Series Co-editors’ Prologue to Sowmya Ramanathan’s Agitation, “Nature with Culture: Learning from Afro-Colombian feminists to imagine gender beyond the human”

By Ponni Arasu, in conversation with Richa Nagar
 
 

*This is part of the ongoing series Holding Movements, Agitating Epistemes convened and co-edited by Ponni Arasu and Richa Nagar.* Read Sowmya Ramanathan’s piece here.
 
 

Sowmya Ramanathan’s intervention is a breath of fresh air. She drives home the critical point that just as the conservative coupling of nature and gender can be oppressive, the progressive decoupling of gender from nature ought to be held up to the light of critical reevaluation. Neither Ramanathan nor this Prologue is advancing a conservative “natural” ideology of gender. Rather, we seek to prioritize a deep, if challenging, reflection on what social, personal, and emotional conditions would be necessary such that changes to our bodies or expressions that are given by nature are acts of free will instead of coerced by hegemonic ideals, conservative or progressive. Together with Sowmya’s intervention, this Prologue seeks to break a silence around such issues, a silence that has become increasingly difficult for many.

Sowmya writes from her location in North America, but the burdens she outlines weigh down our conversations about gender even in contexts thousands of miles away, including those in South Asia. Everyday we see young trans* folks who perceive their path to liberation as restricted to hormone therapy followed by surgery. The process often begins with an understanding that they have to embrace this path in order to be accepted in the gender they feel themselves to be. Many also express that if they had a choice, perhaps they would not put their bodies through the difficulties of the medical procedures. Over time, however, the discourses that swarm around us are those that combine “traditional” fixed notions of gender, gender roles, and expressions with a widely accepted international discourse among LGBTQIA+ communities, funders, and allies. Simply put, while specific kinds of medical intervention might be an important part of healing for some trans* folks, the dominant discourse has made it impossible to converse openly about whether medical intervention is a necessity or a choice in order to be ‘trans*.’ The most striking part of Ramanathan’s essay is her courageous statement that it is frequently the ‘progressive’ discourses on gender that insist on decoupling gender from nature. Such a position, she argues, 1) risks demonizing what we inherit, biologically, naturally, or ancestrally, and it also 2) places an unfair and overwhelming responsibility on the individual to “correct” parts of themselves through their performance of gender or, more extremely, through medical interventions.

I see this happen to trans* folks everyday. Working in a small corner of South Asia which has no access to larger queer communities per se, or any essential resources, much of our frontline work is often about helping trans* folks to access shelter, food, education, employment, and medical interventions. Medical intervention for us has become a ‘basic need’ at this moment in the world that we live in. Even as I pen this piece that asks for space to unpack this as the only option, I know that in brutally practical terms, for a trans* person to be able to access education, employment, and basic everyday safety, just to ‘pass’ as one or the other gender in the oppressive gender dichotomy, is their best bet. I, too, have to stand by such passing as a default, for the sake of survival. All of this, however, is not a progressive ideal but a combination of traditional ideas and the affirmation of such ideas by ‘progressive’ LGBTQIA+ discourses. These discourses fight for the right to medical intervention without any room for reflection on its role, need, or desire in relation to each person’s body and each person’s life more specifically. So we see more and more trans* folks beginning to hate their bodies that are given by nature. Realigning hormonal systems and changing parts of the body become the only path to liberation. All the after effects of the process, of which there are many, are seen as part of the struggle of being trans*. There is no room to even voice the opinion that if we lived in a world where we could be acknowledged as whichever gender we wish to be, or even better, in a place where gender is so unfixed that it can move, change, and grow as we please, then perhaps we would not have to put our bodies through such pain. That the burden of change should not be borne entirely by our bodies, but that it is society that needs to be changed to accept me and my gender just as I am, however I choose to craft my body or express myself. Such a statement would be deemed transphobic today.

Within Jungian psychological approaches—a world of thinking where the mind-body-spirit is one and all of us are interconnected—there is emphasis on each of us accepting ourselves and one another as a whole. Deeper therapeutic journeys of healing often involve accepting all parts of ourselves, whatever they may be. Such acceptance is an important part of us taking back our power to choose how we live with those parts of ourselves, especially difficult parts, in a way that nourishes us as well as those whom we consider as ours. Such empowerment helps us live fully despite the presence of those who hurt and harm us in our everyday lives.

As an expressive arts therapist, I have a growing number of trans* clients from poor, post-conflict, post-tsunami societies who are plagued by traumas created by displacement, loss of life/limb, enforced disappearances, and now the ongoing economic crisis. In this context, beginning a process of deeper healing feels close to impossible on most days. Yet I, alongside my co-activists, turn the soil in the hopes that these folks, too, can access the right to such healing that seems otherwise reserved for elite lives. In some blessed moments, my trans* clients find ways to embrace their whole self. Their hatred of their dead names and body parts that they want to get rid of, or have done away with, does not nourish this process but instead stands as a huge hurdle. It is not the act or decision of making changes to their body per se that is the hurdle, but the intention behind it. The intention almost always arises from a deep hatred that tends to show up as a destructive force to their well-being. It feels impossible at times to advance the emotional process, where they can let go of those names, body parts, and gender expressions, if they so wish, from a place of justified rage, and slowly move to a place of peace. Only if there is space to enable this movement from rage to peace, will the acts of surgical intervention or specific ways of performing their gender be acts of free will. Right now, these decisions and actions are imposed on them as the default, both by the societies we were born into and by the spaces and voices that seek to free us from the shackles of those very societies.

Sadly, there is no room for such heart- and gut-wrenching conversations in our emerging LGBTQIA+ spaces. The ways to be trans* that are established as default within LGBTQIA+ spaces involve precisely what Sowmya outlines. They demonize that which we are given by nature and give in to the overwhelming pressure to “correct” oneself. Any questioning of this default with an intention to open up conversations is deemed offensive. The fragile socioeconomic and emotional state of the trans* folks whom my co-activists and I support do not allow us to initiate these conversations easily. Indeed, the established default has become their anchor because it is offered as the only path that will bring them peace somewhere down the road.

In situations of pain and trauma, there is safety in defaults, even if a little voice in our hearts may tell us that they are not ideal for our body-mind-spirit. This default path almost always does not provide the promised result. The work of healing has to include the psychological and physical effects of gender affirming therapies and surgeries and the everyday pressures of performing gender before and after medical intervention. As frontline activists (and myself as a therapeutic practitioner), it is imperative for us to make space for interventions such as Sowmya’s if we are to equip all of us, including trans* folks, with the tools for holistic healing from the tyranny of normative gender expression and identities. It is unfortunate that what has emerged as a matter of grave urgency for me after close to two decades of frontline work with working class trans* communities will likely be deemed transphobic in the public sphere. More importantly, this urgent conversation can only be had very gently and quietly with trans* folks themselves in order to not disrupt the only anchors they may have in their otherwise fragile existence. Making the lives of individual trans* folks less fragile requires us to have many brave conversations that allow for the unpacking of this default. This Prologue and Sowmya’s piece are both invitations to have more conversations that are not guided or silenced by fear of being judged, labeled, or ostracized, and they should not be read as a declaration of any one way of being and thinking as the only path.

Sowmya gives us a way to break this silence through the tender and politically critical work of seeking refuge in indigenous knowledge systems that connect the body, land, and culture and see them as a continuum. Interestingly, she and I are both cis-gendered, complexly casted (in my case), dominant caste (in her case), queer (in my case) Tamil women who have access to precisely this kind of a knowledge system in ancient Sangam Tamil literature. Tamil is a language that has been spoken uninterruptedly since the third century BC. Its ancient roots lay in a body of poetic literature which is built around two criss-crossing axes. One of them is the ainthinai, or the five landscapes of kurinji (mountain), mullai (forest), marudham (field), neythal (coast), and palai (desert). Each landscape is connected to emotional processes. The land, the people and their hearts speak in one multilayered voice in Sangam poetry. The second axis is that of akam (interior) and the puram (exterior). This division is simplistically translated as public and private, and it is understood as being gendered with predictable patriarchal ideas of the akam being feminine and the puram, masculine. In the poetry however, it is about the interiority and the exteriority of emotional landscapes in human life which may hold different gender energies, and which, in turn, are deeply embedded in and entangled with the more-than-human. I have not looked specifically for understanding of gender in our Sangam, but Sowmya’s essay inspires me to do so. This might be especially useful as we continue our work with Tamil speaking trans* folks.

Sowmya Ramanathan’s piece and the spirit of this Prologue pave the path for thinking through gender liberation without engaging in processes of pulling ourselves away, violently, as default, from that which we are born into. Instead, it makes a case for how we may claim all that we are given by nature in such a way where we own it enough to be able to mold it and make it the ground in which we can lay down roots. Could such rooting and being provide for a liberation that lets us all breathe better? I wish this for myself and for all my trans* friends.
 

Suggested citation:
Arasu, Ponni with Richa Nagar. 2024. “Series Co-editors’ Prologue to Sowmya Ramanathan’s Agitation, “Nature with Culture: Learning from Afro-Colombian feminists to imagine gender beyond the human.” AGITATE Now! https://agitatejournal.org/series-co-editors-prologue-to-sowmya-ramanathans-agitation-nature-with-culture-learning-from-afro-colombian-feminists-to-imagine-gender-beyond-the-human/