Are You a Cis Person Reporting on Transpeople? Some Things to Keep in Mind

By Ila Ananya

On September 12, 2016, Bishesh Huirem, a transgender actor and model who is going to represent India at the Miss International Queen in Thailand, and her friend were assaulted by five security escorts of Manipur Rural Development and Panchayati Raj minister Moirangthem Okendro over the right of way in a narrow lane. Both she and her friend were beaten up as a result of which Huirem claims she was unable to complete her Shumang Leela performance (a form of local theatre) a few days later, when she felt dizzy and lost consciousness. Officials from the minister’s office initially refuted Huirem’s claim about the incident, stating that she had been driving “dead drunk”, and that the minister’s guards had stepped in to help her when she was unable to reverse her car which was blocking Okendro’s convoy.

Protesting the minister’s silence on the incident, the Manipur State Shumang Leela Council resolved to stop performing Shumang Leela in Heirok — the minister’s home constituency—and local artists and transpeople threatened to launch an agitation if Okendra failed to take action against his guards. Consequently, 10 days after the incident, on September 23, The Times of India reported that the guards had apologised for assaulting Huirem and her friend. Following the apology, the council lifted their ban on performing Shumang Leela in Heirok.

Now, The Times of India report presented all the available details, but it made a significant mistake — it mixed up a crucial issue of identity and referred to Huirem with the pronoun “him”. The same mistake was made by The North East Today. This problem does not arise in the Meiteilon language since it does not have gender specific pronouns.

A day before this report, an IBN Live report had not only referred to Huirem with a male pronoun, but also misidentified her as kinnar – the word kinnar (transgender) does not exist in the Manipuri community where the equivalent term is nupi maanbi (Meitei transwoman). Santa Khurai, the Secretary of the All Manipur Nupi Maanbi Association (AMANA) wrote an open letter to the editor of IBN Live highlighting the need for a correction:

This comes on the heels of transactivist Gee Imaan Semmalar recently writing to Scroll after they published his story from the book A Life in Trans Activism but Scroll had changed the original title of “Emperor Penguins” to “How a trans man’s attempt at surgery went horribly wrong”, which went with the strapline, “Let this story also be one such warning to more men who come after me”. In a note on Facebook, Semmalar commented on how not to report on transpeople, especially the obsession with before-and-after narratives about bodies and lives often presented in victimising or patronising tones.

Both these instances are indicative of the kind of media stories on transpeople that have become normal and expected. Nadika, a non-binary writer and historian said, “Most of these stories are either incredulous or condescending, none of them respect the transperson they write about, mostly treating her or him as some subject in a chemistry lab.” Often, it seems like we in the media have forgotten that we’re writing about real people in these stories.

Here are some lessons to keep in mind when reporting on transpeople:

Don’t just focus on people’s bodies or narratives structured around ‘before’ and ‘after’ stories.

Semmalar pointed out that the questions one encounters about this transformation are primarily confined to the body. He argued, “They’re about what surgery you had, where you got it done, how much it cost.” The retitling of his story on Scroll for example is an indication of this obsession.

“We ought to demand stories that go beyond the medical transition narrative. It cannot be just about our genitals and our breasts,” said Nadika, indicating that there are other conversations possible — conversations where somehow transpeople’s bodies are open for public discussion more than other people’s because of our own narrow understanding of gender.

Of all the tones possible, there is no need to automatically choose one of victimhood.

Since the media’s reporting often plugs into already existing conversations, it is possible to use it to bring in new stories told in tones other than the ones that we normatively use. Semmalar wrote in his Facebook note that the Scroll headline for his story froze him in a state of victimhood, when actually his story was really about other things (like caste, gender, community and faith).

Nadika said that part of the problem is also that there is no space in mainstream media to talk of trans narratives that don’t fit pre-existing views of transpeople.

If these are questions editors and reporters grapple with while telling stories of women and men who conform to gender binaries, there is no reason we shouldn’t grapple with them when we write about transpeople. “News or media stories make it seem like our lives are constant fights, struggles or a series of never-ending gloom,” said Nadika. “We have lives as normal and mundane as the rest; we have our own joys and sorrows, our own successes and failures, and we try to make sense of things as much as others. We need honest stories about people who muddle and plod along just like everyone else.”

There is a way to write about stories of success.

Nadika calls most such media reports “inspirational porn”, stories that present transpeople in a way that suggests: ‘Wow! Despite being born this way, they have overcome odds and achieved something!’

According to Semmalar, this is a new kind of story emerging in our media. “It’s like trying to sell the American Dream and saying that, ‘Look, this black man worked so hard and now he’s the head of a company’,” he said. “That doesn’t address structural exclusions; they use one success story to say that if you work really hard, it doesn’t matter what forms of oppression are working against you, but you can make it. It’s a narrative based on meritocracy.” Nadika added, ‘Transpeople (and disabled) who succeed, have become models and examples and therefore ‘good’, and other transpeople have to aspire to being them, or be ‘bad’.”

Nadika is certain that we need more transpeople telling their stories, and added, “When cis people tell their stories, they need to be respectful and sincere to the subject.” Semmalar pointed out that there is a need to equalise such a conversation, especially through a more collaborative process. “[For example,] the story should be translated back into the language in which the interviews were conducted, so that the transpeople being interviewed know what is going out,’ he said. Another way of equalising the power balance between reporter and subject is to follow the lead of media outlets like Dalit Camera and record oral histories that retain the subjects’ voices without mediation.

We seem to have been conditioned to think and believe that there are only two genders – corresponding to the genitals we were born with. “Anyone seeking to overcome this is obviously [seen as] a freak,” said Nadika. “Reporters usually think of their [transpeople’s] stories as a transition from point A to point B, they don’t understand it as a continuum,” said Semmalar. “The crisis is that nobody is looking at gender beyond biology.”