By Papri Sri Raman, IANS
Chennai : A 28-year-old transgender who was forced to grow up as a boy and who is now aspiring to be a television host in Tamil Nadu is campaigning for gender justice in education.
Rose, who will be a talk show host from next month for STAR Vijay — a Tamil television channel of the STAR group — emphasises that education alone can redeem transgender people and empower them economically.
“And only if you are economically empowered can you demand gender equality,” Rose told IANS.
Rose is a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the Louisiana Tech University in the US. Facing a gender dilemma at a young age, Rose spent her school and college years immersed in books.
Belonging to a middle class Tamil family, Rose was brought up as a boy and educated at two elite schools in Chennai.
“My first school was a co-educational institution. Everyone thought I was a boy. But gender, I realise, is more of a mental thing. It is how a person feels … whether you feel like a girl or a boy,” said Rose.
“The boys in school found me strange, were rude at times. The girls often teased me and wanted to know why I was more like them. I realised I was different from boys and I was different from girls. I retreated into my studies more and more. I had few friends and topped my class in academics. My parents and teachers were delighted.
In high school, she was placed in a boys’ school. Those teenage years gave Rose her gender bearing. They were painful decision-making years, years of hiding, and “not knowing”.
“I had no friends, nowhere to go, nothing else to do, so I studied,” she recalled.
Schools should be sensitised about transgender children. Such students should be allowed to go to school along with children from the other two genders as neither boys or girls, Rose says.
“Our religious texts and history have lots and lots of examples of transgender people. I want families with transgender children to accept them as normal children and educate them at par with their sons and daughters,” she said.
Rose did very well in board examinations and was offered a free seat at the Sathayabhama Engineering College to study mechanical engineering. Here again Rose topped her class.
It was in college that Rose finally began coming into her own. In college shows, she played female roles, performing as well as any girl.
However, even at the college level, “you have to be either a boy or a girl”, she said.
It was during her years in the US that Rose started exploring issues of sexuality, read up on transgender people and decided that for her the days of hiding her own gender inclination were over. She decided to return to India in 2006 to help transgender people.
Back in Chennai, a transgender student of the Centre for Social Initiative and Management introduced Rose to Latha Suresh, coordinator of the institution.
The centre had trained half a dozen transgender youngsters to develop entrepreneurial skills and put Rose through a similar training programme.
“Some of our third gender students have done remarkably well. I believe we should mainstream them. We should support them to be equal to men and women in learning and entrepreneurship,” Suresh said.
The Tamil Nadu government this year asked all educational institutions to admit transgender people without discrimination.
“But we are yet to have peer groups in schools and colleges. The child unsure about gender must have very good examples to follow,” Rose said.
Rose is one such role model for the community. With Latha’s encouragement, she mustered the courage to become a television host. She will host a weekly talk show, “Ippadikku Rose” (Yours, Rose), for STAR Vijay from December and hopes media recognition will enable her to advocate equal educational opportunities for transgender people.