The desire to conquer all becomes more concrete when Manu’s defeated by his rival in an informal competition where they’re both flexing, huffing, sweating and screaming while pulling tractors roped to their chest.

Through it all, Manvi’s getting gender-affirming care like laser hair removal procedures and hormones, and of course, navigating cisgender structures on the daily.

While the film didn’t add to the mainstream legacy of misrepresentation that casts cis men to play women who are trans, it still adds to the legacy of the misplaced ‘shock-factor’ in finding out that someone is trans.

It attempts to show that trans people aren’t deceiving anyone by being who we are. But how well can that point land when the whole crux lays in this percieved ‘deceit’ that is portrayed by a cis actor?

Manvi and Manu’s relationship sparks off when Manu gets a dramatic but minor injury by dropping weights on his nose and Manvi takes him to the doctor. On their way back in the auto, a trans person passing by on the road offers blessings and Manvi seems visibly uncomfortable while Manu takes out some money.

Although the scene hints at the fear of being clocked and possible remnants of Mavi’s internalized transphobia, I wish the film went deeper into the emphasis on passing and the extremes of a binary that excludes people regardless of their gender; how the general understanding of gender nonconformity in India has been constructed by the legitimization of its erasure and criminalization, systemically legalised through the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 during colonial rule.

The ‘acceptable’ trans person we are told in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, is someone who fits a sterilized schism: from a ‘good’ family, educated, cis-passing, light-skinned, ‘well-spoken’, successful, well-to-do.

As Manu’s fragility of maintaining his reputation and body for the straightjacket of heterosexuality slightly softens with being in a relationship with Manvi, it snaps right back with added sensitivities as he considers committing to her.

Continued in Part 3: https://bit.ly/3zTwnqK