How trans-identities engender stereotypes

Poke to Darpoke

by

Bachchoo

I’ve been sent a webpost about a famous American Indian family called the Keswanis. It’s obvious from the surname that they are of Sindhi origin and not American Indians as in Sioux or Cherokee, which latter are now known as “Native Americans”. I suppose “Indo-Americans” is the correct term for US citizens of South Asian origin but maybe Pakistanis or Bangladeshis would object.

Frankly, the webpost, about the Keswani family, disturbed me. It wasn’t supposed to. The family of Anil and Vaishali, both highly qualified professionals, are celebrities in their own right as they are featured on something called people.com which boasts millions of approving viewers.

The webpost I read was not about the parents but about their three children. Their first child, the boy Nik, suffers from a rare form of dwarfism, has undergone several surgical operations and has very courageously reached out on the Internet through something called Vine videos, featuring six-second presentations in which he stars, which have been seen by millions of “followers”.

The second episode of the people.com Keswani trilogy features their daughter Sarina. The webpost I saw told me that Sarina considers herself “an introvert” unlike the rest of her family and that she is interested in pageantry.

So far, so American!

The third episode of the series features the six-year-old “Devina”. This Devina is a boy who insisted, say his very caring parents, on playing with dolls. Here’s what the piece I read says:

“He would pick up dolls and we would take them and hide them, and just snatch them out of his hand. I didn’t understand what was happening to my boy,” Vaishali said. “It just hit me that my child is a girl. When you are the parent of a transgender child, you lose that child you thought you had. It’s like a death, and a birth of another and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a huge adjustment.”

They now designate “Devina” as a transgender child. This was what gave me pause. I can see from the Internet that the child, born as a boy, now dresses as a girl. Devina has joined the girl guides and, the webpost says is going to address his/her American school about being transgender.

Anil Keswani says it’s all about understanding his child. I don’t suppose that any right-minded person in the world would oppose the idea of understanding and appreciating one’s child.

That being said, I hope and, despite my deep and prevalent atheism, even pray, that Anil and Vaishali have not taken the step of physically mutilating Devina and subjecting him to sex-change surgery.

Of course I know about people who undergo such surgery and have their clitoris expanded into pseudo-penises or have their testicles removed and their penises inverted and shoved into their crotches to form surgically-faked vaginas. I am aware that this is a huge industry in the West and commands the flow of millions of dollars. Adults in the West, succumbing to the religious idea that a body is a material box in which a “soul” is trapped, think that they are females stuck in the male body or vice-versa. They mutilate they surgically and pharmaceutically mutilate the “box” and so undergo the change.

They have a legal right to so do which must be wholly respected. In any modern society, just as it is absurd to discriminate against people because of their adult, consenting, sexual preferences, or because they believe in immaculate conception or that God dictates books, people ought to be free to be transgender.

But does US law allow parents to take the decision to subject children as young as six to surgical mutilation

When I was a boy child in India I lived with my sister and two maiden aunts. On the back veranda was a tattered leather suitcase full of my aunt’s discarded clothes — Western dresses, knickers, old saris and blouses and high-heeled shoes. I and other boy-child friends delighted in wearing all of these and parading ourselves in public. I clearly remember having a favourite wooden doll called “dancing-dolly-uncle’s-Polly” which dangled from a string and which no one ever threatened to take away from me. I thank all providence that my parents or my aunts didn’t deduce from these proclivities that I was a girl trapped in a boy’s body and had me surgically mutilated. I suppose if I had decided, at the age of 21 or more, that I wanted hormone treatment to grow breasts or wanted to have myself castrated, I could have done both.

My aunts who observed my “girlish” behaviour took it as an element of nurture. Why shouldn’t boys play with dolls They have the potential to be fathers! It’s deeply sexist to conclude that reproducing in play the nurturing of a baby is an indication of being female. My parents and aunts hadn’t heard of transgenderisation and would have thought it a load of rubbish if they had. They were Indians of a particular generation.

I can see from the webpost that the Keswani family is deeply and very happily American. There is the endearing statement from Anil who says “We celebrate our children and their uniqueness. I hope the series will spread a new sense of awareness and, instead, encourage parents to reflect about their own children. If you support your children and their ways, and give them structure and support them, they will excel in many ways. I think that’s the biggest challenge.” The challenge has been met.

Anil’s very American children are all Internet, if not yet mainstream TV, celebrities like the Kardashians — one for initiative, the other for being an “introvert”; and Devina please God, let him not be swept away on an Americanist tide and let him decide when he’s legally mature.