Sublime.

Transgender people are so often autotheorists -- the trans experience and identity is under-theorized and the transsexual theorist often finds herself with very few trans giants to stand on the shoulder of. In an already self-exploration-heavy context of having to figure out one's own relationship with gender, it is easy to have a very solipsistic view of trans identity.

This solipsism is profound - it applies both to the trans individual considering their own self as the ultimate word in what creates transness, and also to the trans community considering its own self as the ultimate word in what way transness is marginalized. It is not hard to see why this irritates older trans people (in the first case) and trans people whose first allegiance is to a wider struggle than the trans movement (in the second). I consider myself a refugee from most trans groups for the simple fact of finding their exceptionalism exhausting.

To be sure, there are some things truly exceptional about the transgender condition. We are a reviled minority, an immediately legible degeneracy to point to and prove that society could use a little more repression - across caste, class, and national lines. There is a visceral discomfort we inspire in people that seems near universal -- where we are considered attractive, we are seen as possessing a fundamental disqualification (oh, you were born as something else); and where we are considered unwanted, we are emblematic of something deeply wrong. The non-adherence to gender roles has been a reliable indicator of a less-developed civilization in colonial terms - groups that have often also been accused of kidnapping children (examples that jump immediately to mind are the Hijras and the Roma.)

However, the question of "what is a transsexual" or "how does one identify a transsexual" or "whom do you believe when they say they are transsexual" deserves a rigourous answer. One of my favourite central tenets of Donna Haraway's feminist philosophy is to never eschew rigour for wishy-washy constructionism, especially when it comes to questions of gender. Sure, gender is constructed, but there is an ironclad concreteness to womanhood; the woman is recognizable, and her oppression is nameable. Just because this concreteness is denied, questioned, and just because rigour and objectivity have hitherto spelled exclusion for women, it doesn't mean we give up on rigour and objectivity. We have to think of a stronger objectivity with which to characterize the condition of womanhood rather than say "objectivity is the tool of the oppressor, we believe women out here."

Is transsexuality self-identified? Well - there is no meaningful way to identify a transsexual other than to ask her. There is a spectrum of trans expression - it varies from physically presenting as one gender but yearning at heart to be another; adopting clothes and mannerisms of another gender only in safe and private circumstances; moving socially in those clothes and mannerisms; performing body modifications to present in a particular gendered manner; living 'stealth', that is, adopting such an optimal gender presentation that it would be very tough for someone to identify that you're trans; or presenting so androgynously that the interlocutor has to acknowledge your transness.

All these are valid trans expressions (in the interest of rigour, the first may be classified as a trans identity without trans expression). All these also come with different kinds of repercussions, persecutions, and social consequences. For instance, the stealth transsexual may find herself subject to serious, even fatal, violence when someone who believes her to be a ciswoman discovers her past; the socially transitioning person may find her claim to womanhood questioned and her life being forced to go on pause to wait for an overburdened medical system to give her the interventions she needs; the androgyne may find themselves stared at and mistrusted wherever they go; the closeted transsexual must live with the yearning and dissonance of not being seen for who they really are.

These are also differential marginalizations - the internal pain of the closeted trans person is not comparable to the experience of visibly being a member of a reviled class, having to live with what WEB du Bois characterized as a 'double consciousness' in the context of being a Black American, having to see yourself from the eyes of your oppressor and temper your being so as to fit what is acceptable behaviour. 'Difference,' theorize feminists (who, in fairness, have always failed to meaningfully account for the Différance between themselves and transsexuals without being exclusionary), must be embraced within the movement, not falsely flattened into an externally-imposed sameness.

Perhaps the obsession with transsexual self-identification is the result of the liberal inability to contend with the disturbing, the difficult, the uncomfortable, the disgusting, the elephants in the room. Rather than dive into the sordid details of how different the material conditions of one who has to dilate her neovagina are from mood swings that may be experienced by people who are on hormone replacement medication, we prefer to flatten our experiences under the umbrella and pick the identifying factor that is common to every variety of transgender experience: if she says she is trans, she is most likely trans.

This, however, is a necessary cop-out and cannot be the basis for affirmative action. Affirmative action must be specially and specifically tailored to the different strands of transgender life. Asking for this does not amount to dividing the trans population; rather it is a commitment to justice. Sure, we're all trans, but if you've never been kicked out of school, you must give way for those who have and speak on their behalf first. The reality of the capitalist welfare state is that every community that is desirous of welfare and affirmative action within the ambit of this economic model has to go through the dignities and indignities of classification under the law. The law must look at you, find you recognizable, and deem you eligible for benefits. This in turn gives you the right to complain that your tax money is helping certain undeserving people. These are the characteristics of the democracy we have agreed upon. Self-identification cannot and will not qualify you for a reserved university seat, and that's as it should be.

We, in India, in 2026, must find a way out of a regime that wants to strip us to confirm our identity, rooted in a criminal view of gender variance, and the way out is not through liberal flattening of the different strands of transsexual marginality into one act of self-identification. Personally, I must admit that the ones who don't desire hormonal or surgical intervention are being somewhat naive in this regard. I already had to undergo the process of laying bare my psyche and sitting with a psychiatrist so as to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria so as to access hormone replacement therapy. Most people seriously adopting a gender identity different from the one assigned from birth have had to do this - either to get access to hormones, or at work, or to get access to surgery. The exact criterion is a question of democratic debate; but an internal feeling cannot be the only qualifier.

For me and for many many trans people, this is not a problem. Various evidences of my transsexuality have gathered themselves over the years of my presenting an outwardly gender-variant expression. These are not merely medical, and they are all material. Does my position betray some bitterness? Of course! I feel bitter about the fact that medically transitioning has estranged me from my parents, made me much less employable, created an interruption in contexts like airport security, and so much more. There are also many sisters of mine who are in a situation where the safest place for them is the closet. But this means that I am out there actively experiencing the unsafety of being visibly gender variant. There is a distinction here that is plainly unfair to flatten.

It is also a distraction from the impending genocide of our ranks. Can we focus instead on the fact that many doctors who do gender affirming surgery have now stopped doing so because the law threatens them with criminal charges if they lay a scalpel on our bodies? Can we focus instead on the fact that the criminalization provisions will affect the most disenfranchised and powerless among us?

If our trans identity is internal, invisible, and inviolable, why does it need state sanction? Contrarily, if we need the state to support us, why should we be treated as exceptional from every other recipient of reservation who has to prove their ancestry? This is not at all an attempt to compare caste and gender - this is a plain statement of fact regarding what every other demographic has to do to qualify for welfare and an assertion that we are not exceptional in this regard.

It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Where does the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act Amendment bill No. 79/2026 come from? What is the ideology that leads to it?

A careful examination of the history and present of anti-trans currents in India and globally can reveal parts of the answer. A friend from the Center for Policy and Legal Research mentions that while it has mostly been a shock to both the known progressive voices in the community and the known rabble-rousers, in terms of timing and phrasing and action plan, the overall intent of the amendment has been clear to him ever since a throwaway statement made by the Indian Government's Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta. Tushar Mehta, a significant voice in arguing that the Shaheen Bagh peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act were divisive acts of sedition, had mentioned this in 2023 court proceedings about social justice, welfare, and reservations: the primary reason why the Government had not yet taken serious steps to implement the reservation mandated for transgender persons is the vague and overly broad definition, in the government's view, that the word "transgender person" has in the current legislative framework set up by the 2019 TG Bill.

What is the problem? In my opinion, it is that the Central Government recognises the subject-making power of juridical processes and outcomes[1]. There has been a particular legal history and legislative follow-up to the transgender question in India - who are the transgender people, how do they become legible subjects under law and the state machinery, and how do we govern/develop/control/empower this class of citizen? The act of a government body issuing an identity card is a significant act in a democratic setup like ours - one identity card, when issued, can lead to a cascade of potential name, gender changes in other documents, and a gradual modification of every aspect that makes a trans woman like me a 'male' under the law.

This is significant because to name something is to give it the consideration of being discussed as a community, a denomination, a stakeholder. This is also significant because one of the potential welfare benefits to which the TG identity card is connected is reserved seats in educational institutions, government postings, and competitive exams. On the surface this is comparable to the 'caste certificate' - a document that is uniquely difficult to procure and serves as the basis for availing welfare schemes as genuine recipients. This comparison leads to one of the legible reasons why this amendment exists: it is another proposed acid rain in the erosion of what reservations mean in our country. In fact, this can be seen as a successor to the efficient and rapid implementation of the 'Economically Weaker Sections (EWS)' reservation, a move meant primarily to weaken the intent of reservations and provide fuel to the argument that it is a poverty alleviation scheme, and secondarily to bring dominant castes into the purview of reservations. The argument underpinning the EWS is the existence of a 'genuinely oppressed' class of people, those who are not in any scheduled or notified 'backward' class but can prove that their annual family income is below a particular threshold (egregiously a lower threshold than the limit for the 'creamy layer' of OBC reservations).

This argument carries on into the proposed Amendment: its officially stated intent is the perceived mismatch (no evidence provided) between the broad definition of a 'transgender person' under the 2019 TG Act and the existence of a smaller, genuinely oppressed subset of the transgender community. Arguments about who doesn't deserve reservations are a popular false flag in discussions like these, since caste is a fiercely contested system that is central to so many aspects of our everyday economic, social, family, and even personal lives. Most of these arugments are started by people who are ideologically invested but do not consider themselves as potential recipients of reservation. It is not that the upper caste opposer of reservations wants them for himself - what he wants is a cunning redrawing of boundaries so that only those he considers as genuinely oppressed are benefiting from them.

Thus there needs to be a narrative of a subset of the community to valourise as the most oppressed of the oppressed and it necessarily comes with the scapegoats (like the metaphorical iPhone-owning Dalit) who are undeservedly benefiting from the provisions of the TG Act. The chosen subsets for both of these ideological classes are significant: the communities chosen as 'genuinely oppressed' are the communities that have religio-cultural identities like Hijra, Kinnar, Jogti, and the intersex community (but only those people with intersex variations distinguishable at birth). The subtle sleight of hand at play here is that there is no accepted definition of a 'hijra': in fact most non-community people and cis people do not have any idea what makes a person a hijra. This has been the subject of much colonial and colonial-inspired ethnography and subject to the usual anthropological imperialism of understanding complex postcolonial subjects as "ancient third-gender communities," a discussion for another essay, but suffice it to say researchers balk at properly characterizing the hijra community out of respectful ignorance.

It is somewhat clear how one becomes transgender: at some point in life, a human being starts noticing a dissonance between the way they are treated as a gendered body and the way they would like to be treated. Gender is fundamental to how we move about the world, how we position ourselves in it, what kind of interactions we have with people, places, objects, and systems, and so eventually it becomes clear that there is an incongruence, that I do not want to be frisked by this security guard on this side of the metro station but by that security guard on that side, and this affects something as simple as which bathroom I use to something as profound as who gets to sign a consent for invasive surgery when I'm unconscious. Different people talk about this as being different levels of voluntary - in my personal experience, I thought it was a choice I made, but every day as I grow more comfortable in my transsexual body, I'm realising that it is a choice I'd been blocked from making and I should have had the courage to make this choice a lot earlier, because my body has known for a long time even though my rational mind took time to catch up and recognise that in this world, a tranny is what I am. Others grow supremely uncomfortable having a particular puberty - school life becomes difficult, it is hard to repress and suppress your gender feelings, and you eventually either get harassed out of school or find yourself at the receiving end of corrective violence from your family, and this leads to a large number of transgender individuals leaving home with no safety net. Most of us take some kind of action to dissociate ourselves from being perceived in the gender we were assigned at birth, and look and act and be perceived otherwise.

It is not clear to the outside world how one becomes a hijra. I will say this much frankly - I am not an ethnographer and am not bound to such ethics. The hijras are predominantly transfeminine, androphilic, matriarchal, and follow syncretic (Hindu and Muslim) religious and cultural practices. Anybody can become a hijra by paying a certain amount of money to a 'guru,' an influential house (gharana) mother in the community. This payment of money is in return for her protection and entry into her house of transfeminine individuals. It also comes with an obligation to earn money - often either through begging or through sex work - and give your guru the entirety of your earnings from the day, in exchange for food, shelter, beatings, and most importantly, the chance to one day get approved for 'nirvanam' or bottom surgery or castration. There is a price set for you, and if you want to leave this bondage or join another gharana, you or your sponsor from the other gharana have to pay. This is enforced by gang violence and semi-organised crime. These are strictly and fiercely hierarchical systems - the head of a gharana is a nayak, and under her are a few gurus, and under each guru is her jamaat of essentially bonded individuals.

Why does this exist? Although I have made a serious effort not to romanticise what is very clearly familial abuse within found/chosen family, the reason such a system exists and thrives is because nobody wants to employ transgender individuals. Trans folks are severely ostracised in education, housing, and employment, and the hijra gharana is often the only choice for many trans people who have not been able to finish their education, or find a job, or keep one. It is a community formed by bloody circumstances and keep together by blood, desperation, and hierarchy. It is time we stopped romanticising it. I write this at the risk of being targeted by gharanas near me, but they already despise me for not wanting bottom surgery, and worse, being attracted to women. It was going to be a matter of time, but somebody has to write something counter to academia's romanticisation and the center's distortion and name it for what it is.

This much is very very clear: a government identity card is free for anyone to obtain if they can prove that they satisfy the criteria. A community identity is not free for anyone to obtain, and is very much a way to gatekeep whether or not you are allowed to hold this identity. The jamaat are, to drop any pretense of wokeness, intensely regressive, violent, and hierarchical. I write this in the knowledge that younger, bleeding-heart individuals may consider me heartless and ever-compromising activists and NGO representatives may consider me divisive. The topmost layer of nayaks is incredibly wealthy and politically powerful. Political power in this context means that their assent is needed before welfare can trickle down to their chelas. And traditionally, they have been patriarchal, conservative, and violently opposed to transmasculinity, gender nonconformity, and any sexuality that doesn't center and worship men.

Trans men and transmasculine individuals are uniquely scapegoated in this amendment. It has long been "accepted knowledge" in trans activism circles that if you have to get anything done, you have to let go of and allow the extreme transphobia the jamaat has towards trans men. The 'invisibility' of trans men is often given much academic treatment, but this invisibility is not inevitable; it is manufactured hatred, it is the concerted power-grabbing effect of one trans community having been given certain recognitions and turning around and burning the bridge. Unless transmasculinity is proactively and wholesomely accounted for in any future definition of a transgender person, we cannot move forward.

Many people have written about what there is to be opposed in this amendment, and how to go about opposing it - these are very valuable resources and I'll be linking to them as I update this post. But having traveled with and been a part of hijra groups to a small extent, I know some aspects of hijra existence that have been done a brutal disservice by academic romanticisation. Now that a parliament bill has been proposed naming hijras as the real transgenders and the rest of us as self-mutilating freaks, it is time that we looked at a community whose violence seems inescapable. If it is a choice between letting go of my transmasculine brothers and saying the inconvenient truth about the jamaat despite knowing that cis people will use this to divide us further, I choose the latter. Push has come to shove. The jamaat must fight for the inclusion of our trans brothers, or where I morally stand is in the opposite side.

Addendum

It is not clear that this bill outright benefits the Hijra community, or even a set of its most powerful members that can be named. As it stands, the amendment has very devious double-bind: where it has reduced transgender identity to a few socio-religious communities, it also mentions "any person or child who has been by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence, either with or without consent, compelled to assume, adopt, or outwardly present a transgender identity, by mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure or otherwise." It leaves no provision for these procedures to be done voluntarily without inducement or deceit. In the clause meant for delineating punishments for crimes against transgender folks, also includes serious punishments including imprisonment for five to ten years for performing this coercion. As it stands, a coherent reading of this bill criminalizes every hijra guru and nayak.

While ideologically the figure of the hijra is used for moving the goalposts of trans identity, materially the hijra is criminalized for merely existing, and only children born intersex can be inducted into this community without someone falling foul of this law. In summary - only the hijra is the genuinely oppressed transgender person, and it is not possible to induct someone into the hijra community without performing a crime according to this bill. The attack is on self-perceived gender incongruence: this amendment inescapably mandates you to live life as your gender assigned at birth, and anyone who helps you transition is seriously criminalized alongside the gravest crimes in this country.

Practically speaking, this leads to the question of how we oppose this bill and how the Jamaat might. This is a moment where transmasculine people, gender non-conforming people, unaffiliated trans women, and the hijras can come together to define and understand transgender identity in a way that isn't tied to religion and the jamaat.

The material conditions of an average hijra is a far cry from the opulence of the average nayak, and there is no convenient moment to bring this up, and thus this inconvenient existential threat is when I choose to speak about it.

they laugh every time the train brakes

jerked away from a world only they occupy

four eyes and one world.

And the city flies past, teeming masses crossed by

more teeming masses. we build houses and cities

And we keep building: here's something that

I only could come up with when you're looking at me

with those eyes of yours, like the way I see the world

could cure mortality.

why does it please me so?

that the western ghats twist that way

the river Moira twists this way

a rumble under the Earth raised rolling hills

and a small road with a big bump right down its middle

The question of inclusion has always been predicated on a simple, fairly apparent, possibly even measurable difference: the one between what you do because you're supposed to do it, and what you do because it makes sense and feels right. There is an intimate relationship between power and civility, orderliness, conduct, discipline, and how to BE. Power often dictates how we must act, carry ourselves, what we're allowed to do and what we aren't, or fundamentally, what is acceptable.

For example, consider: What decides whether you're allowed to walk on an escalator? Something you might notice in a mall or a metro station or any of those glossy sterile places-meant-for-the-affluent is the moment of hesitant terror that someone might have, standing paralysed in front of an escalator. I remember being in that position - my dad, a man of the world, knew what these contraptions were, but stairs moving on their own and getting swallowed up under the ground terrified me and my mother.

I remember feeling the need to treat these things as though breaking them would bankrupt our family (they would). Something about how shiny it was made me and my mother step on it very gingerly, knowing that in a fundamental way, this place is not home, and there are rules, some spoken, and some unspoken, and there are consequences for breaking them. Though there were some security guards peppered here and there, the real enforcement of these consequences seemed to be atmospheric. The kind of power that enforces these rules didn't have to shout at us or really even insist very much - the guards are really mainly for display, and the people who do end up paying fines are often those who have made mistakes, or haven't yet caught on to this projection of power.

It is not just the guard that enforces this rule, not really. After all, only a little part of my mother's paralysis was the machinery that her sari might get stuck in - a bigger part of it was the fear of doing something unacceptable around others who might be watching, and possibly laughing. In that sense the mall has co-opted all of us into being enforcers of the (un)acceptable.

Moreover, as someone who is becoming a 'person of the world' myself, I now know that there's nothing scary about the escalator. In fact, I even know that it's okay to walk on it and not just stand: it's been engineered to withstand being walked on. However, many people don't. Some might even look at me as though I'm vandalizing the escalator when I walk on it, and possibly even feel superior to me, "don't you know you're supposed to treat it gingerly?" Consider how this reinforces the power that the mall has of getting others to rally behind its rules of acceptability, even when they go against the laws of physics.

Only power can do this. When people look at a signboard announcing a rule, they do not always perceive the authority behind the sign or the power that really enforces it. It is not immediately clear, looking at a signboard that says "Stay behind the yellow line," that sure, standing behind the yellow line does save lives, but beneath it is really an unspoken power, one that dictates civic sense, from which the signboard derives its authority. One must never confuse this: it is not merely persuasive language; it is backed by material power.

This leads me to think about what is acceptable conduct around a transgender person. Language which has been designed (by whom? more on that shortly) to be respectful or accommodating has often been decried by its detractors as 'coercive'. It is quite easy to conjure up a mental image of a person, very easy to 'trigger', who demands to be spoken to and treated with in a very specific manner, using very specific kinds of communication. Often, this imaginary person is simultaneously so fragile that they might combust if spoken to in the wrong way, but so powerful as to coerce you into censoring yourself.

However, all speech is governed by power, the only difference being whether or not that power is immediately perceptible. The question of what is acceptable is a political question, and rendering some forms of speech and action (un)acceptable are political acts. Making something (un)acceptable, therefore, is not merely a matter of figuring out its language, but a matter of remaking the balance of power.

In plain words: if you want someone to not misgender you (or others), what gun are you holding to their head? It isn't that people don't have goodness in their hearts or are inherently disrespectful; the point is that your adversaries already sustain a certain standard of what is (un)acceptable backed by a lot of unspoken power.

People who have otherwise never had their authority questioned, or people who mostly fit into, or until recently used to fit into acceptable categories, might be under the impression that one must ask nicely, or scold, or sufficiently explain why they must be treated respectfully.

I will repeat myself here: your adversaries aren't asking nicely.

In fact, your adversaries have convinced people that they have naturally and reasonably arrived at the conclusion that you mustn't walk on escalators, or that there are exactly two sexes. They get to pretend now that you're the unreasonable one. People are as free to gender you as they are to misgender you, but they have been convinced that one of these options is free and the other is coercive.

A lot, therefore, is predicated on understanding what kinds of power you do and don't have. Can you pepper-spray your interlocutor and have a crowd take your side? Can you have someone removed from a space? Do you have buddies you can call and outnumber a small hostile group? People rarely do the right thing because it's the right thing. They usually follow a rule backed by authority or they break it if it feels good.

I think one of the things that we have to reconcile, at any cost, is the shock of seeing trans lives take shape when subscribing to a feminist thought that - at best - forgot to account for trans folks. Cisfeminism has useful shorthand for how gendered oppression works, such as to say that makeup as it currently exists is controlled by powerful men who profit off inducing body image issues, which in shorthand becomes a very strong opposition to the idea that makeup bestows femininity. Expose such a person to 'a man' who does use makeup to present as more feminine than 'his' body 'allows', and they're obviously going to get a sense of revulsion towards this individual who seems to be appropriating femininity and simultaneously also participating in and advocating for one of the most murderous industries of modern capitalism.

This fails to account for the fact that the trans woman is here a victim of the same set of factors that are causing the oppression of the cis woman, which is that a majority of the world and its institutions do associate women with makeup and refuse to associate trans women as women without it, and it fails at this precisely because it considers the trans woman as staunchly non-woman. And so the trans woman seems to be standing in between the cis woman and the utopia of bra-burning.

This leads to a sort of 'logical' transphobia wherein feminist logic that never accounted for trans folks is used to justify the exclusion of trans folks from womanhood - one that can only be broken by a feminism that includes trans women as women at its very foundation. It's crucial to consider this idea that trans-exclusionary thought is merely a logical result of any feminism that doesn't explicitly recognise trans women as women, since it underpins the radicalisation of the TERF community.

British TERFs as far as I've seen them are a mix of clueless aunties like JK Rowling and Chimamanda Adichie who are convinced of their own erudition (of course I know what feminism is, I wrote a book on it!) that draws from systems of feminist thought that don't recognise trans women; malicious right wing astroturfing infiltration paid for by conservative Christian and alt-right groups (such as Heritage foundation, which has ties with the newly formed "LGB alliance" in UK); and bogus theorists who facilitate this infiltration and rewrite formerly implicitly exclusionary feminist theory into explicitly transphobic academic output.

I think it would be useful to recognise the difference between these entities, and furthermore useful to recognise the breaking point in politics of otherwise 'normal' folks who with a little bit of the right indoctrination turn rabidly transphobic. It would be useful to recognise the banality of this transphobia: just as to Arendt there was a banality to Eichmann following his superior's orders at a concentration camp. JKR is, to use Arendt’s words only insofar as the comparison holds, “terrifyingly normal.”

Posting a mirror of this: original at http://theworldofapu.com/super-deluxe-critical-analysis/

Super Deluxe (2019), directed by Thiagarajan Kumararaja, has been a polarizing film in my queer circle. To those convinced of its brilliance, it is nothing short of a cinematic revolution. However, to the rest of us, it is difficult even to describe how depraved the moral center of the movie is, surrounded as it is by an aura of big names lauding it as years ahead of its time. This becomes an especially difficult matter when the narrative of the film is praised for being trans-inclusive. Many see it as Tamil cinema’s big favour to transgender folks, which makes it that much harder to argue that the film is transphobic to its core.

Structured as a set of four seemingly disconnected storylines, which eventually converge in unexpected ways, Super Deluxe is a potpourri of things that sound like Really Cool Movie Ideas—shower thought after shower thought thrown at you, plot devices that may well have come from that one college friend obsessed with Quentin Tarantino. The cult success of Aaranya Kaandam (Kumararaja’s previous and first film) led to a breathless build-up around Super Deluxe, and that resulted in a movie so convinced of its own hype, that it never stopped to consider the fact that these Cool Movie Ideas may not fit coherently. The movie is always smugly convinced of its own brilliance, all the way from the titillating title sequence to the ending that featured a bizarre exposition (aliens give you cash! morality is relative!), revealing the film’s sheer contempt for the viewer’s intelligence. Leaving aside the gratuitous violence and the rampant transphobia, Super Deluxe is a drab movie at best.

To begin with, Super Deluxe is not kind to its cis women. It opens with Samantha playing an archetype of a modern woman that has plagued Kollywood since time immemorial. Her character, Vaembu, speaks about sex in a way that is reminiscent of a schoolboy’s fantasy, calling herself an ‘item’ by way of introduction. We see a neat correlation being drawn, between the sexual openness of the character and the trouble she is in. Later on in the movie, a weak attempt is made to subvert this portrayal, along the predictable lines of the How Many Partners Have You Had conversation. By that point, the plot seems to have lost any semblance of life. The less said about Leela, the better—Ramya Krishnan makes a brave attempt to authentically portray one of the most ham-fisted stereotypes of Sex Worker with a Heart of Gold I have seen yet from Mysskin (one of four writers credited on this movie).

However, the violence that registers most is the one that comes disguised as empowerment. The character of Shilpa, a trans woman, is played by actor and cis man Vijay Sethupathi. Shilpa’s story is the detailed recounting of every single way in which trans women can be humiliated. My favourite critical review of the filmmaking on display here comes from the blog The Seventh Art, where Srikanth Srinivasan notes that the camera and the soundtrack share the point of view of the aggressor time and again. We rarely see Shilpa’s plot from her own perspective; it is always the perspective of a condescending observer or a crying wife. One such instance of this voyeuristic framing and subsequent othering is the scene where Shilpa is shown draping a saree. She dresses herself in front of a mirror while her wife stands and watches, sobbing. The soundtrack is giggling out Maasi Maasam Aalana Ponnu, a song from the 1991 film Dharmadurai, mockingly dissonant from the context. The camera zooms into Shilpa smoothening her wig, and she has the slightest moment of genuine euphoria that she looks good for her walk. The camera, of course, makes fun of this vulnerability all along—titillating noises from the sex song still running, it switches over to the sobbing wife who says, “I don’t know what’s harder, having lived so long without a husband or having to live with a husband like this.” This is the point of view the camera wants you, the viewer, to have. It wants you to watch while ‘something like this’ gets humiliated. This is supposed to be the progressive portrayal of a trans woman in this movie, obsessed with her appearance, indifferent to her wife’s pain; a balding sex trafficker who dresses up while her wife watches.

Srikanth goes on to observe: “In the scene at the police station, the only point of view the audience is allowed to recognize is the sleazy cop’s. The cop, of course, is a caricature and the audience is made to feel morally superior to him, while not having anything to do with Shilpa beyond dispensing sympathy for her subhuman status. By making Shilpa the passive object of contempt, the film forestalls even the possibility of the audience’s identification with Shilpa that the casting of Vijay Sethupathi might have offered. There’s a special violence in the fact that the transference of identity that the film demands from its trans viewers for its other characters is not matched with a demand from its cis viewers towards Shilpa.”

It deserves to be said that it is profoundly unethical and transphobic to cast cisgender men to play trans women. Jen Richards put it across wonderfully in the Netflix documentary Disclosure (2020):

“Having cis men play trans women, in my mind, is a direct link to the violence against trans women. And in my mind, part of the reason that men end up killing trans women out of fear that other men will think that they’re gay for having been with trans women, is that the friends, the men whose judgement they fear of, only know trans women from media. And the people who are playing trans women are the men that they know. This doesn’t happen when a trans woman plays a trans woman.”

All the subplots share one thing in common: the setup is fantastically contrived with no aspersions to realism or believability, with the exception of sexual violence, which is gratuitous, uncomfortably real, and never-ending. Don’t get me wrong—I think there can be artistic value in making a viewer squirm in their seat, discomfited by sexual violence, especially if you’ve been a victim of it. However, to do so with no narrative significance and to follow it up by saying “Everything is Meaningless” is the kind of depravity that I could not stomach, in a movie that everyone seems to love. Ostensibly, there seems to be an uplifting and empowering message that is arrived at, but not through any meaningful transformation, or moral discourse, or even the triumph of good over evil. This is the thematic methodology of the movie: it first completely reinforces harmful stereotypes for the entirety of the plot, in excruciating detail, and then says, “I was just joking, a flyaway TV knocks out the sexual predator, isn’t life funny?”

The most egregious of these, to me, is the resolution of Shilpa’s narrative, when she comes back and speaks to her wife and son. “I didn’t think of you or your pain. I didn’t know that I would have a son who loved me and ask me why I left him,” she says.

Raasukutty and Jothi berate and gaslight this sobbing survivor of sexual assault, accusing her of being stone-hearted and plotting to leave her family. And then Raasukutty says reproachfully that although everyone else mocked her, he and his mother accepted Shilpa the way she was. “Did I or mother say a single word to you?” he asks. This is not true; Shilpa was thoroughly humiliated when she returned home, including by Jothi, who responds to her transition by alternating between shock, unveiled disgust, and mourning at lost masculinity. But coming from the mouth of precocious child Raasukutty, it is merely a reflection of cis-fragility that doesn’t even register they drove Shilpa away.

Shilpa sobs a little more. Raasukutty says, “I don’t care, be a man, be a woman, be whatever you want. Never leave us again.” The scene fades into black.

My blood boils.

How could this be the resolution? The movie features a trans woman being mocked in ways that feel like the camera is laughing at her, a trans woman being sexually assaulted, a trans woman who is told that expecting society to accept her is too much to ask, a trans woman who gets driven out of every place she wants to exist in, only for her to be told, “I don’t care who you are.”

“I don’t care who you are” is not acceptance. I might have forgiven it all if Raasukutty had instead said “Why did you leave me, mother?” But what we get instead is a return to square one: Shilpa being berated for not being a father, a father she never wanted to be.

Shilpa is never offered simple acknowledgement of her womanhood, or her personhood even. She is always treated as a thing, never a woman. She is seen as an aberration, something grotesque, and the progressive message seems to be that these grotesque things must be accepted for whatever they are. I keep going back to that scene of Shilpa draping a saree, and the awful cognitive dissonance of it. In the end Shilpa says, “As a woman, I understand what you’re going through.” The irony sends shivers down my spine. If the filmmaker had actually believed that, he would have made a very different movie.

There is a profound cis male perversion in the way Shilpa’s story is told. It takes a cis man to devise a plot where a trans woman takes her young child to a public bathroom and zips him up, in a pose that looks like she is fellating her own son. It takes a cis man to write a plot where a trans woman is a child trafficker who upon losing her child in the market, screams that she’s a sinner who transferred her sin to her son when she touched him. It takes a cis man to gaze so long and unblinkingly at the debasement of trans life, and intercut to jokes about porn. This isn’t progressive thought.

One of the most enduring and harmful transphobic stereotypes in existence is the idea that transgender (and other) alms-seekers are running begging and child trafficking rings. This is a popular idea with very little evidence: Sabina Yasmin Rahman calls it the mafia of middle-class convenience. Having noted that police have run multiple investigations in Delhi which failed to establish the existence of a begging mafia, she concludes that this idea of a begging mafia is perpetrated by popular culture and widely-held beliefs, but in reality is hugely exaggerated. Most beggars just live in debilitating poverty. This harmful myth is reinforced in this movie. And really, the more I recall this movie, the more shocked I am that anybody thinks this is progressive. This is what cis people think trans folks do.

In his article on trans characters in Indian cinema, film critic Baradwaj Rangan (who happens to be cis male) had said, “Had Super Deluxe not been a “mainstream” movie, had it played only in festivals to sympathetic and (dare I say) “evolved” audiences, there might have not been the fear that Shilpa is showing the transgender community in a bad light.” For what it’s worth, I’d like to make it clear that sex trafficking is not a realistic character flaw, and rape is not a humanizing portrayal. I leave it to the reader to ponder how utterly offensive this idea is, that a mainstream portrayal of transgender people should shy away from such esoteric things like human dignity.

Even within the Indian trans community, there are divergences in what is considered problematic within the movie. Some of the criticism leveled at it, such as that of transgender activist Grace Banu’s (in an interview to Vikatan; article in Tamil), has been regressive and homophobic, calling into question the logic of Shilpa transitioning as an adult or being attracted to her wife.

Transgender people of all gender identities have the right to choose when to undergo surgical changes, if at all they want to undergo them, and have the express right to fall in love with or have children with or live with people of any gender. One of the common effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy is infertility—there are plenty of folks within the trans community who live their lives precisely in the way that Grace dismisses as illogical. For a trans woman who wants to father children, the two options are to freeze her sperm before starting HRT (expensive and inaccessible) or have a child before starting HRT (which is what Shilpa has done). Grace’s unnecessary and bigoted detour into Shilpa’s bedroom provides no teeth to her critique, which is otherwise spot-on in terms of the movie bringing back the many indignities that the trans community has finally moved past.

I wanted to edit the punctuation from something I wrote right after U Srinivas passed away.

There is something that music does to you that you can’t quite explain. One of the things that keeps reminding me of this fact is a song called “Raghuvamsa Sudha”, a light-hearted composition that a man who would later become one of my favourite musicians is particularly adept at playing. I still remember the day I first heard the song:

My father kept telling me that there was just something different about this song, something that he can’t explain, and that if I came with him to the concert that night, he’d show me. My 10-year-old self was frankly more interested in the new friend I’d just made around the block, whom I could play cricket with.

‘Come,’ said father, though. ‘It would be magical.’ My ears pricked up at hearing the word ‘magical’. Even at that age I knew one thing: my father never overestimated.

So I trudged along, and off we went in that noisy little moped of ours: mother, father and I. At the gate, the artist’s sister shakes our hand warmly, absolutely prohibits us from buying tickets, and whisks us off to the first row. Colour me impressed. I didn’t think father was a ‘big man’. I promptly ask mother, and she says, ‘Out here, he is. He’s been following this man’s career for more than twenty years. I think his record of not having missed a single Chennai concert of his, was broken a mere three years ago.’ Why had I never known this about my father before? And more importantly, why is this worth missing the cricket game?

I’ll be frank about this – the first hour of the concert was a dull affair. That’s what I thought, anyway. I was too young and too inexperienced and too illiterate in music to understand the true nuances that were hidden in what I was hearing. I, having finally given up any hope of cricket, was drifting off to sleep. I voiced this concern in no uncertain terms, to father, and to this day, I believe that was the only time annoying father did any good to me. Father sighed, and whispered to me that if I was patient, he could do something. And so, he tore off a small piece of paper, and wrote “Raghuvamsa Sudha” on it, discreetly walked backstage, and handed the chit over to the mridangam player during a break between songs.

And I could have sworn that I saw Mandolin U Srinivas give father the tiniest of winks as he read out what was on the paper.

Father came back, settled down, grabbed my hand tightly, and said, “Listen.”

I had no idea that this song, in Srinivas’s particular rendition, would become by stock response to whenever I’m asked the question of what I thought the greatest piece of instrumental music ever made, was. Not right then. But for some reason, and this still amazes me, even to this very moment when I’m writing this and the song is playing in the background, I couldn’t stop smiling. There was a deep sense of happiness emanating from somewhere within me, and as I looked, smile still plastered on my face, I saw that my expression was mirrored in my father’s face. He, too, was smiling; eyes half-closed and head bobbing to the beat.

And, his hands playing across the tiny fret-board of the electric mandolin, switching notes faster than the eye could comprehend, the same smile was mirrored on Shrinivas’s face as well. The ecstasy of art, manifested in a boyish grin of unbridled, unadulterated joy, complemented by those twinkling eyes of inimitable charm.

We were in a world of our own. He had taken us to this exquisite world that only he could conjure up. Just like the rings of smoke through the trees of Robert Plant’s thoughts, except there were no words. Just incredibly talented men and their music, a confluence of all things beautiful.

It was too good to last. The good things always are. The song came to an end, and while ten-year-old me would prioritize cricket over carnatic music in the days to come for quite a long time – too long, in hindsight – those ten minutes had lit a flame inside me. I wouldn’t come back to carnatic music until I turned 16, but somewhere down the line, I owe it to this man for having taught me in ten minutes what a beautiful world there was, that I hadn’t explored yet. A world where I stand at the entrance and hesitate.

I now bitterly resent not having gotten to hear the best of the legend while he was still alive: there will be cassettes, there will be mp3s, but the magic of that moment – the utter serenity of that smile, born out of the joy that only the creation of art could produce – is lost, forever.

The news of his death came as an utter shock to my father. When I saw the news, I called him up immediately, and he said he was going to go to ‘Mandolin’s house to pay his respects.

To father, he was always ‘Mandolin’. He always kept saying that it is a great honour that an instrument is known after a man. That a random village in Andhra Pradesh, and a random instrument with roots in medieval Italy, were brought to prominence due to the sheer genius of a man who could move rocks to tears.

“1. I say so. Not because I'm special or anything, but this word claims to cater to me and include me and I just don't vibe with that nonsense. I'm not a woman and I'm not a woman with one character substituted out. So if you're going down to reason 2, you're telling me I hear you and I know better than you how to include you, in which case, here's some more reasons:

2. It has its origins in trans-exclusionary feminism. Womxn is understood to have been coined in response to "womyn," a solid TERF construction which was to signify that they hated men - and trans women - so much so that they didn't want "men" to be a substring of the word denoting them. Womxn is supposed to fix this - I'm not sure how or why. The word does not have any coherent transfeminist history that I can see, and I have been searching for a while. If you can find an authoritative source for the origin of 'womxn' that contradicts this, please contact me. Mark Peters in The Boston Globe writes that ““Womxn” is one of a few similar lexical and social phenomena, including the adoption of “x” in naming LGBTQ and non-gender-binary people.” I think that’s shoddy. Unlike ‘womyn’ which has a coherent traceable history, going back to Wolf Creek Womyn’s festival, womxn has no such known origin point. Some trace it to the 70s without ever demonstrating this trace - please @ me politely or otherwise if you find that I haven’t done my research and there is a coherent source and etymology for womxn. If you construct a term where the founding logic is "let's take out all traces of 'man' from this word so as to exclude trans women who we believe really are men," then in my book it doesn't get subverted by changing its spelling. The purpose of modifying the word "woman" was trans-exclusionary in the case of 'womyn' and I fail to see how it ceases to be trans-exclusionary for 'womxn.'

3. There cannot be one term including everything 'womxn' claims to include and excluding everything it claims to exclude. I posit that any sentence that demands its usage is carelessly composed. Womxn is intended to lump together cis women, trans men, nonbinary folks, and exclude cisgender drag queens, cis men, and other AMAB castaways of the queer community. As far as I can see, the criterion for being a womxn, far from being the all-encompassing all-progressive umbrella, turns out to be far too reliant on gender assigned at birth. That's shady as hell. I personally don't know any trans man that wants to be called a womxn; and I abhor the term, of course. I think really it just reeks of cis-feminism trying to reduce all gendered violence to a conception of sexism where only cis men can be perpetrators and cis women are the highest hierarchy of victim to the extent that the word "woman" forms the root of this word to represent all marginalised gender identities. As a nonbinary person I reject the cis-centeredness of this term, and I also reject my inclusion within it.

4. It is a prime symptom of the NGO-industrial complex trying to worm its way into progressive communities by appropriating the language while not adopting any principles of social justice. Every woke organisation is probably sending out internal memos to search-replace instances of "women" with instances of "womxn." Womxn is considered to be the more 'woke' version of the term, used to signal a certain progressive credential. It is best to be cautious of such usage. As an approach to inclusion and liberation and progressiveness it is highly suspicious, one that involves reinventing language not for linguistic or community purposes but to cover up exclusion and to add clout value to sentences to make them look aesthetically revolutionary.

5. An umbrella term already exists to signify nonconformity to the assigned gender at birth, to denote many of those who are marginalised due to gender identity, expression, and experience differing from gender assigned at birth, and differentiating us from cis folks: transgender. Unlike 'womxn,' transgender denotes an umbrella of people with actual shared experiences and identities and communities. While ostensibly claiming to be inclusive, "womxn" is predicated on the cis gender binary and focuses inordinately assigned gender at birth.

Aside from that, reading the work of Anbu Esvi reminded me of how cis queer spaces had somehow made me feel like "transgender" is a dirty word, a word that's not enough, that I had to use "trans*" or other alternatives to replace an 'outdated' term, and how that is sheer folly.  
They write -

"In my personal journey, I have now arrived at happiness with ‘transgender person’. I have arrived here after rejecting queer and only trans* that I used to earlier uphold, as part of my solidarity with some queer feminist spaces. I am happy with transgender asexual person because I have now spent some amount of time engaging with terminologies and their histories and political implications. Unlike queer (which was ‘reclaimed’/’subverted’ from a slur ... and still has little to no space for asexual expression), the origins of transgender terminologies are taken by the community ... however complicated its meanings and understanding of sex and gender differences."

and I find myself heartily agreeing. I have an exhilaration for "transgender" as a term to describe myself and an umbrella to identify under because of the power it holds. The history it holds. The amount of progress that has been achieved under its name. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson aren't "womxn." They identified as drag queens, an identity that exists under the transgender umbrella. They are transgender. Say the word.