The 'T' in LGBTQ

This week, Shivy, the transgender teen who was brought to Agra from the United States by his parents, was granted reprieve by the Delhi High Court. Born Shivani Bhatt, Shivy is trans. He was told by his parents to travel with them to India under the pretext of visiting a sick grandmother but once here, he was asked to stay back and "behave like a girl".

Last month, the 19-year-old posted a video on YouTube with the help of Nazariya, a Delhi-based LGBTQ rights organisation. He had by then escaped to Delhi and, with Nazariya's assistance, filed a petition before the Delhi High Court. In an order on Monday, the High Court directed Shivy's parents to let him return to the US.

"Gender identity and sexual orientation are fundamental to the right of self-determination, dignity and freedom. These freedoms lie at the heart of personal autonomy and freedom of individuals. A transgender's sense or experience of gender is integral to their core personality and sense of being. Insofar as I understand the law, everyone has a fundamental right to be recognised in their chosen gender," Justice Mridul, who headed the bench hearing Shivy's case, said.

Shivy can now return to the US and restart his life. The video in which he explained his plight attests he is a bright young man full of promise. The court has directed his parents to continue to fund his education and refrain from using tactics similar to the ones they employed on him.

Shivy's case is instructive in that his parents, in spite of raising him in the US, felt they could "change his ways" by bringing him back to India. To that end, they even got him enrolled at a college in Agra. The discord he would have felt between his life in the US and the constrained one he was forced to lead here is not hard to fathom.

The curious thing is his parents believed that they could get him to "act" like a girl if he were kept in India. What were they thinking? That he would flip his personality and change who he is just to fit in? How could his parents think he would be game for their experiment?

Shivy's case has ended well, but his struggles indicate that cultural bonds remain strong in spite of the place of residence. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to Silicon Valley, members of Trikone, a US-based, India-focused LGBTQ rights organisation, were manhandled for demanding an end to Section 377. Moving to a more egalitarian society is clearly no guarantee that folks from back home would change their stance on issues of gender and sexuality.

In court, Shivy's mother said that she wanted to protect him since "she [his mother continues to refer to Shivy as 'she'] may change her mind about her sexual identity later". This was rightly shot down by the court - at 19, Shivy is an adult and his status is clearly not a phase. Even so, his mother's concerns are not entirely unfounded. She may have wanted to protect him from ridicule, a lived reality for many transgender even in the West. So the problem is not so much Shivy but how society views people like him.

The funny thing is that if the family had wanted to keep the situation under wraps out of a fear that Shivy's status is not who he is but a momentary error of judgement, they could not have done worse than bring him to India and hope to "convert" him. The ideal thing to do would have been to direct him to a counsellor back in the US. This would have brought home to them that Shivy is indeed a trans man. Rather, they tried to confine him to Agra, which changed nothing, except for bringing his case before the whole world, an outcome that they had wanted to avoid in the first place.

Shivy's case offers lessons that need to be urgently learnt in this country. He is the kind of articulate trans person we need to hear more of. The video in which he pleads for his freedom makes for dim, but also surprising, viewing. By most measures, he does not cater to our impressions of the transgender, which term in India usually translates to hijras, or castrated males. Shivy's case shows that the trans spectrum itself is large and varied.

On the one hand, we have seen some remarkable progress recently in the legal rights granted to transgenders in India. They were recognised as the third gender by the Supreme Court last year. The apex court, in its judgement, directed the Centre and states to put in place reservations for them in government educational institutes and jobs. In the West, with Caitlyn Jenner's coming out and greater representation of trans lives on television, the "T" of the LGBTQ umbrella is finally on the radar.

Yet, biases exist, and transgenders continue to face discrimination on a daily basis. In India, poverty forces many into sex trade. Amidst all this, the battle for sheer visibility is a continuing one. Shivy's case should go some distance in plugging that gap.