After aggressively threatening Manvi a few times, Manu slowly realizes he’s still in love with her and starts the process of addressing his insecurities while unlearning transmisogyny and educating himself about gender.

But the performance of patriarchal femininity and hyper-masculinity are again reproduced as Manu re-develops a sort of protective role by seeing Manvi for who she is, and with the movie’s emphasis on ‘the surgery’ and the medicalization of transness – we don’t need psychologists to validate our identities.

While Hollywood is going through *some* moments of reckoning with how they portray trans lives on screens, why should Bollywood continue making the same mistakes in the name of a kind of progress that measures itself on harm?

I do appreciate the tugs of uncertainty we get from Manvi in the hesitations of dating while trans – the exhaustion of determining the time to unfairly having to explain your identity yet again, with feelings, sex and attraction involved; keeping distance while also not trying to come off as distant; calculating how much is too much to share in the balancing act of intimacy and closure.

Still, I’m not satisfied.

Call me idealistic if you must, but I don’t believe in this trickle down approach of making strides in ‘representation’. I believe in the right to demand that trans characters and narratives are portrayed with the multitudes that our stories contain.

Movie industries don’t exist in a bubble. Netflix India has both Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui and Disclosure, a documentary by trans people on how mainstream media has historically perpetuated anti-trans narratives.

With these resources and tools to unlearn, learn, reframe, ignorance is complicity.