How to name it?

What can a person born male become? A father, a son, an elder brother, a younger brother, a friend, an enemy, a traitor, a madman… and, if fate is kind, a leader!

And a person born female? A daughter, a mother, an elder sister, a younger sister, a sister-in-law, a friend, a lover, a wife… and, if fate is kind, a goddess!

Very well. And those born transgender?

— Mari Selvaraj, Marakkave Ninaikkiren

After a long wait, I watched Dorothy on the very day it was released on OTT. Before I saw the film, I happened to watch an interview with one “Himalaya of Directors” (sarcasm fully intended), who had a great many questions about it. In it he said,

“This is Western influence. A film that corrupts our culture for money. Do we allow you people into the Koothandavar temple or not?” and rambled on about this and that. Most of all, he issued a decree: “The film must be released on OTT only after the kiss in the final scene is removed.”

Two questions rose in my mind then. Who are you to accept or reject, to allow anyone in or keep them out? And isn’t culture the very thing that never stops changing?

In my school days, when I had no real understanding of gender, a classmate who spoke with a certain softness was called a thirunangai by the whole class, and the teacher would join in the mockery. Back then, my heart walked straight past the moments when he wept in a grief he couldn’t put into words. Now that same heart takes time by the hand and walks back, desperate to comfort those tears, the tears of one who suffered and could bear no more, and it aches in helplessness, because it cannot.

We look at, and look away from, the everyday humiliations faced by someone born male who longs to become female (or the other way round). How could people like us ever understand the inner world of a trans community that fights this many battles just to live an ordinary life? The days I cried as I put on the birthday shirt my father bought me, chosen for its price and not my liking, still flicker like shadows in my memory. We, who refuse to wear even an unwanted garment on a body we love, what right do we have to pass judgment on those who simply long to wear the clothes they love on a body they never wanted?

In Dorothy, Subbu realises at sixteen that she is a woman, and for years tells no one, keeping it hidden and brooding deep inside. Even Karthi, who is everything to Subbu, stumbles at this one place. It is Dorothy, arriving at home as the elder brother’s wife, who finally gives Subbu a place to say everything without filtering a single word. At the bottom of a deep well, in a solitude with no one else around, Subbu breaks open the suffocation inside, lays her head in Dorothy’s lap and begins to cry, and with tears overflowing, pours out at Dorothy’s feet the womanhood she has carried all her life. It is a scene that makes you feel that no one, until then, had ever given her even a place to speak her mind.

A few days after I arrived in Belgium, a feud flared up between a manager and me like a fire. I told no one and kept it buried inside. Over time the embers grew hotter until it erupted like a volcano, and everyone came to know. Then a Belgian colleague came to me and said,

“Why didn’t you tell us before? We would all have stood by you. I’m truly sorry for not giving you enough space to confess,” and held my hands to comfort me.

Have we given everyone around us a place where they can speak their hearts freely? Let it be anyone at all: family, relatives, friends, a lover, a husband, a wife. Let us ask ourselves, just once: how many of our relationships have we given the assurance that if they pour out their pain, they will be heard without being judged?

A college friend called me after ten years, and somewhere in the conversation he mentioned that he was gay. When I simply took it in my stride, he said, “I’ve never told anyone, da. Because no one ever gave me that space. I just felt like I should tell you.”

In every relationship, how important it is to make room.

On the TV show Tamizha Tamizha, there was an episode on brothers-in-law and their Annis (elder brothers’ wives). At first it was a little confusing to see just one woman sitting on the brothers-in-law side. The topic that day was how Annis had become a second mother. That lone woman began speaking in a male voice and introduced herself as a thirunangai. Even though she had already become a woman before her brother’s wedding, she recounted how her family sent her out of the house when the bride’s family came to visit, made her wear men’s clothes to the wedding, and told her to cut her hair. Everyone at home had pressured her to become a man again. But on the opposite side, her Anni began with, “My naathanaar (sister-in-law)…” and the host asked, “Who do you mean? Your kozhundhanar (brother-in-law)?”

“She’s changed, hasn’t she? From now on she isn’t my brother-in-law, she’s my sister-in-law,” the Anni said firmly, and went on, “If I’d had a child like this, isn’t this exactly how I would have looked after her?” The thirunangai, who said that simply being called a woman felt like the greatest blessing of her life, added,

“Only after she came into our home did I get any recognition (not resentment, recognition) in my own family. Every Deepavali they would buy me pants and a shirt. Only after she accepted me did I get a saree for Deepavali for the first time,” she said, glowing with pride.

That show told me loud and clear: Dorothys aren’t angels born in the heavens who come and stand at our doorstep. They are flesh and blood, women walking among us as one of us.

I saw opinions everywhere saying the film should have ended where Subbu is dropped off on the road. Why should it have ended there? And what of Subbu after that? She should have begged on the streets, or, unable to find work, been pushed into sex work. That, for them, is the acceptable ending. How many masks can a single kiss tear off? As Mysskin says, if these men can take a knife and slit another man’s throat, then surely there is nothing wrong with a kiss?

A friend I first knew as a man, who became a woman a few days later, told me how in a single stroke she lost everyone and everything: family, relatives, home, job. She poured out her anguish, and not knowing how to console her, I took my leave like a child who has lost his way and forgotten how to speak. How absurd would it be to go to her and lecture her that “gender is feeling, not organs”? Isn’t it society that must change? How violent is it to make those who have already been wounded by change also carry the burden of changing everyone else’s minds?

In “Paal,” a story from Mari Selvaraj’s Marakkave Ninaikkiren, someone first introduced as Karthi has become Karthika. Beaten and driven out by her own family, she appears before Mari, tears welling, dressed as a young woman. Not knowing what to say, Mari asks a single question that speaks loudly for every silenced voice: “Born a man and wanting to live as a woman, must this person die now, or live? If die, why must she die? If live, where must she live?” And in the end,

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to go somewhere.”

“Where will you go?”

“There must be lots of people like me somewhere. I’m going to find them,” says Karthi, weeping. No, forgive me, Karthika. And Mari puts her on a bus and sends her off. Isn’t this the reality for most trans women and trans men born into lower-middle-class and poor families? Without even realising that each of them lives like a small bird searching alone for its own sky, people spout “rise above your trials and triumph” and other hollow revolutionary rubbish. That is the height of ignorance. Or else, it’s fear: fear that the very foundations of male dominance will crack.

One day, much later, Mari goes to Karthi’s house and introduces himself as Karthi’s friend. On hearing that name, Karthi’s mother breaks down sobbing and says, “Karthi is dead.” At the doorway, Mari notices Karthi’s photograph in school uniform, garlanded, and he ends with this:

“Karthi is dead. I know that too. Where is my Karthika? Tell me that.”

The mob that boiled over at the last kiss Karthi gives in Dorothy needs to understand just one thing here. When he leaves Subbu on the road, Karthi says, “My friend Subbu died long ago.” So the kiss was never for Subbu. It was for Dorothy, the woman Subbu had become. And for the few fools (the Himalaya of Directors included) who ask what their life will be after that kiss, who believe lust is the final destination of love, the lines I wrote long ago come back to me:

“Not every fondness has to end in love, marriage, sex, and children. Sometimes the very peak of love is simply to love unconditionally. Let some love grow boundless and fill a whole lifetime. There is nothing wrong in that.”