Trans Rights Activist Empowers India’s LGBTQ Community

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This Gay thread is dedicated to Dead Eye one of the two biggest homophobic bigoted assholes on GFY

Trans Rights Activist Empowers India’s LGBTQ Community

KOLKATA, West Bengal — Sintu Bagui was 14 when she dropped out of school and started working in a plywood factory. For $1 a day, she hauled heavy sheets of wooden board and did assorted cleaning jobs in brutal 12-hour shifts. Her hands were bruised and blistered at the end of each day, but it was better than the government school she was supposed to attend.

“Every time I walked into school, I died a little,” Bagui, who identifies as a trans woman, recalls. “I did not want to use the boys’ washroom, I did not want to wear a boy’s uniform, and I was tired of hearing boys and teachers bullying me to be less like a girl.”

Bagui’s mother, a sex worker who lived in a red-light area, was devastated. It had not been easy to enroll Bagui at the school.

“The school wanted my father’s signature and wanted him to enroll me,” Bagui says. “They probably suspected my mother was a sex worker and tried to turn us away. But some parents from the school protested and made them take me in.”

So when Bagui quit school, her mother — worn down by a hard life of endless marginalization and struggle — lashed out violently at Bagui. Bagui’s mother died in 2012 when Bagui was 20, unable to come to terms with her child’s gender expression.

It was only after her mother’s death that Bagui wore a sari and jewelry for the first time.

“My mother always kept saying, ‘Be like a man, be like a man.’ So I never felt like dressing the way I wanted to around her,” she says. After her mother’s death, Bagui says, her family tried to marry her off to a woman as a ‘cure.’ “Here I was dressed in a saree and bangles, and they were trying to find a bride for me,” Bagui says.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court finally struck down a colonial-era law, commonly known as Section 377 after the relevant section of India’s penal code, that criminalized gay sex. The court’s welcome decision granted LGBTQ citizens equal rights after a lengthy struggle, but transgender individuals like Bagui, particularly from working-class families, continue to face discrimination, social stigma and violence.

Today, at 27, Bagui is a trans rights activist with Anandam, a nonprofit working with some of India’s most marginalized communities in small towns and settlements where LGBTQ people struggle to find support groups, civil society organizations and lawyers to fight for their rights.

In conversations, Bagui preferred to use LGBTKH, where the traditional words “kothi” and “hijra” — rather than “queer” — speak more closely to her lived experience. Bagui continues to live where she grew up in Gorabagan, the red-light district of a small town called Seoraphuli, an hour’s drive from Kolkata in the east of India.

“Imagine what happens in small towns where there’s no immediate support nearby and the police and residents are hostile,” Bagui says, describing the hardship of transgender people in small-town India. “Most of them are poor and uneducated and have been shunned by their families. They don’t read about landmark judgments.”

From Factories To Activism
The memories of Bagui’s time at the plyboard factory still traumatize her.

“I was so young and desperate then, I barely realized how I was being abused,” she said. “I used to put up with men grabbing my chest, pinching my butt, poking me while smiling and cracking jokes.”

But she stuck with the job because she needed the money. After years of sex work had taken a toll on her mother’s health, their family of five often ate little more than a handful of vegetable fritters and puffed rice.

A year into her time at the factory, she found a job at a stationery shop near her house, which is where she first met a group of transgender people. One day, on the pretext of interviewing for another job, Bagui followed the group to a rundown house where a large group of trans women and intersex people lived.

“For the first time, I felt like I belonged to a place. People were in women’s clothes, they were cursing, laughing,” she says.

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↑↑↑ AIDS infected Russian

India has a much lower AIDS infection rate than Russia.

Why does Russia have the highest AIDS infection epidemic in all the predominantly white countries?

Women and children in Russia have the highest rate of AIDS infection than any nation in the industrialized world.

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