Shame Has A Climate

There are forms of shame that do not behave psychologically at all. They behave with architecture, settling into the body the way damp settles into Mumbai walls during monsoon. Gradually enough that nobody notices the damage until the paint begins swelling outward and the wood under the windowsill softens permanently from trapped moisture. And by this point the damage is not recent. The wall has been holding water historically for longer than anyone thought to check.

Shame entered my life through the anticipation of the incoming atmosphere. Before I had any sophisticated understanding of gender, before I knew what transfemininity was, before I understood why certain forms of touch or perception felt unbearable, my body had already organized itself around anticipation.

I was an autistic child in a household where anticipation frequently functioned as survival. Nobody used the word autistic around me then. They used other vocabularies instead. Sensitive. Difficult. Overreactive. Dramatic. Stubborn. Quiet when quietness became suspicious and loud when loudness became embarrassing. But I think there are autistic children whose nervous systems develop around surveillance before they develop around selfhood. We are the children who become environmental readers before we become people fully recognizable to ourselves. I could tell what kind of evening we were about to have from the pressure with which utensils hit the sink. The sound of my mother’s slippers against the floor was always calculated. Cupboards shutting too loudly meant something. Silence meant much too, especially the stretched-out kind where nobody speaks because anger has not yet decided what form it intends to take.

Violence has announced itself to me environmentally first.

Even now my body reacts to WhatsApp notifications with the same anticipatory dread. Especially certain phrases.

Can we talk?

My stomach should respond before cognition and then autism feels less like social difficulty and more like existing without atmospheric insulation. Everything enters directly into the body. Fluorescent lighting. Wet fabric. Someone saying “I’m fine” while holding a spoon slightly too tightly. Emotional weather always arrives at full voltage.

People (mostly mothers) used to call me emotionally intelligent for years, and what they meant was permeable.

I absorbed rooms compulsively, and I can see myself doing it even now. Tiny shifts in breathing told me which adult was about to lose patience, which friend was becoming overstimulated, which person needed silence but continued speaking because silence meant proximity to themselves. Meanwhile my own body receded gradually into infrastructural background noise. This is partially why I struggle with narratives that separate the private self from the public self too cleanly. Because shame colonized both too early. There was no untouched interiority waiting privately beneath performance. Performance was created too early by the nervous system, and my identity was never consolidated properly.

It is quite simple – the body learned correction before it learned desire.

Sit properly, lower your voice, stop crying, stop moving your hands like that, stop making yourself visible in the wrong way.

People often narrate transness retrospectively through revelation, but I think many transfeminine people first encounter themselves through management. Before joy. Before experimentation. Before language. Somebody somewhere is already trying to reorganize the body into coherence. And because I was autistic, coherence itself became procedural. I rehearsed facial expressions in mirrors long before transition consciously entered my life. I practiced eye contact, smiling and laughter. There are photographs from adolescence where I look strangely over-arranged, like I was editing myself to social legibility in real time.

When I look back, safety was the only word for it. There was no deception because the body was rehearsing faces in the way you rehearse evacuation routes.

Autistic masking and gendered socialization began sharing a nervous system inside me very early. Both required continuous self-monitoring. Both rewarded successful self-erasure. Both punished visible incoherence. Shame disguises itself elegantly when it remains present long enough. It can resemble adaptability. Self-awareness. Maturity. Politeness. Emotional intelligence. And I know that I spent years aestheticizing hypervigilance into my personality because hypervigilance was often the only thing keeping rooms predictable.

The frightening thing about shame is how easily it transforms into usefulness.

Become useful quickly enough so that punishment can redirect elsewhere. Notice emotional shifts early enough and maybe conflict can be delayed. Be clean instinctively. Speak softly. Remain emotionally available. Do not become difficult.

So I became useful before I became visible.

There are houses I still remember entirely through texture. One flat in Dombivli where the bathroom latch never locked properly and the floor tiles remained cold even in May heat. Another in Versova where the ceiling fan clicked overhead with such consistency that conversations began unconsciously arranging themselves around its rhythm.

Click. Pause. Click.

Someone discussing attachment styles.

Click. Pause. Click.

Somebody crying near the balcony grill.

Click.

Oil spluttering in the kitchen because garlic has started to burn.

These houses come back to me now as a kind of training for the nervous system, learning to read space as a survival skill. My nervous system could not read itself as anything else in particular. My body collected environments faster than it collected conclusions. For years I mistook this level of noticing for intimacy with myself. If I could map a room precisely enough, I thought, I could survive inside it safely. As a child this was often true. But the skill that made rooms survivable did nothing to make the body legible to itself.

Mumbai has always entered my nervous system through this same infrastructural density. 

Rusty water dripping from local train doors. Women moving quickly at night while pretending not to notice men staring. Wet concrete. Crowded compartments. The city often feels organized around anticipatory negotiation, especially for women, especially for queer people. For transfeminine people, the anticipatory negotiation never fully rests.

I knew very early that masculinity as assigned to me felt catastrophic. But this is where I diverge from most transition narratives, because femininity did not appear to me as an uncomplicated refuge. Masculinity surely felt like suffocation every year, removing another possible future from the body. Be it the deepening of my voice or the facial hair, the social expectations attached to boyhood were always hardening around me. Teachers speaking differently. Men speaking differently. The world reorganized itself around assumptions I could not inhabit without dissociating slightly from my own existence.

But the women around me never appeared free either. Not in family spaces. Never in public space. Not in trains or malls or relationships. I grew up watching women perform extraordinary amounts of invisible labor simply to remain socially survivable. That would look ideally as monitoring men’s emotional states, monitoring clothing, monitoring volume, monitoring routes on the way home, monitoring danger continuously while pretending the monitoring itself was natural. My nervous system, which already had no insulation, recognized this immediately. To become a woman publicly was also to become newly exhaustible. So the suffocation of masculinity had traded itself for the exposure of femininity.

For years I existed inside that contradiction without any language capable of stabilizing it.

My father was in jail during my 16th birthday, during the Pantaloons visit. I do not know now whether I registered that fact consciously at the time or whether it simply altered the atmosphere in the way his absences always did. His absences would only ever make my mother brittle in a particular way, and make me correspondingly alert. She had taken me shopping before my birthday. I remember fluorescent lighting and the strange helplessness of being unable to explain why every shirt she picked out felt unbearable. Synthetic fabric. Tight collars. Loud prints. Shirts that already felt socially occupied before I even touched them.

She held clothes against my body while salespeople watched. I said no repeatedly while she insisted, and then language simply collapsed, which is the most accurate description I have for what happened next. Public crying that arrives without permission and cannot be made to look intentional. This is where the body stops belonging entirely to itself for several minutes. She pinched the skin of my stomach hard enough to force me back towards composure because people were staring.

What I remember most clearly is seeing the denim shirt afterward.

Thin denim. Dark blue, soft-looking even from a distance. It looked like it had already been worn by someone comfortable inside themselves. I did not ask for it. I think I understood already that asking had become too expensive for that particular afternoon. But I kept looking at it while she steered me toward the exit. Something registered in my body that I would not have words for until much later: that there was clothing in the world that did not feel like correction. There is fabric that might hold the body without managing it.

Puberty confirmed what that afternoon had suggested structurally. Each year the walls moved closer. Eventually the body moves towards the fear it can live with over the fear it cannot.

The world began treating my body differently the moment it became readable through femininity. Men stared longer. Women assessed me more carefully. Cashiers hesitated before recovering politeness. Security guards lingered. Groups of boys on trains laughed slightly louder when I entered compartments. Because I was still autistic, still without atmospheric insulation, and all of this arrived at full voltage.

There was a period in my early 20s where I wore a gold shimmer pressed into the inner corners of my eyes almost every day. If my hair was pink, the outer corners became pink too. Green hair meant green shadow. I loved sitting close to mirrors, slowly constructing color onto my face. I loved jewelry, I loved the small metallic sounds bracelets make while moving your hands absentmindedly. I loved rings clinking against steel tumblers, lip gloss stains on cigarette filters. These were the happiest rituals of early transition, pleasurable precisely because they emerged from desire rather than correction.

Here is the distinction the essay keeps returning to, so I will state it plainly: femininity can feel self-authored, and this is a truth trans women are not allowed to seek. I could not have sought it either because womanhood arrived already organized around what I owed. 

Adornment never exhausted me. Surveillance did. The grief emerged from maintenance of the endless awareness that every successful performance of femininity also increased my visibility inside systems organized through misogyny. Patriarchal femininity survives partly by collapsing adornment and surveillance into the same activity, encouraging women to experience self-monitoring as self-expression. They perform beauty until it becomes difficult to separate from optimization, until even pleasure begins carrying administrative pressure underneath it. For trans women, this pressure intensifies because femininity becomes publicly measurable in especially violent ways. There is no stable public category available. Instead there is continuous interpretation: woman, not woman, passing, clockable, attractive, artificial, pathetic, threatening. Every interaction carries the possibility of being reassessed mid-sentence.

This became most legible to me during the period I did sex work. Sex work rendered explicit what public femininity already contained structurally: that desirability must be functioning as labor. So, attention became transactional. Softness became monetizable. And what I had felt in early transition like adornment became, in that context, a product. 

My body transformed into something publicly consumable under conditions where the consumption itself often carried humiliation folded into it. Shame that had sedimented so deeply into the nervous system made punishment and recognition difficult to separate. If someone desired me intensely enough, part of me automatically anticipated degradation afterward. 

Visibility would have only been available if it was carrying consequences.

Class intensified this further, and the autism made class legible in its own particular way. My nervous system would read material conditions as atmospherically as it read emotional ones. Public femininity is expensive not only financially, though certainly financially, but physiologically. There’s just so much to achieve and so little to give. Time. Energy. Hair removal. Skincare. Voice training. Clothing. This optimization demanded by public womanhood under patriarchy requires resources most trans women do not possess consistently. The gap between what is required and what is available is experienced not abstractly but in the body with the specific texture of a synthetic bra leaving marks against the ribs after eight hours on a local train.

There were and are times when I can not afford femininity at the level required for social readability. These failures interrupted the fantasy that successful womanhood existed somewhere waiting at the end of enough labor. At some point the body stopped believing optimization would save it. This did not immediately produce butchness. It produced exhaustion first. And exhaustion altered my relationship to clothing long before it altered anything theoretically. I resist the idea that what emerged was a rejection of beauty or adornment. It was merely the refusal of administration. A meek, gradual repossession of the body from the systems that had always been trying to run it.

By evening, after moving through the city, my nervous system often felt swollen from visibility itself. Tight clothing became unbearable. Certain fabrics made me too aware of being perceived continuously. What I found, over years, was that the body began gravitating toward things that changed alongside it rather than against it. Denim loosened slowly around its movement. The knees softened first. The seams began remembering my body without demanding continuous correction from it. My oldest jeans still carry local train grease near the hem and a cigarette burn near the pocket from a party in Bandra where everyone spent six hours discussing abolition before collectively crying about rent.

I trusted denim because it changed honestly.

I still own my light blue denim shirt, thin and soft, which already looks inhabited when you take it off the rack. I cannot say now whether I sought it out because of the Pantaloons memory or whether the memory attached itself to the shirt afterward, the way the body sometimes retrospectively arranges its own continuity. What I know is that wearing it has never once required justification. No adjustment. No performance. No awareness of being perceived correctly or incorrectly. Just fabric that sits against the body the way fabric is supposed to. It is already broken in, already inhabited, asking nothing back.

The monsoon walls eventually dry out, or they don’t. Either way, the house goes on being lived in. The damage becomes part of the architecture. At some point that stops being a problem and starts being just the condition of having been here, inside all this weather, for long enough.