Transitioning from one gender to another requires grappling with a whole new set of absurd social norms.
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At 24, when I was about six months into my gender transition, a Delhi Metro security guard informed me that I had finally reached my “transgender tipping point”. I use the phrase transgender tipping point differently than the famous Time Magazine article, to refer to the point in the early transition of a binary trans person when random people one interacts with start to read our chosen gender onto our bodies.
Back then in 2021, I used to be in my ‘boy mode’, which means when a trans woman presents masc or “like a boy” in public ( I explained the term 'boy mode' only for the cishet people reading this). After six months on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), my body had changed considerably, but not to a point where my dysphoria (and the transphobic society) would allow me to present fem in public.
I was in a loose t-shirt and skinny jeans (how gay of me!) on that day. This loosely hanging t-shirt was a desperate attempt to camouflage my budding breasts while the fitted denim offered the opportunity to revel in a tiny bit of gender euphoria. I kept my nails long and painted them black, you know, because ‘boy mode’. I had gotten my first laser session done on my face, so my facial hair was patchy, and I would always keep it shaved. The hair on my head was at the length that can only be described as “stoner boy from DU arts college.” In this very peculiar stage of my transition, I stood at the metro security check in, hoping to pass as a boy, and wishing to pass as a woman.
As the iconic philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler wrote in 1988 in their genre-defining essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, “gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”
In Butler’s view, the acts that constitute gender—-long hair and painted nails for example— don’t just brand someone as belonging to a certain gender but also creates gender as a distinct identity. About 35 years later, the gravity of this assertion dawned on me as a young trans woman secretly self-medicating herself. I find it ironic that even after decades of robust academic debates and gender discourse, when we arrive at the metro security check today, we must neatly sort ourselves into the two “valid” societal genders.
I stood hesitantly in the queue for men, because that is how I thought (oh, the dysphoria!) I was presenting. The security guard looked at me, almost in shock, and said with an annoyed undertone “Ladies uss line mein” [Ladies in that line], pointing toward the women’s queue. I switched queues without uttering a word.
I realised my days in “boy mode” were numbered (ah, the relief!). The guard had taken one look at me and refused to gender me as a boy. Butler said that certain acts constitute the illusion of a gendered self. My budding breasts, long nails, skinny jeans, a fairly hairless face, that DU stoner boy hair, and my obviously feminine mannerisms had constituted the identity of a woman in the eyes of the police officer. My transgender tipping point had been reached.
At 24, when I was about six months into my gender transition, a Delhi Metro security guard informed me that I had finally reached my “transgender tipping point”. I use the phrase transgender tipping point differently than the famous Time Magazine article, to refer to the point in the early transition of a binary trans person when random people one interacts with start to read our chosen gender onto our bodies.
Back then in 2021, I used to be in my ‘boy mode’, which means when a trans woman presents masc or “like a boy” in public ( I explained the term 'boy mode' only for the cishet people reading this). After six months on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), my body had changed considerably, but not to a point where my dysphoria (and the transphobic society) would allow me to present fem in public.
I was in a loose t-shirt and skinny jeans (how gay of me!) on that day. This loosely hanging t-shirt was a desperate attempt to camouflage my budding breasts while the fitted denim offered the opportunity to revel in a tiny bit of gender euphoria. I kept my nails long and painted them black, you know, because ‘boy mode’. I had gotten my first laser session done on my face, so my facial hair was patchy, and I would always keep it shaved. The hair on my head was at the length that can only be described as “stoner boy from DU arts college.” In this very peculiar stage of my transition, I stood at the metro security check in, hoping to pass as a boy, and wishing to pass as a woman.
As the iconic philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler wrote in 1988 in their genre-defining essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, “gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”
In Butler’s view, the acts that constitute gender—-long hair and painted nails for example— don’t just brand someone as belonging to a certain gender but also creates gender as a distinct identity. About 35 years later, the gravity of this assertion dawned on me as a young trans woman secretly self-medicating herself. I find it ironic that even after decades of robust academic debates and gender discourse, when we arrive at the metro security check today, we must neatly sort ourselves into the two “valid” societal genders.
I stood hesitantly in the queue for men, because that is how I thought (oh, the dysphoria!) I was presenting. The security guard looked at me, almost in shock, and said with an annoyed undertone “Ladies uss line mein” [Ladies in that line], pointing toward the women’s queue. I switched queues without uttering a word.
I realised my days in “boy mode” were numbered (ah, the relief!). The guard had taken one look at me and refused to gender me as a boy. Butler said that certain acts constitute the illusion of a gendered self. My budding breasts, long nails, skinny jeans, a fairly hairless face, that DU stoner boy hair, and my obviously feminine mannerisms had constituted the identity of a woman in the eyes of the police officer. My transgender tipping point had been reached.
Something that stuck with me, besides a ton of gender euphoria, from the incident that happened at the metro station was how the police officer had gendered me as a woman, while the people in my family (who were unaware of my attempt to transition) still saw me as a boy.
In her book Sexed Up, writer, musician and activist Julia Serano explains this phenomenon as the “two filing cabinets in our minds.” Having been socialised in the cishet fantasy land we also call the “society,” Scerano argues that humans subconsciously gender everyone we meet and file them in either the “male” or “female” filing cabinets in our brains. This filing is an almost permanent and irreversible act. Undoing it—moving a file from one cabinet to another, or none at all (enbys, I see you)—requires deliberate and repeated petitions to each individual filer.
Around the time the metro security check incident happened, I began coming out to my family as a trans woman. I initiated the process of submitting repeated petitions (some of which have to be continually submitted to this day), requesting them to file me in the “female” cabinet.
A little over a year into my transition, one evening I was visiting my brother who lived in Noida. He was still stuck in traffic by the time I reached his house. To pass the time, I rolled a joint and smoked it by the door of his house. When he reached home, my brother told me that his neighbour had called to tell him that a girl had been smoking pot in front of his apartment. My brother apparently tried to correct him. “Oh no, that’s my brother,” he had said.
By this time, I was presenting fem full-time and had come out to most people in my family by then. The neighbour, who had seen me for the first time, had filed me as a girl without really thinking about it, while my brother was still struggling with the refiling despite me having come out to him.
As more and more people began to see me in accordance with my chosen gender, I began to notice a shift in the way they treated me. Suddenly, my skin had sexual properties to it, and I was expected to make it difficult for the person whose gaze was on me (men, the gazers are almost always men!) to have access to it. Serano describes this as double standards that separate the bodies gendered as masculine from the bodies gendered as feminine. These double standards are not rooted in how a gender behaves “naturally.” Rather, they are social expectations of how a gender “should” behave. And when it comes to women, I was learning that they carry a certain value judgement within them which separates the “good girls” from the bad ones.
The double standards that exist for men and women can be best documented in how access to spaces is policed by society. I have a habit of working out of bars on weekday evenings. The vibe is surprisingly quaint, and well, who doesn’t enjoy the 1+1 cocktail deals? About a year into presenting fem full-time, I started noticing how me taking up space, in a bar, on a weekday, alone, was not something society expected of a “good girl.”
Before I started transitioning, I would work out of bars and get tipsy, and I was never approached by anyone. Not even once, in the three years I had been doing it. I was seen as a serious person and my personal space was respected.
But when I began to be perceived as a woman, my mere presence in such spaces sent invitations to people (yup, men again!) to come talk to me. The approaches varied from uncomfortable to downright threatening. These invitations, which a woman does not send but are received by men regardless, are described by Julia Scerano as “phantom invitations.”
Men tend to perceive femininity merely as a tool of attraction; a tool for attracting male attention. Femininity cannot just exist, its only purpose in a space is to attract them. When these men would try to strike up a conversation with me, and I would act cold, because I was there to be alone, they would never perceive it as their fault. Instead, they would think of my presence there as a “misleading” invitation I had sent them.
Learning how phantom invitations work and how men view femininity taught me that my personal space as a woman is very negotiable. Society had been successful in conveying to me, in brazen terms, that “good girls” don’t take their work to bars.
Society doesn’t just limit the choice of spaces women can occupy, it also polices the amount of physical space a woman is allowed to inhabit. In the book Throwing Like A girl, Iris Marion Young, a political theorist and social feminist, points out that bodily motions of women are heavily restricted compared to men. “Women tend not to open their bodies in their everyday movements, but tend to sit, stand, and walk with their limbs close to or enclosed around them,” she wrote. Young argues that women restrict their movements even when not doing so would accomplish a task better.
Before I transitioned, I was never told that I was tall. Recently when I was on a walk with one of my friends, an older man who was sitting on the ramp of his upper middle class house, said “Beti, tum toh jada lambi ho” [you are way too tall].
The same man would probably not go up to even a 6’3” man and tell him that he is too tall. And even if he did do anything of the sort, it would be phrased as a compliment. Men taking (read: conquering) more space is seen as a good thing while a woman is expected to constrict her physical body and carry herself in a way that limits her mobility in public spaces. I think I was told I was way too tall not as a compliment but as a way of conveying the social expectation that I need to take up less space.
The personal space of a woman is constantly invalidated on account of the phantom invitations that femininity is perceived to have sent out. In Young’s view, the consequence is that women tend to constrict their physical presence as a defence mechanism.
Navigating through this new social reality has been a constant bombardment of gendered expectations, a consistent negotiation of boundaries, and a never ending struggle of re-calibrating my relationship with the world.
In the initial days of my transition, I would try my hardest to abide by these gendered expectations and to maintain the social order. The desperate need to “pass,” to be seen as belonging to my chosen gender, for my family to see that I was indeed a woman encouraged me to abide by all the societal expectations. These attempts to maintain the social order, and to assimilate into society took such a toll on me that I would, at times, freeze under this pressure. I would feel clueless as to what to do, say or act in the myriad situations that occur as one navigates through life. This discomfort and this freezing was noticed by people around me and I was often told by my friends and family that I was “not as comfortable in public as I used to be before.”
Thankfully my assimilationist fantasy was short-lived. As I unravelled the layers of patriarchal conditioning that social expectations were built on, I began to understand the radical possibilities that exist in embracing queer existence. I started to revel in the fact that the aberrations in my behaviour were not a reflection of my gender, but a discomfort I was causing to a social order that wishes to eternally replicate itself. Being a loose woman is fun.
I would be lying, my dear reader, if I were to say this social re-calibration has not affected my lived reality in any way. I have definitely had to make changes in how I go through the world, in the interest of my safety. I can no longer take my work to a bar on the weekdays anymore. But I would choose living like a woman on my own terms over the 1+1 cocktails anyday.
This personal essay is part of queerbeat’s Youth Storytelling Project, bringing together eight young queer writers and artists to produce pieces on what it means to be queer in India.
Katyayini Saksham is a bahujan trans woman from Punjab. She makes visual essays on gender, feminism, caste and society with a very queer lens. You can find her on instagram and youtube @Katyayinisaksham
Visvak (they/he) is a writer and editor based in 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.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
