In India, Shivaani Ehsaan endured religious reparative therapy and her family’s resistance during her transition.
(Photo: Brandon Buck/FSView)
When Shivaani Ehsaan came out to her parents as a woman, they sent her to India.
As a transgender woman, her parents were wary of her newfound gender identity, but putting aside their concerns, they thought India might provide her with a more affordable transition option than what was available in the U.S. They told her they would financially support her transition if it’s what she truly wanted.
So last month, Ehsaan packed her bags and went 9,000 miles away, in search for an answer. Finally, there was hope that her body would finally reflect her true identity.
Once she arrived, Ehsaan met Dr. Sanjay Pandey, who told her she was not a woman until she got the full, surgical transition. Being only 21 and publicly identifying herself as a woman in April, Pandey worried about Ehsaan’s age and maturity in making her decision to transition, stressing she must be sure about her identity before she went through with anything. He warned Ehsaan that sometimes, people who transition ask him to change them back.
“I don’t want that to happen to you,” Pandey told Ehsaan.
Her grandparents then put her in touch with a spiritual leader, and she consequently underwent what she calls “religious reparative therapy.” She wouldn’t wish it on anyone whose skin isn’t as thick as hers.
Religious reparative therapy comes in many forms—In Ehsaan’s case, it was trying to convince her that her gender dysphoria was a curable ailment. The spiritual therapist tried to talk her out of her transition, telling her she was going against nature.
“He brought me in and he talked to me about how we should always be ourselves, we should never go against nature,” Ehsaan said. “He told me that I wanted to be a woman since I liked woman gods. He said, ‘Men aren’t supposed to worship woman gods or else they become women.'”
The therapist promised Ehsaan that if she were to stay with the gender identity she was assigned at birth, he would give her a successful life of fortune and marriage in India, working as an astrologer. He gave Ehsaan’s information to several families for an arranged marriage, and he told her she already received potential prospects.
“They already started looking for a wife for me,” Ehsaan said. “He said, ‘Leave all this! I can help you be successful. You don’t even have to graduate. I can help you. He told me not to go through with my transition, that it is unnatural.”
Even as they told her to think about her family and the harm it would do to her body to inject hormones into it, Ehsaan endured, and ultimately maintained she wanted to go through with her transition.
“I just shook my head,” Ehsaan said. “I listened to him. I was like, f**k. I kind of knew they were going to try to do something like this. After that one hour, I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do this. You’re the reason people commit suicide.’ And I just walked out.”
Ehsaan said that she has spoken to many spiritual leaders, but none have made her endure the humiliation that she was currently experiencing. According to Ehsaan, Hinduism accepts transgender individuals, and treats them with the same dignity as any other human beings.
“Luckily I had a thick enough skin to go through that—but younger kids that might be looking towards their parents to find out what the truth is—would probably not do so well. Luckily for me, I knew the research, the data and the realities of it. I didn’t need to rely on my family to realize what the truth was.”
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In India, you can be killed for cross-dressing.
Known as hijras, India’s trans women population dates back 4,000 years, revered in ancient texts for bearing luck and fertility. For centuries, hijras were respected in society as religious figures. Last year, India’s supreme court recognized the transgender identities, openly counting them as a “third gender” in the census.
However, while the government has steadily enacted policies that advocate for transgender individuals, Ehsaan said this is met with pushback from Indian society itself.
The government has been trying to build more homeless shelters, and even have tried to get free operations for transgender individuals, but hijras face immense prejudice, and are often forced into begging, menial jobs and sex work.
Hijras are not hidden behind closed doors – they are “out in the open,” Ehsaan said, and are particularly visible within the homeless population.
“When I was a kid, I saw a lot of homeless trans women begging for money,” Ehsaan said.
Cross-dressing is still illegal in most areas, and if someone hasn’t had a full sex-change operation, the law permits that they can be killed for the act of cross-dressing.
“There is a force within government trying to do things, but then there’s also that backwards force in the government trying to push against it,” Ehsaan said. “There is a society that has not caught on yet.”
While it is cheaper to for Sex Reassignment Surgery in India than the U.S., those wanting surgery must go through an intensive, five-day psychiatric evaluation to test their resolve and dedication to their new gender identity. Once someone is certified, they must wait to get medication for one year.
“I have no idea if I would even pass or not,” Ehsaan said.
In the U.S., all it takes to be able to undergo a surgical transition is finding a psychiatrist and endocrinologist to sign off on their patients for gender dysphoria, the condition of feeling one’s identity as male or female is opposite to one’s biological sex. In the U.S., people can get their gender marker changed without undergoing SRS. Though more expensive, the process allows less hoops to jump through for those wanting to transition.
However, discrimination against transgender women is not isolated to Indian society. Translating what Ehsaan learned on her journey to India to her work at FSU, she said in the U.S. when advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, it’s essential to talk about transgender women of color. To Ehsaan, what people don’t realize is that the Supreme Court’s ruling of same-sex marriage equality is just one step in the fight for for LGBTQ+ equality.
In a New York Times op-ed, Ehsaan writes:
My name is Shivaani Ehsaan, an Indian Transgender woman currently studying political science and sociology at Florida State University. I was Assigned Male at birth but have identified as female since the age of four. I spent a good 15-16 years of my life donning a large beard, playing sports, and aiming to appear as manly as possible. In my conservative Indian family, Transgender, known as “hijra” in India, is heavily looked down upon and regularly ridiculed . I made all the efforts to appear as male my whole life. However, I still faced contempt for my high pitched voice and feminine laughter, many times even called a “faggot terrorist”.
In the U.S., trans women of color face the highest rates of violence and homicide of the entire LGBTQ+ population.
“Trans women of color are on the frontlines of justice for many in the LGBTQ+ community, including the racial justice community, but they’ve always been ignored,” Ehsaan said. “With these struggles, we’ve always been placed on the backburner. It’s the most marginalized groups that we see continuing to face oppression but not getting attention. We need to start reaching out and fighting for their liberation as well.”
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Ehsaan recently began working for Project Conversation, an unpaid internship program with The Center for Leadership and Social Change with Florida State University.
Using a peer-to-peer education model, Ehsaan will build curriculum and lesson plans, teaching students with a specific focus on transgender oppression.
Ehsaan’s main goal is to spread knowledge about transgender oppression and trans issues on FSU’s campus through an organized curriculum. Ehsaan will go to classrooms, leadership seminars, social justice classes, freshman interest groups, workshops and more to speak on the importance of advocating for transgender rights, analyzing the social, political and healthcare policies from India to the United States.
Ehsaan helped inaugurate Transgender Liberation Front, a Tallahassee organization that advocates for transgender women, specifically women in color. They advocated and helped stop FL HB 583, which would have prevented transgender individuals from using the bathrooms of their choice. In April, she gave a TED Talk entitled “Trans Liberation in Communities of Color” to over 500 students on FSU’s campus.
Except for her grandparents, Ehsaan’s parents still hide Ehsaan’s new gender identity from the rest of her family. She has not started hormones yet because she wants to respect her parents’ pace in coping with her new gender identity.
“Be real with yourself,” Ehsaan said. “Be what you want to be, and don’t allow societal constructs to hold you back. If you want to wear a dress and still wear your beard, do that. Express your authentic self. Admit to the world who you really are and not who they want you to be.”
To donate to Ehsaan’s transition, visit http://www.gofundme.com/ShivaaniEhsaan.