If only our blessings would save us first

The first time someone sought my blessings^[1] in a public space, I was taken aback. I did not know how to react. And that feeling continues to this day. There was a sense of recognition, yes, if not of me, of my transness; it was a time in my life when I longed for recognition from people in my circle, a recognition of me-being-trans, which I was denied. But I was discomforted by the stereotypicality of that recognition wherein my being was erased and reduced into a form of the other. Nevertheless, I offer any blessings I can when I’m asked for one, despite the many internal arguments that would torment me later on.

It did not disorient me as much until it happened in a setting I can never forget – outside the critical care unit in a hospital. We had just lost a friend, a transgender woman. As I was stepping out of the ward, a woman who was entering it (probably back from a small break to the canteen) removed her slippers aside in front of me (as if entering a sacred space) and asked for my blessings, handing me an offering of money. I refused to take the money; deeply overwhelmed, I tried to tell her that my blessings wouldn’t do anything for her. But I could not communicate this to her in a language she’d understand. She was seeking my blessings for her dying husband, who was bedridden in the same unit. That’s the thing, isn’t it – that you do not necessarily need a spoken tongue, let alone a common language, to bless someone? My being was moved, shattered. I went in with her once again and blessed her husband. He was unconscious; he was dying.

As I mentioned earlier, we had lost a friend^[2] only a couple of hours back in the same ward. A transgender woman died there, a terrible death, losing recognition and the dignified life that she longed for and worked actively – not only for herself but for her community. She was betrayed and looted of all that she had worked her life for and deserved in her final years, leading to her dying moment. As I walked out of the ward again, I couldn’t help (still cannot) but think that if only our prayers would work for ourselves; if only with our blessings, we could save ourselves.

While narrating this to a friend of mine who is a transgender person as well, they were visibly angry that I had to go through such an overwhelming experience and remarked upon the power dynamic of that interaction – on the apparent dominant disposition I may have held in that scenario. The way I see and understand it, however, if at all there’s a power dynamic in work in situations as such, it is one that works against transgender people. The blessings sought from us are a burden. A burden on our identity. A transcendence that facilitates our othering, one which makes it easier to sideline our being from the apparent human-divine to the non-human wretch. There is a gestalt, and we are thrown from one to the other without a second thought, rarely, if ever, able to escape (back) alive.

I’ll briefly talk about another variant of people seeking our blessings – it is people who are afraid of our curses. I do think these two phenomena work independently, but they might as well function together – that people seek our blessings lest they be subject to our curses. I was once invited to deliver a guest lecture at a college for undergraduate students of sociology. A question that came up in the Q&A went something like this: Is it true that the curse of a transgender person will come true? The question broke me a bit because, after almost an hour of talking about transgender rights and (mis/)representation, the question I get is about our curse! Aren’t we the accursed? Aren’t we the damned? Aren’t we the wretched^[3]? Yet there I was, being asked about the epistemological validity of the curses of transgender people (I should perhaps write a thesis on this).

I did not, however, construct an epistemological argument as to why that question was nonsensical (I was a little emoted for that, yes!). I asked for a context, and the questioner mentioned some train situation. Okay, now we know that the question did not come from a space of care but of concern. I’ll make it clear – it was not from a space of being concerned for us but being concerned by us and our ways of being. So, rather than getting into the epistemology of curses, I once again spoke about the lives of transgender people, that behind every transgender person you see in the trains or anywhere else for that matter, there most often is a family lost, friends lost, childhood lost, education lost, job lost, career lost, livelihood lost, rights denied, dignity deprived, and oppression within and without the community. I remember ending my response with a plea: treat us as human beings first, then the question of the validity of our curses wouldn’t even arise.

Indeed, as transgender people, we walk the grey area between the human and the non-human – more like monsters^[4]. What I cannot avoid seeing in or interpreting from most spaces I navigate is that we are not perceived as human enough. Instead, we are made objects of curiosity; we are made exhibits. And we know what the world does to/with exhibits. Better treat us as human beings; else, who knows, our curses might even come true. And how I wish our blessings would save us first. If only.

^[1] In India, people from the Hijra community are associated with a ritualistic role of conferring blessings upon newlyweds and newborns. See Gayatri Reddy (2005), With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, pp. 54–74; I’m not initiated into the Hijra community but most often in public conscience, there’s a lack of distinctive understanding of and between the various regional and culturally significant identities within the transgender community in the country.

^[2] Daina Dias (1992-2024) was a transgender rights activist from Goa. She had worked with and advocated for various marginalized communities (Transgender, Hijra, Intersex, Sex workers, MSM) and founded an NGO in Goa called Wajood. She was taken too soon from us. See https://feminisminindia.com/2021/02/05/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-trans-rights-activist-fight-prejudice/; https://idronline.org/contributor/daina-dias/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUMCmTPoNjg 

^[3] Read in the Fanonian sense (Frantz Fanon (1961), The Wretched of the Earth) that as transgender people, we are subject to the colonizing gaze of the European medical standards; see also Paul B. Preciado’s response to such a gaze, in his 2019 speech at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris, Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts.

^[4] See Susan Stryker (1994), My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage where Stryker writes thus: “I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”