“The man says, everyone strives after the law, so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry? The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, here no one else can gain entry. Since this entrance was assigned only to you, I am now going to close it.”
— This episode’s guest, Aruvi, reads an excerpt from Kafka’s ‘Before the Law,’ to discuss how the law can be exclusionary for disadvantaged communities.
What does justice mean for queer folks? Is it marriage equality? How do queer folks experience the surveillance state? And where do queer folks go when institutions fail the queer community? What is the role of community and mutual aid in queer liberation? In this episode, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Ruchika sit with Aruvi to answer some of these questions, with help from Kafka.
Content Warning: This conversation includes mentions of assault, rape, and mental, emotional, physical and institutional violence.
***
Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Ruchika
Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of the In Search of Justice podcast. I am Ruchika.
Vandita
And I’m Vandita.
Ruchika
And we are your Co-hosts on this journey to navigate what justice is.
Vandita
Content Warning: Before we begin, I’d just like to give you all a trigger warning and a content warning that there will be mention of rape, sexual, physical, mental assault and also other forms of gender-based violence. We will specifically be discussing justice in the context of gender-based violence and we realize that it can be hard to listen to. So we invite and encourage you to step back in case you feel like it’s getting too much, and come back to this conversation when you feel comfortable with it.
Ruchika
The next few episodes of the first season of the podcast, we’ll specifically address how gender-based violence interacts and intersects with other forms of systemic violences or marginalized identities in society. Today, we’re going to specifically explore what justice looks like for the queer community.
Vandita
We’re so excited to have a guest with us today. Aruvi is a transgender person and a student at the University of Hyderabad. They’re a student of gender studies, and they’re interested in trans studies, philosophy, public transport and public policy. They’re also currently running a mutual aid campaign that has helped transfolk and other adjacent communities that have been affected by the lockdown and by COVID-19. We’re so happy to have you with us.
Aruvi
Hi. Hi, I’m happy to be here. Nice to be on this podcast. I have to admit that I’ve only heard a couple of episodes, but I really liked what I heard and I thought that this would be a nice place to have a chat about maybe the current state of what violence against transgender people looks like and what is being done about it.
Vandita
Definitely. And I would just like to say that I resonate in the sense that we follow you on social media, and that’s why we learned about your work. I found that the work that you do around mutual aid and solidarity and justice breaking away from a more traditional hierarchy of work, is very, very inspiring. And we thought it formed a great foundation for us to discuss what that could look like in the context of justice and gender-based violence as well. So very glad to have you with us. I’m actually gonna jump right into the first question. Just gonna start by asking you, Aruvi that you know, what does violence look like specifically for queer folks? We realize it’s a broad question, but it’s quite intentionally so.
Aruvi
I think one of the very major bases for violence on queer folks is what Judith Butler calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’. It’s the matrix of creating a society that is based on, and that is predicated on heterosexuality and this means that anything that does not fall into this, anything that does not seem suitable for upholding this heterosexuality is seen as something that is something to be eradicated, something that is unwanted, something that is honestly just a pain in the ass, right? And that is a huge basis for the impunity with which violence is being done to queer people and.
The major gender-based violence for queer people comes from this particular idea of being seen as- of non-heterosexual non cisgender identities as being seen as- somehow inferior or as somehow, how do I put it? If you speak within a safe surrounding, right. If you really speak about this to people in terms of, OK, all right, I’m going to give you half an hour to, you know, explain every single misconception that you have or what you think is a misconception, explain it and then I’ll sit and talk to you about it. Right. And the idea is that people, and including me before I came out, find it difficult to envision the idea of a queer life as being equally satisfying as cis heterosexual one. You know, being able to realize your potential self for self-actualization, it is understood that self-actualization for queer people, for queer relationships is of inherently less value and it comes from a place of a lack of also of institutional support, right? Somebody doing violence to queer people is also doing it in the knowledge that they will possibly with some effort, escape punishment for this. And so in the combination of both of these things right as bodies that uphold the status quo of society that prioritize heterosexual matrix, and bodies that are supposed to be indifferent to this inertia of culture and, you know, protect us and help us and take cognizance of violence against us, don’t take cognizance of violence against us because partly because of the former and partly because of the lack of advocacy that exists for queer people. So, what does it look like? I don’t know. It can look like a lot of different things. But I like to think about where it comes from. And if you think about where it comes from, then specific situations can be analyzed better.
Vandita
Definitely. I think that’s super insightful to just think about how overtime our institutions in themselves have become so violent that even when overt like violence is not being perpetuated, there’s always like some form of violence happening by way of denial of rights. It could be at the workplace; it could be in our homes. It’s also like something you mentioned, right, that violence will be perpetuated against queer folks because people know that you can get away with it because there aren’t any specific laws to address it or even the government or the judiciary won’t care as much. I mean, it’s happened recently with court Judgements even talking about it, saying that what they’re literally saying is that these lives have lesser value, right?
Aruvi
That’s what I mean, right? These are institutions that are supposed to be indifferent to the argument of cultural inertia. To say that, that’s basically the argument that queer lives don’t form part of traditional marriage is an argument of cultural inertia, right. The idea that our culture should remain the way it is, or that we should go back and recapture our culture from a time when it was golden. Courts are technically not supposed to take this into consideration, they’re supposed to consider people equal before the law, they’re supposed to specifically consider the situation of people who have been culturally excluded. So, a court which has to take cognizance of the fact that queer people are culturally excluded, on the contrary, turns around and says the state of queer people is justified because the culture does not have space for it. And that’s a special kind of violence, I would say.
Ruchika
Yeah, absolutely. I want to sort of focus on one specific institution that can be extremely violent towards queer folks, and that is Aadhaar. What does having Aadhaar mean for queer folks? How does surveillance tie into causing more violence to queer folks? And how does a government mandated ID that requires the mention of gender on it make members of the queer community more prone to harm at the hands of government authorities or any authorities that require the presence of Aadhaar? And how do other formal systems of surveillance work alongside, say, social or cultural scrutiny and surveillance that queer communities are already put through on a daily basis? So, it’s like a couple questions in one, but it didn’t answer, yeah.
Aruvi
So I think as far as Aadhar is concerned, right, like coming back to what I said, Aadhar if you look at it in that lens is a project of locating somebody in the heterosexual matrix. It is a project of asking where you lie in this matrix, whether you are the head of the family, whether you are the husband of somebody, whether you are- sorry, whether you are the wife of somebody, whether you are the daughter of somebody you know, If you’re a woman, who’s responsible for you, if you’re a man who you’re responsible for and in that sense, right to put a nonconforming gender identity in Aadhar would sort of defeat its purpose of surveillance. And in that sense, trans lives and trans kinship structures are very difficult to capture in an Aadhar right. If you’re thinking about the digital data model for an Aadhar the digital data model will have space for traditional families. It will have space for huge families that have interconnected kinship relationships and all of those can be captured within Aadhar in terms of atomizing those families into atomic structures of fathers and children and mothers and you know that kind of family structure. I’m not putting it too well but I’m sure you get a fair idea of what I’m talking about. And the kinship structures of transgender people of where a runaway transgender person comes and joins a hijra community, has a hijra guru and has hijras ahelis and this kind of a system, this kind of a way of life, is a way of life that cannot be captured within the other, which means the Aadhar does not know what to do with transgender people. And you know, nobody really bothers to like- even if you get a campaign to get every transgender person an Aadhar card, the relationships and the kinships and the family compositions of transgender people cannot be captured within Aadhar, which means that you won’t be able to help them in the way that Aadhar, even in its ideal case, is supposed to help people.
For instance, Aadhar expects your face to look like something throughout your life. It expects you to have bodily characteristics retained from whenever it was measured, right? And this is a huge problem, facial recognition, bodily recognition for transgender people is a huge problem. One example is the TSA example, so in the USA, basically an X-ray is taken of you when you pass through airport metal detectors, basically the airport security checkup, when you pass through it an X-ray is taken of you and then this X-ray is compared against standard values for male and female bodies to basically figure out whether you are hiding a weapon in your pants. And I know I’m hiding a weapon in my pants, it’s a great weapon, right? But. The point is when a transgender person, if let’s say there’s a transgender person, the person who was assigned male at birth, who has taken HRT, who has gotten breast implants, who has also gotten SRS and does not have a protruding penis, walks through the metal detector. Now the first thing that has to be done is for the security officer to calibrate it to a certain gender that they expect this person to be. So they calibrate to ‘female’ because they see this person with long hair and breasts walking in, so they calibrate it to ‘female’. And then if they do not have SRS then this system is going to find a bulge in their pants and then what’s going to happen is that an anomaly is going to be detected and then they’re asked to step aside.
And then you know what happens when people step aside in- people are asked to step aside by a uniformed police officer standing security in an airport. It’s it’s a fucked up situation like that. There are enough people who have talked about what happens after this and there is a gendered violence even there as well because both in India and in USA, the law says that women have to be patted down by women officers and men have to be patted down by male officers. Which means that once again, as per the legal judicial prudence of previous court Judgements in USA, it is supposed to be that the officer is supposed to look at you and take a call and if you look visibly non binary then it’ll be difficult for them to make a call and most likely they’re going to make the wrong call. And I go through this dilemma every time I walk into a metro station. Every time I go through the security line, depending upon what I look like, depending upon what I’m wearing that day, depending upon hell, whether I’m wearing a mask or not – right when I’m wearing a mask, when I’m dressed like a girl, when I look like a girl, the security guard waves me over to that that goddamn tent, that that little women’s modesty tent that is created for this purpose, he waves me along and at that point I freeze. I get very terrified. My heart starts beating faster, you know, like what if this woman takes her metal detector, accidentally brought my pants and, you know, finds out that there’s a bulge there and then grabs my collar for being a man in that woman’s enclosure, saying how dare you enter the space, how dare you that is- something that woman would consider as an attempt to sexually harass her by imposing me on her. And this is, this is the shit that’s going on in my head, right? And then the security guard over there is is not giving me a suggestion. He’s wave me over to the woman’s tent. I have to go there. So, I go there and obviously she waves the metal detector a couple of inches away from my body, doesn’t touch me, obviously and nothing happens, and I keep walking on. But if something had happened, then I would be in trouble.
And even if you set up systems in place to make sure that I don’t get in real trouble, to make sure that whatever superior officer I get taken to has an understanding of trans issues and knows that I’m a transgender person and knows that I should be let go. This is something that I don’t need in my day. And the reason that this exists in my day is because it is so strictly gender segregated. It is unnecessary- this bifurcation is being done of people that just need to- for where you just have to wave a metal detector over someone and an unnecessary bifurcation is being done. And this creates a little bit of anxiety, it makes me panic if I get stopped, it is half an hour of my life I’m never going to get back. I have an appointment, I’m in the metro station to take a train to go somewhere fast.
You know, like so this is the problem with structures of surveillance, especially technological structures that are reliant on artificial intelligence, that are reliant on comparing your features to an existing picture or comparing your features to an artificial intelligence database of expected values of male and female bodies, this is a problem that is always going to come.
Ruchika
I hear you. I feel like just a lot of everyday normal experiences for cis-het people are so different for trans folks and queer folks in general, and that’s something that we don’t even recognize in a lot of the conversations we have, especially even around surveillance. I mean, there’s a billion articles on surveillance, but how many of them address these issues that you just brought up? And I think that’s extremely important to include this in conversation.
Aruvi
I mean, that’s the thing, right? Like we are automatically suspected of- like we’re automatically subject to suspicion. Consider the first piece of state legislation that was criminalizing Tribal people, which is the ‘Criminal Tribes Act’, which is basically the idea that we’re inherently suspicious for being who we are. If the system recognizes a bulge in the pants of somebody who has breasts, it’s probably a gun to the system, and that’s the problem.
Vandita
I hear you completely, I feel like just our institution and even people’s response to this has been very inadequate. In fact, this takes me to another question which is very closely linked to, like your surveillance systems and institutional response. But what are the specific experiences of queer folks when they’re navigating formal legal processes in terms of law, in terms of infrastructure? And it’ll also be great to hear about, like things that can be done to change this right at a personal, community and institutional level.
Aruvi
This is a story by Franz Kafka called Before the Law. It’s a very short story, it’ll probably take 5 minutes of me directing it. So, this story is cited by Judith Butler. Like I’m stuck on Judith Butler because I learned Judith Butler this semester, and once you read 30-40 pages of their writing, it’s just so encyclopedic that you get stuck on it. But anyway, this is called ‘Before the Law’ by Franz Kafka. It starts like this: “Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who has to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. It’s possible, says the gatekeeper, but not now. At the moment, the gate at the last ends opens as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see it through the gate into the inside. The gatekeeper notices that he laughs and says if it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition, but note I am powerful. I’m only the most lowly gatekeeper, but from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t even endure one glimpse of the third room. The man from the country has not expected such difficulties. The law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin black tata’s beard. He decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a tool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him, briefly questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside.
The man who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all, but as he does so says I am only taking this so that you do not think you have failed to do anything. During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance in the first years thoughtlessly and out load. Later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in the long years studying the gatekeeper, he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asked the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper.
Finally, his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live before his death. He gathers in his head all his experience of the entire time up to one question, which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him. Since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body, the gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. What do you still want to know then? Asks the gatekeeper, you are insatiable. The man says, everyone strives after the law, so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry? The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, here no one else can gain entry. Since this entrance was assigned only to you, I am now going to close it.
So here Kafka talks about how every man has its own gate and his own gatekeeper to the law, and this is how the law is designed to function. Although the law promises equality towards its citizens, it has specific gatekeeping in the sense that it does not recognize the social discrimination that people might face. In that sense, this is an idea that was shared by Santwana, I forget their last name, in an Academy magazine conversation about criminalizing Dalit dissent, where she says that equality before the law is a problematic concept because when people are considered equal before the law, then the caste character of certain crimes is not brought into the picture. The perpetrator is seen to be equal in the eyes of the law to the victim, which means that the caste character is erased and the same applies for gender-based violence as well. When the law is supposed to treat transgender people only equally, and the law already has existing bigotries within it which does not take the reports of transgender people of abuse and violence seriously, then what results is that transgender people have all of these gatekeepers to the law and you never can get through them.
And one of the most wonderful features of the comprehensively written ‘2015 Trans Bill’ that was authored as a private member bill by Telichisiva, the DMK MP, that bill had provisions for special codes for transgender people and also had provisions for allowing people to make complaints to the police on behalf of transgender people, and basically had strict offenses and penalties for any member of law enforcement who does not take these complaints seriously or does not take the complaints on the behalf of somebody seriously. And it has a provision that every law enforcement officer has to provide proof as to why the complaint was considered to be frivolous and discarded. So that is the kind of special provision that is needed in this country for marginalized communities to get access to the law.
Ruchika
The little bit you read is, I think, so wonderfully put. And I think it also sort of addresses the layers with which gatekeeping functions. It’s not just a simple like no access is multiple layers to it, it happens on so many different levels in so many different ways that we might not even realize that it is gatekeeping. So thank you for sharing that. I think that’s very well put.
Vandita
If I may just add to that, I found that the nuance of the story was so great because one part that really stood out for me was how over time you get sort of gaslit into believing that this is it and this is how it should be and this is how it’s always going to be and I think, this is also a place where community organizing and justice forming communities is so needed. Because I was just talking to someone about this the other day where overtime you lose your sense of perspective because this sort of oppression and violence has been happening for so long with you. And sometimes it’s important for someone to just, yeah, shake you up and be like, no, you know, like what’s happening to you is wrong.
Aruvi
No. Now that you bring this up right. I just realized the demand for gay marriage is us getting stuck on the first gate.
Ruchika
It’s very interesting you say that because that’s actually the next question we want to talk about. You know the big one, marriage equality. I think a lot of folks equate liberation with marriage equality and recently, I’m sure we’re all aware that the government submitted an affidavit that stated that, living together as partners and having sexual relationships by same sex individuals is not comparable with the Indian family unit and the concept of a husband and a wife and a child, so my issue is that the queer community is very clearly divided on this and I’ve had very intense conversations about this with a lot of my queer friends as well. I just want to talk about what all of our thoughts on this are today, try to settle this matter.
Aruvi
Here’s the deal, right? Here’s the deal. For the queer community, especially for the trans community, the example of Tamil Nadu is very important because Tamil Nadu is a place where progressive movements intersect with gender-based issues and progressive movements have engaged with gender-based issues. Especially Periyarist movements have engaged with gender-based issues of marriage. And I think that it would be absolutely criminal for us to not take the example, and not take advice from the great people before us, the periods before us, right? Consider the case of self-respect marriage when it was considered by the community that marriage was an institution that excluded Avarna people, that excluded the Dalit/Bahujan people from the institution and marriage. Hindu marriage was an institution that did not allow inter-caste marriages and used endogamy to maintain the caste structure. So, what they did was they said fuck it, we do not believe in this Kanyadan bullshit. We do not believe in this Brahminical nonsense. And what we believe marriage is, is an equal relationship between equal partners where they promise to stand by each other in commitment. And that is exactly what we will do. And that is the only thing we will promise each other. And there will be no priests and there will be no donation of the woman to the other person, no Kanyadan, no Brahminical nonsense.
And let me tell you another like this is the other deal, right? Last month my friends visited the marriage of two queer people, the completely legal marriage of two queer people in Kerala. And this is legal because it is a self-respect marriage. We need to stop trying to find space for queer kinship within Hindu Brahminical structures. We need to make our own structures and get the government to recognize them like Periyar did. It’s as simple as that. Periyar’s Self Respect Marriage was genuinely revolutionary to the point that the state government which was formed by Anna Durai who had the ideological differences to Periyar, nonetheless found that Self Respect marriages were absolutely necessary and were absolutely revolutionary and had the potential to break endogamy and therefore legalized it. And the future of the history of Self Respect marriages, and why they did not achieve this end is in no part helped by obviously the rising juggernaut of fascism. And the recent revival of self-respect marriages, wherein now we see more self-respect marriages, more public self-respect marriages that are talked about, that are debated about. And so it’s undergoing a revival and that is a history that needs to be examined. But it is an example, more importantly, that needs to be emulated.
Ruchika
I think what really stood out to me from everything that you said, especially stood out from everything that you just said, is that why do we need to be validated or recognized within structures that are already so oppressive? And I like it really irks me to see, you know? These queer couples having like a grand Hindu wedding and you know with the priest and everything and then people sharing it on social media look at this like gay pride. I don’t know. It just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not even liberation, if anything it’s assimilation. That’s just how I see it.
Vandita
These have been- you know, to draw upon other movements as well. It’s something that one of my mentors once told me that even the expectation that just because one person has faced oppression in one identity, one aspect of their identity, the expectation that they would then not be an oppressor in other aspects of their identity, is futile. And that is something we have to be very careful of, right? By we, I mean anyone who’s trying to build a larger movement or build solidarity. Because when we start having these broader assumptions about people, we sometimes don’t recognize the damage certain demands can do to the larger movement. And damage doesn’t always have to be something overtly harmful. It can just be about like what Aruvi said, just gatekeeping and limiting even our imagination of what our lives can look like and to have that constrained by, you know, you have two kids, you buy an apartment, you buy a car.
Aruvi
Yeah, it just broke my heart when you said that because like, it reminded me of all of these young gay boys that I meet from the community, migrants to the city, who have these dreams of getting married, of imitating heterosexuality, of and- it’s just depressing to see because I know that we live in a society where that dream, no matter what you say about the dream, whether you believe in the dream or you don’t believe in the dream, is never going to be a reality for that person in this lifetime. And I don’t know if let’s say, we’re currently debating whether it should be legalized, so I don’t know, maybe in 2-3 years as we for the BJP if they don’t ban elections by then, if they conduct elections, then they’re going to want to keep this as a thing that they can do to gather votes from the LGBT right wing community as ‘Modi has saved you once again’.
Vandita
This is actually taking me to our last question for today. We personally know that you’ve been doing some amazing mutual aid work online like you mentioned for transport for adjacent communities. We’d love to know about this work also for our listeners listening in and how they could contribute. But in general, also about how mutually it is a tool that can help build community and redistribute resources. And what is that? How is that playing a role when we think about justice for queer people?
Aruvi
Now you want me to openly admit to being an anarchist and paint even more of a target on my back from sanghi than what I just said, trashing every sanghi ever. But yeah, I do want to talk about my mutual aid, and this is a good time to talk about my mutual aid because this is what I want people to leave thinking, which is please give me money, we really need money. But jokes apart, we need money. So, I have been organizing a mutual aid. What is mutual aid? Mutual aid is basically a way of subverting the paradigm of charity and subverting the paradigm of ‘NGO’-ization when you want to do relief. So, the existing paradigm of charity in terms of relief has a strict criteria around who applies for charity, who gets to apply for charity. And it is basically a way for, let’s admit it, for rich people to launder their money and get write offs and not really reach the people it’s supposed to reach. Which means that what we wanted to do was come together as individuals. And this was something that happened when the pandemic started and when the lockdown was imposed. We sat up and noticed that overnight, 90% of the transgender community had been rendered incapable of a livelihood because for most of the marginalized trans community, which cannot find a place in the traditional workforce, the only two options available are sex work and Kadaki Kardi or begging. And neither of these things were things that you could do in the lockdown when you aren’t allowed to go outside. And anyway, nobody else is outside, which meant that most trans people overnight had, you know, absolutely zero money and no way to find the next meal. And this is also in the phase of not being able to access government aid, because as you know, most trans people don’t have ration cards. And the ones they do have ration cards, many of them have details on the ration cards that don’t match, like their birth name or photograph that doesn’t look like them. This basically meant that transgender people were essentially left to die, and we wanted to do the little that we could. We wanted to see what we can do, how much we can help them. So, we started raising money for the purpose of buying groceries and essentials and medicines. Most importantly, because we also felt that we understood the needs of the transgender community. Being so close to the transgender community and one of us, namely me being transgender myself, we felt that we also found a certain self-respect and a certain dignity lacking in the way that charity was being done otherwise. And when we want to help people of our community, we want to make sure that it is done with dignity. Like if we’re buying them provisions, then we buy it from the same shop that we would buy our own provisions. And like, just not restricting it, not restricting aid to rice and Dal, right. Providing people a nutritious and balanced set of rations even when we are giving them away and, you know, making sure that people have something for a special occasion. And all of this is done with complete transparency to our contributors, complete transparency to whoever has sent us even a single rupee of money and complete opaqueness to anybody else. We don’t care what anybody else thinks about us. We don’t have invoices. We are not affiliated. We’re not a company. We don’t have any governmental backing. We don’t have any political backing.
We talked to NGOs insofar as NGOs help us find people that we can help, wherein NGOs say we are not able to take care of this person but you are not restricted by the restrictions that apply to us wherein- for instance, if somebody on an somebody in an NGO goes on a field trip to do relief and they suddenly find somebody that they hadn’t planned for in trouble, then even if they sympathize personality, they won’t be able to help them. There is a certain purview that every NGO has. There is a certain budget that it has, there is a certain number of people that it can help and these restrictions exist. And the situation of the lockdown and situation was dire enough that we felt the need to go beyond all this and act with the freedom of individuals. We are accountable to each other; we are accountable to our contributors and I think that’s all we need to be accountable to. And so, what we do is we basically take, we collect money from- so I initially started talking to people from the queer community and telling them, hey, this is what’s going on and if you have some spare money, if you have some spending cash, then please help us. And honestly, I got an amazing response from the queer community and this prompted Shreejit, one of the people who I’m working with, she started the whole thing. Actually, I joined them in the middle. Shreejit was talking about how we resist the language of donation, these are not donations. The people giving us money are not rich people. The people giving us money are queer people who are trying to, who are in this battle for their own independence, who are trying to secure their own financial safety, who are having their own struggle to pay rent within the lockdown. But they have shared little parts of their life, little parts of their income, little parts of their life savings with us. And that is why we consider it as a mutual aid where these are also communities that get built. Now when somebody said, hey, I don’t have money, how can I help you? I just told them, become one of us. Do the same work that I did. I called up people in, I called up queer people I know, I called up affluent, influential people that I know. I called my dad and I said, hey, here, this thing is there and I know how much money you have and I know how long it’s been since you gave it away. So, give me money. And yeah. So, when this friend asked how she can help, I said just become one of us. Ask people around, collect their e-mail ID’s, collect the money and pass me the money and the e-mail ID’s. So, this is what we do. We collect the money and then what we do is we have a set of regular recipients.
Whenever we get reports of people in a certain area needing relief, we group them by area and we select a local leader in each area and we transfer funds to the local leader. This is both to this is both the trust we have in the community and also to help with social distancing and not making a crowd anywhere and us not going around and compromising ourselves in a deadly pandemic. So, we transferred money to these local leaders and the local leaders would go and purchase whatever is needed. This included provisions, this included medicines, this included special care for elderly trans people. Basically, elderly trans people are an overlooked community even within the trans community, and they experience an intersection of both ageism and transphobia. You know that this is not a society for old people, and this is not a society for trans people either. For instance, insulin was very, very hard to obtain in Chennai at the earlier stages of the lockdown. So, we went ahead and found insulin for them. And we’ve been providing insulin for six transgender people every month since March 2020, till now. It’s still continuing and yeah, this is what we do. And in the midst as we became sort of semi viral, there were a lot of people who were contributing to us. We got a certain flow; we got a certain backup amount that we could fall back on when funds did not come through. And at that point we decided that we would do a project.
So, for Diwali we were also thinking about how we wanted to consider the self-respect aspect of giving people what we decide to be the bare minimum. We decide to be the bare essentials. It’s not their decision when we talk about essentials. So, we wanted to give people something to be joyous about, find joy and find gender euphoria in the midst of all of this darkness. So, for Diwali, what we wanted to do was give people sarees, I personally know the value of receiving gender affirming clothing as a transgender person and we wanted to reiterate that essential is far more complicated thing than we realize, and that was a rolling success. We were able to distribute Sarees to 34 people and then there were people that we felt to be missed out. So, 10 more people after a couple of weeks later. And yeah, we were able to make a lot of People’s Diwali a little bit more hopeful and we’re still continuing our work. We have our regular work of sending people provisions and essentials, but right now we’re also transitioning into helping people set up their livelihoods. So, the livelihoods that were once lost in the pandemic, when the pandemic started and the lockdown started, those livelihoods could not be brought back like people moved people. A lot of people have gone back to their native place. Jobs are harder to find. So we’re helping people set up their own self-help groups and entrepreneurial ventures and we helped a couple of people. We bought them electric sewing machines because they were extremely talented fashion designers who just needed the hardware to start making and selling clothes.
So we’ve been doing this kind of work, we continue to do this kind of work and our safety backup, you know that whatever is in the bottom of our pot is dwindling. We’re scraping the barrel, so we would really appreciate some funds. Just send me a message on Instagram if you’d like to contribute to us. And if you contribute to us, you get e-mail updates forever on what all we do, even if you contribute ₹1.00 on time.
Ruchika
Thank you so much for doing the incredible work you do. And we’ll put in details for our listeners in the description of the podcast and so they can reach out to you and contribute in any way they can. And I think like I really want to thank you for sharing something that really. Is gonna stay with me for a really long time, and that is the whole distancing ourselves from the language of charity and donation. I think that’s super important for us to understand, especially when we’re understanding how mutually it functions and in general how I think certain structures in society right now don’t really do justice to. Doing ‘good work’ that they claim to do because inherently the structures are flawed and something, I mean we’ve discussed repeatedly through this podcast and even in this episode and I think mutually it definitely breaks those sorts of structures and is kind of revolutionary in that format.
Aruvi
Yeah. And finally, like what’s mutual about it. What do you get right? What happens is a queer networking, where you suddenly have something to do, a way out, somebody to ask for help, somebody to call when the government decides to give up on you like it gives up on the people that we’re talking about, right? Mutual aid gives you that network. If you ask somebody to help you out the last time, then that means that you now have a network of people that you can rely on to bail you out when all institutions decide to give up on you. And that kind of that is what anarchists call becoming ungovernable.
Ruchika
I like that. I really like that.
Vandita
Yeah, I think that’s amazing. And that’s such a great note to also like to end today on. I think it has been such a fabulous conversation. Thank you so much, Aruvi, for joining us today.
Aruvi
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for making me think about all these things. I came up with things today. I was able to think about things, was able to theorize in a way that would not have been possible if this environment did not exist. So I’m happy for it.
Vandita
We’d love for you to, if you feel comfortable to share maybe an Instagram or any other social media handle that people can connect with you on for the mutual aid work or otherwise.
Aruvi
On Instagram @trains_trance So I like trains. I’m a trans person. There’s an underscore in between. So that’s how you find me on Instagram and I might be posting some thirst traps. Don’t be scared by those. What you need to do is read the highlight, that has a highlight called, “urgent” and that highlight contains the details of the mutual link and then just message me to contribute.
Vandita
Perfect. Thank you so much for everyone listening in. Do get in touch with Aruvi, find your way to contribute and follow us on Instagram and Facebook @onefuturecollective and @onefuture_India on Twitter (X). Also, keep an eye out for future episodes. We release one on the second and fourth Thursday of every month. This podcast is brought to you as always by OFC and it’s produced by Ruchika.
Ruchika
Leave us your questions and comments and concerns on Anchor or in our DMs. Or even Aruvi’s DMs if you want to sort of pick their brain apart on something they spoke about today. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on everything we’ve discussed today. Stay with us on our journey as we search for justice.
| Zombie Kindnesses by Shan Shan If heterosexuality must continue, let there be cats, glowy green ones.Why not, like alien Moss or undead neon, but definitely cat shaped and capable of appearing anywhere, Say a living room in which my grandmother sighs again? Asks again. Why can’t you find a nice girl, have some kids, or a classroom? A grad school classroom. When in the middle of a break time conversation about who we are dating, a straight classmate puts his hand on my shoulder and earnestly, almost sweetly wonders. But with your boyfriend, how do you decide who does what during, you know, let me summon the cats. Let two of them spook my grandmother just enough so that she’s more concerned with finding an exorcist. Then, finding me a wife, let three of them scratch and scratch my straight classmate’s hand. Let them leap to my rescue. Let them henceforth be known as my guardian screeches for veracities, zombie kindnesses risen from some unkillable queer soil. And right now, in the stale mouth of my dentist’s waiting room, I may require all of them. Every green cat Here where not only is every magazine’s cover story about a heterosexual divorce from five years ago, but also on one otherwise blemishless wall hangs A portrait that must be new, as I 110% would have remembered it. This framed painting of my dentist. And who else could she be? His wife. The two of them dressed in sweater vests with little embroidered badminton rackets while holding what else could they be? Badminton rackets. And they’re smiling. Smiling like they’re the perverts who’ve just invented dentistry. Yes, I need all of you, all your splendidly obnoxious, scary wordartness. Firstly, because couples outfits are unacceptable. Except on me and my boyfriend. Secondly, because I like badminton. But who enjoys badminton that much? Thirdly, because, ew.I beseech you, I have the fanciest of feasts waiting for you. Rise up and finally become such uncompromising visual artists.Come paint over this beaming monstrosity paint instead. The glory of my eye roll. My whole body size, not my soul’s cowl, my profound frown. |
***
Do you have thoughts on this episode, and want to share them with us? Use the comment box to tell us what you think! Stay tuned for the next episode.
About the In Search of Justice Podcast
As we strive to collectively build towards social justice, it becomes imperative to challenge and reorient the very conceptions of justice. Justice, in popular culture and the zeitgeist overall, has been synonymised with carcerality, which presents a very myopic perspective of justice and diminishes the significance of justice as an intrinsic human right. Further, in the case of survivors of abuse, pathways to justice are further limited and often don’t include the survivors themselves in the process. Justice thus, becomes a destination, an outcome, rather than a collaborative, collectively-built journey or process. Through this compilation of the transcripts of the In Search of Justice Podcast, we aim to explore this discourse surrounding justice, particularly in the context of gender-based violence, in bite-sized episodes. Co-hosted by Vandita and Ruchika, these conversations seek to navigate the multiple meanings of justice, especially when it is considered the penultimate goal by questioning carceral systems, introducing alternative justice systems and leading the conversation into how we can build justice systems that are receptive and responsive to the various needs and desires of survivors.