Queer trauma in India is systemic, but healing often begins in the oddest places of feeling seen—one compassionate witness at a time.
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My last relationship with a woman was an autumn romance. I am still not entirely convinced she didn’t do it on a five-month long dare. She was bisexual, looked great behind a book, and tried to hold my hand even while swimming. It was warm and terrifyingly wonderful. All because it was meant to be short. We knew from the beginning that we would eventually return to our respective homes—she, to the Netherlands, and me, to the land of heartbreak.
The health I experienced in this short relationship felt jarring because unlike many other queer (and non-queer) connections in my past, our unresolved traumas didn’t collide.
This was never visible to me while I was dating in my early 20s, and I often found myself in highly charged, intense relationships filled with avoidance, tension, and the communication style of a tennis rally with mismatched rackets—one’s overpowered, the other’s underprepared, and neither is effective.
My therapist often tells me, “we’re attracted to what is familiar [from our childhoods and early adulthood].” And my dear friends, trauma has been most potently familiar to me.
Deeksha Bala, a Bengaluru-based queer mental health professional defines trauma as “anything that overwhelms the nervous system beyond its capacity to tolerate or handle.” In India, the challenges of survival and acceptance for many queer individuals make managing overwhelm difficult.
Queer people in India face pervasive, systemic discrimination. A 2019 UNESCO survey of nearly 400 queer youth in Tamil Nadu found that over half skipped classes to escape bullying, and a third ultimately dropped out of school. And a 2024 study by iHEAR, published in PloS Global Public Health, highlights significant healthcare barriers faced by transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse individuals in India, exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings revealed worsening health conditions, unsafe treatment, and severe mental health impacts such as anxiety and gender dysphoria. Deloitte’s LGBT+ Inclusion @ Work Survey in 2023 revealed that approximately 60 percent of 455 Indian respondents believed their employers demonstrated a “commitment to LGBTQIA+ inclusion.” However, only six percent of these respondents identified as transgender, non-binary, or gender queer, and four in 10 queer individuals reported encountering non-inclusive behaviors in the workplace. These barriers across education, healthcare, and employment can charge heavy tolls on queer bodies, resulting in a pileup of trauma.
Deeksha said, “The only way queerness doesn’t come with trauma is if someone receives unconditional support and acceptance, which is an unrealistic possibility for most [in India].”
It takes safe, affirmative environments to explore sexuality, gender alignment and our own bodies. Within the context of our families, where all of these are intergenerationally policed concepts, how do people who didn’t have an affirmative environment themselves—like our parents, for example—provide it for others? According to a conference paper titled Parental Acceptance and Challenges Faced by LGBTQ Youth in India and Their Mental Health published in Springer in 2022, “parents equally need support to understand and accept their [queer] children.”
Shyamali*, a 27-year-old queer football player in Bengaluru, came out to her parents two years ago. While her parents took their time, they did accept her being queer and her queer partnership. Shyamali said that the real challenge for her parents was not with understanding Shyamali’s queerness. She shared, “From what I’ve observed, for them, their own struggle to accept my sexuality initially came from what they’ll say to their friends in social circles that aren’t accepting; they feared being ostracized.”
“But to all our great surprise, their closest circle of friends were accepting of my queerness,” added Shyamali. “They said it ‘wasn't a big deal.’ In the safety of their friends’ acceptance, my parents told me they were able to process my being queer and the choices of partnership that came with it.”
Beyond having an affirming environment as a child, it also takes access to safe spaces as adults to “escape” trauma. Far from having access to this kind of safety in open, public spaces, queer adults in India struggle to find homes to rent simply due to being queer. A 2022 report in The Caravan highlighted the lengths to which queer individuals in Delhi have had to go to find discrimination-free housing.
When you can’t be queer in your own home and don’t have safe public spaces, where does the trauma go? Back into our bodies.
My last relationship with a woman was an autumn romance. I am still not entirely convinced she didn’t do it on a five-month long dare. She was bisexual, looked great behind a book, and tried to hold my hand even while swimming. It was warm and terrifyingly wonderful. All because it was meant to be short. We knew from the beginning that we would eventually return to our respective homes—she, to the Netherlands, and me, to the land of heartbreak.
The health I experienced in this short relationship felt jarring because unlike many other queer (and non-queer) connections in my past, our unresolved traumas didn’t collide.
This was never visible to me while I was dating in my early 20s, and I often found myself in highly charged, intense relationships filled with avoidance, tension, and the communication style of a tennis rally with mismatched rackets—one’s overpowered, the other’s underprepared, and neither is effective.
My therapist often tells me, “we’re attracted to what is familiar [from our childhoods and early adulthood].” And my dear friends, trauma has been most potently familiar to me.
Deeksha Bala, a Bengaluru-based queer mental health professional defines trauma as “anything that overwhelms the nervous system beyond its capacity to tolerate or handle.” In India, the challenges of survival and acceptance for many queer individuals make managing overwhelm difficult.
Queer people in India face pervasive, systemic discrimination. A 2019 UNESCO survey of nearly 400 queer youth in Tamil Nadu found that over half skipped classes to escape bullying, and a third ultimately dropped out of school. And a 2024 study by iHEAR, published in PloS Global Public Health, highlights significant healthcare barriers faced by transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse individuals in India, exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings revealed worsening health conditions, unsafe treatment, and severe mental health impacts such as anxiety and gender dysphoria. Deloitte’s LGBT+ Inclusion @ Work Survey in 2023 revealed that approximately 60 percent of 455 Indian respondents believed their employers demonstrated a “commitment to LGBTQIA+ inclusion.” However, only six percent of these respondents identified as transgender, non-binary, or gender queer, and four in 10 queer individuals reported encountering non-inclusive behaviors in the workplace. These barriers across education, healthcare, and employment can charge heavy tolls on queer bodies, resulting in a pileup of trauma.
Deeksha said, “The only way queerness doesn’t come with trauma is if someone receives unconditional support and acceptance, which is an unrealistic possibility for most [in India].”
It takes safe, affirmative environments to explore sexuality, gender alignment and our own bodies. Within the context of our families, where all of these are intergenerationally policed concepts, how do people who didn’t have an affirmative environment themselves—like our parents, for example—provide it for others? According to a conference paper titled Parental Acceptance and Challenges Faced by LGBTQ Youth in India and Their Mental Health published in Springer in 2022, “parents equally need support to understand and accept their [queer] children.”
Shyamali*, a 27-year-old queer football player in Bengaluru, came out to her parents two years ago. While her parents took their time, they did accept her being queer and her queer partnership. Shyamali said that the real challenge for her parents was not with understanding Shyamali’s queerness. She shared, “From what I’ve observed, for them, their own struggle to accept my sexuality initially came from what they’ll say to their friends in social circles that aren’t accepting; they feared being ostracized.”
“But to all our great surprise, their closest circle of friends were accepting of my queerness,” added Shyamali. “They said it ‘wasn't a big deal.’ In the safety of their friends’ acceptance, my parents told me they were able to process my being queer and the choices of partnership that came with it.”
Beyond having an affirming environment as a child, it also takes access to safe spaces as adults to “escape” trauma. Far from having access to this kind of safety in open, public spaces, queer adults in India struggle to find homes to rent simply due to being queer. A 2022 report in The Caravan highlighted the lengths to which queer individuals in Delhi have had to go to find discrimination-free housing.
When you can’t be queer in your own home and don’t have safe public spaces, where does the trauma go? Back into our bodies.
A 2020 study of 6,41,860 individuals published in nature communications found that transgender and gender-diverse people reported higher rates of autism, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and scored higher on autistic traits, systemizing, and sensory sensitivity compared to cisgender persons. A year later, in 2021, a University of Cambridge study stated that autistic individuals are more likely to identify as LGBTQIA+.
The overlap between shared challenges in navigating neurodivergence and queerness is not restrictive to autistic individuals alone. A 2017 study published in Psychiatry and Clinical Pharmacology found that 90 percent of individuals with gender dysphoria had at least one psychiatric diagnosis, with ADHD being the most common (75 percent), followed by major depressive disorder (25 percent). They also exhibited higher scores in behavioural issues (problem solving, communication, affective response), with attention problems significantly associated with gender dysphoria. The study was conducted in Turkey and had a sample size of 20, with a control group of 40 people.
Nick Walker, professor of psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies, coined the term ‘neuroqueer’ in 2008 to "examin[e] how socially-imposed neuronormativity and socially-imposed heteronormativity were entwined with one another, and how the queering of either of those two forms of normativity entwined with and blended into the queering of the other one."
Deeksha explained, “Queer and neurodivergent individuals face immense pressure to mask their identities to fit societal norms, which comes at significant emotional and psychological costs.”
Masking is the act of suppressing or altering one’s natural behaviours, traits, or expressions to conform to societal expectations or avoid stigma, often used by neurodivergent individuals to blend into neurotypical environments.
The dilemma of maintaining authenticity versus masking creates constant challenges—from how you present yourself at work to how you socialise. The mere existence of a neurodivergent queer person in a system designed for conformity is a challenge to the status quo.
As Deeksha told me, “Every system of power around you is angry at you for existing as you are.”
In an environment like this, a queer person finding safety to explore sexuality often feels like an urban legend.
Sexuality remains a heavily stigmatised topic, even in supposedly progressive spaces. Comedian Shreeja Chaturvedi, in one of her stand-up sets, joked about how her mother only used euphemisms her whole life to avoid saying the word ‘sex’ out loud. Even with relentlessly educating myself on sexuality and sex positivity, I found myself at the mercy of stigma when I felt ashamed last year for experiencing an STI-scare.
If we are too tired to ‘fight the power’, where do we go from here? How do we heal?
Deeksha stated, “I don’t think we can heal individually. I don’t even understand why Western ideas of psychotherapy insist on the individual being central because I don’t think the individual exists without the collective.”
Which is where Shyamali found her healing—in her football team, where her identity was celebrated, “When I moved to Bengaluru from Chennai, my football team celebrated me going on dates! I’d never experienced that kind of acceptance before.”
She also noted that parents in her football club were increasingly advocating for their queer children to have safe experiences. “Some of these parents are just 10–15 years older than me. They are speaking out more against any discriminatory practices like bullying that their queer children could potentially experience,” she said. “They’re advocating for their kids in my club. My own team has nearly four queer folks out of 11 players.”
She also added that while the club itself, like many sporting institutions, still had a few homophobic factions at its roots, some of the club’s directors were committed to ensuring the players—queer or not—feel safe.
Positive, affirming environments—whether through friendships or romantic or queer-platonic relationships—may provide tools to navigate systemic trauma.
While queer individuals might struggle surviving in conformist systems, the queering of our own little worlds and the systems we create with other queer individuals can become the healing spaces we so desperately need. It was in a queer-platonic space with Archana* that I found some room to heal from familial distress, the exhaustion of masking, and putting on a parade of being ‘too happy’ when I was feeling miserable.
In our many rewatches of beautifully terrible Hallmark movies, and well, Derry Girls, we uncoupled the idea of being traumatised and experiencing trauma. The distinction helped me not identify merely as a traumatised queer individual, but as someone who navigates a deeply traumatising world from where it’s impossible to walk through unscathed.
We were (and are) committed to self-development, desperate to heal from past traumas, all while navigating trauma-permeating structures in the present. In our shared determination to heal, we ended up creating homes that invited other lovable queer folks on their own journeys of healing, desperately seeking kinship and a space to be.
My own therapist defines trauma as “how you respond to something that happens to you in the absence of a compassionate witness”. This is why coming out as queer or simply existing as one can often be traumatising for most of us—not because we’re afraid to be out but because most often, we may have no compassionate witnesses.
One of the most profound moments my queer body has ever experienced was while watching a pretend coming-out scene in the Australian TV series Please Like Me. Arnold (Keegan Joyce), preparing to come out as gay to his homophobic father, practices by performing his “coming out” to his partner Josh’s (Josh Thomas) father, Alan (David Roberts). While Alan had always accepted Josh’s queerness, he hadn’t fully grasped the weight of hiding one’s true self—until Arnold sang Sia’s Chandelier, ending with the heartfelt declaration, “Dad, I’m not sexually attracted to women!” Moved, Alan shakes Arnold’s hand, hugs him, and says, “It doesn’t matter that you’re gay. It matters that you’re a good person.” Arnold was crying, Alan was bawling, Josh’s friends in the room were weeping, and Josh himself was exhilarated. I, of course, was a puddle on the floor.
To me, this moment planted the seed that maybe we never really heal the system that holds queer folks in trauma rooms. Maybe we just become a compassionate witness to one queer person in a room at a time, singing their heart out in that tender human thing called the effort to be understood.
*names have been changed to protect privacy
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a writer, editor, and strategist who splits her time between Bangalore, Bombay, and Goa.
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Visvak (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Goa.
