Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli, Transgender RTI Activist*

From the known to the unknown, speaking of myself to begin with, my full-time education is only till 10th, where I've gone to a full-time school.

As is the case with many transgender persons, many queer persons, I was left out of my house when I was 15. And my intermediatary years and my undergrad and post grad diploma, all were thorugh distance education, or through open university.

Most transgender persons access education through distance education. The formal education system ends up institutionalizing structural violence. So many transgender persons are quite fearful of going through full time educational institutions. We are either fearful, or we are not let in.

With having access to education through distance, I somehow got in with my dead name and gender, into the employment system. I managed to remain there for 16-17 years in the private sector. But it all came crashing down because I was performing my dead gender and name until 2014.

In 2014, with the NALSA v. Union of India judgement, I felt I was on cloud nine, I felt I don't have to live a lie and perform my dead gender and name, and I told a Wall Street giant -- where I was working then -- that I am a transgender person, that this is the supreme court judgement, that I'd like access to a gender-neutral washroom, which wasn't there, or to the women's washroom, which I wasn't allowed to.

There are many things that are apparent in India, like the dowry system is banned, but it continues in other forms, re-christens itself: instead of calling it 'dowree' it's called. gifts and so on. So it rapidly mutates like a retrovirus and so does social exclusion.

Continued: https://www.pixstory.com/story/transcare-conference-boil-the-indian-ocean-on-a-kerosene-stove-vyjayanti-vasanta-mogli1651829895/98707