The Indian Government might have recognised transgender people as the third sex and given them their rights, but it may be long before people accept them as equals.
For ages, our society has perceived transgenders as outcasts and abnormal. How then can they accept such people with equal respect and what would they do if one of their own turns out to be this so called ‘abomination’? What lengths would they go to, to undo ‘the wrongs of nature’?
Narrating these horrors is 19- year-old Shivy, a transperson of Indian origin who lived with his parents in the US. Shivy was brought up as a girl but early in life he discovered that he was a transgender. Yes, he prefers to be called a ‘he’.
It takes great courage for a child to accept such changes and be who they are, and Shivy did so. He seemed like a happy teen as he lived out his life in the US studying Neurobiology and enjoying his time with his friends.
Of course, his parents weren’t too happy with the way their ‘daughter’ Shivani Bhatt was turning out. And when they finally found out that Shivy was transgender, they left no stone unturned to change things. After a series of verbal and physical abuse to make him behave like a ‘proper girl’, they manipulated him to come to India under the pretext that his grandmother was sick.
All hell broke loose after that for Shivy. His passport and green card were confiscated by his parents. They went through great measures to make him behave like the girl he should have been. They even kept him away from a phone and the Internet so that he couldn’t get in touch with his friends. It was one big nightmare for Shivy, especially because it was his parents who inflicted such pain on him.
Finally he managed to escape it all. But the horrors that he faced leave us all shaken. Here is a video feed by Shivy himself who records his story.
More On >> Balancing Act
