays and lesbians. But in popular imagination, reinforced by the images in the media, there is a clear-cut class divide between the groups.

In the media lens, gays are urban, metropolitan, perhaps a bit westernized, middle and upper middle-class, marching in Rainbow Pride marches, organizing queer film festivals and comfortable about appearing on English language television talk shows. In short, People Like Us.

In that same narrative, transgenders are lower down the class hierarchy. They are hijras who knock on the rolled up windows of the cars of PLUs, panhandling for money, when our vehicles are stalled at traffic lights. They might work in the sex trade, come from some mysterious opaque world with its own esoteric rituals, and are more comfortable spitting out colourful gaalis than arguing in human rights lingo. They are kinnars, aravanis, jogtas, hijras. People NOT Like Us.

If you look at oppression, the degree of oppression is based on how well you can blend into society and the size of the community. The more you stand out the more you are discriminated against, whether it is based upon disability, religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity/expression.

For gays and lesbians, it is the feminine looking gay or the butch looking lesbian who are harassed the most because they do not fit the image of a “normal” man or women. When a lesbian or gay couple hold hands in public they are faced with more harassment because they are not a “normal” couple. That begins to change when media starts to portray gay and lesbian couples as a “normal” couple in ads and on television.

The media use to portray gays and lesbian as living on the seedy side of life, hanging out in bathhouses and going from one sex partner to another, but as the media started showing them as a “normal” couple the public opinion of them started to change.

The same is true of trans-people, the media is starting to slowly change the way that they portray trans-people. We are no longer portrayed as the deranged killers in “Psycho” or “Dressed To Kill” but in a more positive light. If you look at the hit movie “Transamerica” where you see a trans-character in a positive role and who is a “normal” person. The Amazon show “Transparent” and the Netflix show “Orange is the New Black” they also show trans-people in as a “normal” person (I have an issue with Mort being played by a non-trans-person).

The media is starting to change and with it so is society.