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I’m so disappointed. I’m sorry you had to feel that way.
The next month is a book exhibition in Delhi. If you like to go, I will definitely inform you.
During a bookshop date with my friend, I fell into the trap of short lasting excitement: from the shelves of Khan Market’s Full Circle, I naively picked up a book with a spine that read ‘Trans’ only to realize that the book wasn’t by a trans author as I had hoped.
It turned out to be another gender critical attempt by the cisgender gaze that cannot see trans people beyond our bodies; that percieves trans and gender-nonconforming commitment to be who we are as a threat; that is a continution of patriarchal systems that use ‘sex’ as a tool to control all of us, regardless of our gender.
I jerked my neck back with a slight startle —hate is an exhausting action, and I’m constantly amused by how the book’s author, journalist Helen Joyce, had the energy to write 401 pages laced with transmisogyny to dismiss the right to self-determination, and gender-affirming spaces and healthcare (which is linked to lower rates of being at risk of suicide).
This minimalist-esque book cover became a sterile mix into the nostalgia I associated with coming to this bookshop and market in my childhood, in search of discovering someone and something I hadn’t yet been acquainted with.
What would this book be for someone younger who finds it tomorrow? Would the child grow up to hate trans people? Will they grow up to hate themselves, finding that they’re stuck in the cage of gender essentialism?
I put the book back, it’s spine facing away so that only the blank stack of pages was visible, knowing that my small attempt to erase erasure doesn’t amount to much.
Attempts to police and erase trans people’s existences through literature and media are probably as old as media itself is: from gender being used as a joke to hide how we use social constructs to restrict each other, to ‘sex’ being weaponized to gatekeep these constructs.
The bookshop can no longer be romanticized – Full Circle felt like a shrine of Indian right-wing propaganda, normalizing hate, and Joyce’s book was just one in many that normalized the erasure of people.