More than just an autobiography or memoir, this is a powerful and passionate account of one woman's battle to claim her identity and place in society. In A Small Step in a Long Journey, Akkai Padmashali, a trans rights activist and campaigner, thinker, writer, poet, and actor, throws out a challenge to society, demanding not sympathy or pity but acceptance, recognition, and respect. Brutally honest and self-critical, Akkai's writing is a political act in which she lays bare the hurt, humiliation, confusion, insult, love, solidarity, and joy that went into making her who she is today.
Time and again Akkai asserts that her story is not just her story. What we call gender and sexuality, she says, 'is a journey we all travel', one that connects our personal and political lives, and one that helps us to face difficult, disturbing questions about prejudice and privilege.
AKKAI PADMASHALI is a trans rights activist, writer, singer, performer, and motivational speaker. She has been a champion for queer and trans rights, an advocate for policy change and a recipient of Karnataka government second highest civilian honour, the Rajyotsava Prashasti.
She has also received an honorary doctorate from the Indian Virtual University for Peace and Education. Founder of Ondede, a human rights organization, Akkai's was among the leading voices opposing Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized homosexuality. She has been a strong critic of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and the 2018 and 2016 bills that preceded it.
I often think of why I wanted to write this book. It has been on my mind for several years during which I read the autobiographies of a few other transgender activists. When people read such books, especially from a national or global perspective, they often read them from a position of sympathy. In a way, that's fine. In our society, there should be sympathy, neutrality, and empathy, too. These accounts give a clear message that when it comes to self-identification, we should have the right to decide our own gender and sex.
But as I read those books, I started to feel that, somehow, I couldn't connect with their stories. They seemed to be based on the idea of 'ayyo, paapa! They were seeking social and cultural acceptance. Today, when we talk about social recognition for transgender people, the response often is, "They're transgender. Ayyo, paapa! We should do this for them. We should do that for them.'
I don't want those ayyo, paapas. I don't want that sympathy. I want to claim human rights. I want to speak my dignity. I want to say that you and I are alike.
There are many terrible incidents I will talk about in this book. There was Chandni's murder, the gang rape of a transgender woman in Byappanahalli, Manjulamma's murder, Famila's suicide, the Delhi gang rape case, the Hathras gang rape case, and the Hyderabad gang rape case. When these incidents happen in society, people say, 'ayyo, paapa!' 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' they say. Society does offer this sympathy. But talking of victimhood is not enough.
I was also sexually abused. Five people I called friends tore off my clothes and raped me. All of this has happened. Even today, when I hear about a rape, I automatically connect it to what happened to me. I become angry speaking about it. I may cry and sob for a moment. And then you might say, 'Ayyo, paapa!' But, at the same time, you shouldn't see me as a victim alone.
How do you overcome victimhood? To do so, you need a certain amount of self-confidence and self-motivation, and that has to come from within. Nowadays, I handle many such cases. People come to me with these incidents, and I listen to what they say. Listening is a skill. You are doing it right now, as you read my book! After you listen, you must acknowledge, 'What's happened has happened,' and you must ask, 'So what is next? We motivate, and we console ourselves, and we continue fighting. How do you break stereotypes? How do you fight back against a larger patriarchal, transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, casteist society?
Akkai's request to me to write a Foreword for her memoir is an undeserved honour and, I would like to believe, a measure of our nascent friendship built around shared concerns and politics.
Akkai Padmashali is today a prominent trans rights activist, whose voice is heard with respect and interest on a range of human rights issues. In her memoir, Akkai describes her journey as a trans person and each milestone with brutal honesty, laying bare her pain and joy; interrogating and introspecting about herself and others; and seamlessly drawing the link between the private and the public, the personal and the political. It takes not just courage but also deep-rooted conviction to detail the adversities, violence, ostracization, and betrayals that Akkai has endured.
Akkai's writing, like every step of her life, is a political act through which she challenges and persuades the reader to question the social construct of family, marriage, sex, gender, work, parenting, love and more. Her truth-telling sears through her writing and compels you to confront your own prejudices, fears and lurking phobias towards sexual minorities, and more specifically working-class sexual minorities. It leaves you unsettled. I think Akkai means to disturb and disrupt us, for only then can we cross over and join the struggles for equality, freedom and justice.
Akkai rightly points out that while trans persons face egregious sexual violence, criminal law does not acknowledge or protect them. The legal debate on this issue is usually posited as a gender-neutral law on sexual violence versus a sexual assault law that only recognizes cisgender women as victims. As Akkai writes, the issue came to the fore during the Justice Verma Committee consultation, without any consensus among the activists. Over the years, broadly speaking, gay rights activists and transgender groups have advocated for a gender-neutral law on sexual violence where the victim can be any person.
As this is a legal issue with which I have engaged, it is in the spirit of continuing engagement that I am expressing my view here. I agree with Akkai that in many circumstances, trans people may be even more vulnerable than cisgender women to sexual assault. The failure of criminal law to recognize, prohibit and punish the sexual violence that trans people and other sexual minorities suffer, is unacceptable. My view, however, is that instead of framing this debate as a binary between gender- neutral and cis-women centric sexual violence laws, we need to shift the discussion to gender-specific laws for each sexual minority with attendant amendments in the procedural and evidentiary laws. Gender-neutral laws will, in the name of neutrality, be blind to the gender-specific concerns of all sexual victims, which will vary for a trans person, a gay man, or a cis-woman. The present law, substantive, procedural and evidentiary, has been formulated based on the experiences of women.
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