Breaking Gender Walls
All over India, sex change surgery remains a traumatic experience because it is done secretly and unprofessionally.
Castration is illegal in India, and Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) is legally ambiguous. Therefore, those who wish to undergo a sex change operation have to go to private clinics, and suffer physical and mental trauma. The cost of the operation is very high there (around 45 lakhs).
Christy Raj is intimately acquainted with the sufferings and difficulties attached to SRS. Numerous friends of his have been through it, and he himself hopes to be able to undergo the operation one day, however hazardous it is.
A female to male transgender, Christy was forced out of his home, beaten, bruised and left on the highway, to be crushed to death by speeding vehicles, by her own family six years back, when he was 17.The reason: Christy has just confessed to her people that he was a man trapped in a woman’s body and that he wanted to be complete by undergoing a sex change.
‘I confessed because I thought if anyone could be taken into confidence and could be counted on to help me, it would be my family, the one I was born into’, he says with a wry smile. ‘Instead, I was beaten like an animal.’
Christy, however, didn’t get run over. Instead he was found, of course unconscious and bleeding, by a Hijra who was human enough to take into her house this strange who, for her, was just another human being.
A proper SRS not only consists of a surgical operation. It also includes counselling, before and after the operation, hormonal treatment to enhance the physical changes, and a medical follow-up, to prevent the risks attached to the surgical intervention. But when the intervention is carried out in private clinics, transgender patients hardly receive any of these, and are left vulnerable to various infections, medical complications, and post-intervention psychological distress.
To improve his community’s situation, Christy Raj is engaged in Sangama, an NGO that provides support for the counselling process. He also belongs to an activist network that lobbies the government to susbsidise the surgery, as is the case in Tamil Nadu. He has numerous friends who have undergone SRS and now lead happy lives, utlimately at peace with their gender identity.
Castration is illegal in India, and Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) is legally ambiguous. Therefore, those who wish to undergo a sex change operation have to go to private clinics, and suffer physical and mental trauma. The cost of the operation is very high there (around 45 lakhs).
Christy Raj is intimately acquainted with the sufferings and difficulties attached to SRS. Numerous friends of his have been through it, and he himself hopes to be able to undergo the operation one day, however hazardous it is.
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| Christy Raj |
The transgender community is still discriminated against massively in India, and there is total ignorance amongst the public of their needs.
‘I confessed because I thought if anyone could be taken into confidence and could be counted on to help me, it would be my family, the one I was born into’, he says with a wry smile. ‘Instead, I was beaten like an animal.’
Christy, however, didn’t get run over. Instead he was found, of course unconscious and bleeding, by a Hijra who was human enough to take into her house this strange who, for her, was just another human being.
A proper SRS not only consists of a surgical operation. It also includes counselling, before and after the operation, hormonal treatment to enhance the physical changes, and a medical follow-up, to prevent the risks attached to the surgical intervention. But when the intervention is carried out in private clinics, transgender patients hardly receive any of these, and are left vulnerable to various infections, medical complications, and post-intervention psychological distress.
To improve his community’s situation, Christy Raj is engaged in Sangama, an NGO that provides support for the counselling process. He also belongs to an activist network that lobbies the government to susbsidise the surgery, as is the case in Tamil Nadu. He has numerous friends who have undergone SRS and now lead happy lives, utlimately at peace with their gender identity.
Comments
Mor power to people like Christy and Frank