The amount of irrelevant things we are taught in school always surprises me. As a thirty-year-old, I still stumble trying to figure out basic life skills. I wish that the essentials of adulthood were taught to us in these educational institutions. There’s so much unlearning left to do.
The trauma of being an unapologetic queer person in a world that stifles authenticity of the self still has its hooks dug deep in me. I’m on a lifelong journey of relearning better ways of living, alongside my therapist, support group, and friends.
I have always been fascinated by biology and even studied dentistry for three and a half years. I was intrigued by the innate nature of living things wanting to survive. A group of inanimate molecules came together under the right conditions to form the first living cells — a fact that sounded magical to my teenage brain. Biology, as a subject, taught me how wonderfully complex all life forms are and allowed my adolescent mind to be empathetic to all living beings
Back then, I found a biology blog that said over 1,400 animal species exhibit homosexual behaviour. This fact slowly helped uproot a lot of self-hate, as I…
This feeling of being an oddity came from the absence of narratives surrounding queer lives in India. Such visibility continues to remain restricted. Any representation in the media was painfully limited to either vilifying or mocking queer lives and lived realities. On the contrary, biology made me realize that the feelings I felt were natural and an innate part of life itself.
The way I understood biology was not always in alignment with what was taught to us in school. It did a disservice as it failed to capture queer-trans realities. While the variations in nature and living beings were taught to us, biology in conventional classroom settings omitted that people vary.
Diversity in human beings isn’t an anomaly. Biology in school also failed to teach that able-bodiedness isn’t the norm. Queerness in people shouldn’t be written out of school textbooks. It normalises prejudiced views in children that they pick up from the world around them.
In high school, I used to think of myself as a gay boy and eventually accepted my transness. My friends, including doctors and dentists, are inquisitive about my gender-affirming transition. They question me regarding my queerness and instead of asking them to google the answers, I patiently explain.
I make this exception as I studied the same books that they did which rarely mention intersex people, yet have paragraphs on one-in-a-million diseases. Transgender and intersex people find little to no mention in medical school books.
Science continues to study and celebrate all the ways of being, excluding one species - the human being.
Our medical schools aren’t equipped to educate students with knowledge which is affirming of queer-trans realities so that they can be of assistance to trans or intersex people. Recently, I was handed a form for an appointment and, not seeing my gender on it, I ticked the ‘others’ box.
The lady who handed the form crossed it out and wrote ‘male’ on it. The hospital staff and caregivers refuse to acknowledge that the ‘others’ might be people like them. People who exist and aren’t just a box, but individuals who they are supposed to treat and heal instead of causing further agony. My gender did not have any bearing on the ear infection. I asked her to cancel the ‘male’ and write transgender on it.
The onus of educating psychiatrists, psychologists and other medical practitioners on issues concerning queer-trans lives often falls upon queer-trans people, like me.
Presently, I’m lucky to have trans-affirmative healthcare providers. However, in the past, when I was struggling with the disease of addiction and was admitted to rehab, I was told on multiple occasions that my transness was a part of my ‘disease’ that needed to be cured.
Trans friends of mine have had similar or even worse experiences. I consider myself lucky, as I have a background in medicine and access to relatively better healthcare systems. I can help my doctors understand me better and when they say something they shouldn’t, I correct them. However, this privilege doesn’t always extend to my other queer-trans friends.
I still wonder about a gay friend of mine who was forcibly taken to a doctor by his parents to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. He was prescribed a heavy dosage of medications given to people with schizophrenia and was locked up in a room as suggested by the doctor. It’s been years and I still haven’t been able to find him. I don’t like thinking about what may have happened to him.
We don’t question the variations in nature because we were taught how wonderfully diverse it is. The same sense of acceptance and wonder can be instilled in young minds by teaching them that there is no ‘one mould’ for being human. They can be taught that people are diverse and not all are meant to be alike — that would be an evolutionary disaster.
The inadequacies in the educational system lead to hate and hurt towards anyone who does not fit in with the normative. Thankfully, education does not end with institutions. After all these years, I am still learning to love myself unabashedly.
