Queeroes and Trans Champs: Laxmi Narayan Tripathi
- Suzanne DeWitt Hall
- 24 hours ago
- 3 min read
“Am I both a man and a woman? Am I neither man nor woman? I am a hijra, so I can access both states of being.”
The passage below is excerpted from Queeroes and Trans Champs: 15 Extraordinary People from Around the World Who Show that Authenticity Is Power
It is said you can tell what part of Mumbai, India you are in by scent alone. Exhaust fumes from cars, busses, and 3-wheeled autorickshaws mix with spices and wood smoke from street-food vendors. Perfume and body odor rise from the millions of residents of this megacity. The sights and sounds are just as intense: crowded trains and sacred cows; Bollywood scenes of music and dancing being filmed on street corners; chattering voices and beeping of car horns. It is a place of contrasts where luxurious homes are owned by the super-rich, while millions of people live in shacks in the world’s largest slum.
Out of this colorful land of contrasts comes Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a third-gender dancer and choreographer who has starred in music videos, television shows, and movies. Born as a boy within the Brahman caste (the highest social class in India), Laxmi always knew herself to be feminine. “When I was born, the sex assigned at my birth was given over me,” Laxmi says. “But I didn’t choose to stay in the boxes of male and female.” While comfortable in her reality as a mixture of masculine and feminine, Laxmi still experienced challenges from others. “I never felt different, the world made me feel different,” she says. “One day I said no, enough.” This meant joining the oldest ethnic transgender community, known as the hijras.
Most hijras live as women within communities of other hijras. New entrants are adopted by an older hijra who acts as mother and guru philosopher to teach them about hijra life, and the ancient Hijra Persian language.
Most hijra dress as women, wearing traditional saris and beaded slippers called khussa. When Laxmi gives interviews her saris are beautifully draped and colorful. Her fingers are covered in rings, and her hands move through the air as if they are dancing as she speaks. She frequently describes the ancient, respected history of the hijras, explaining that the third gender is mentioned in Hindu texts which are thousands of years old. “No religion ever discriminated against us, history is in our favor and that’s just a fact. I made this knowledge my Brahmastra, my lethal weapon, and it has always been part of my activism.”
“Am I both a man and a woman? Am I neither man nor woman? I am a hijra, so I can access both states of being—the word ‘hij’ refers to a holy soul and the body in which the holy resides is hijra, hence they say the soul is hijra—and I can also go beyond.”
Hijras are believed to carry the power of the goddess Buhuchara. They offer blessings at weddings and the births of babies, and so are often in the homes of others. Honesty and trustworthiness are therefore especially important characteristics within the community. While hijras were respected for hundreds of centuries, British colonialization in the 1600s through the 1900s resulted in societal shifts which made it harder to be a third gender. Laxmi’s work strives to reverse that trend, and her achievements are impressive. She was the first transgender person to represent the Asia-Pacific region at the United Nations, she founded Astitva, an organization which supports sexual minorities, and she has given a number of TEDx talks. Most importantly, Laxmi took the issue of gender all the way to India’s Supreme Court, where she offered an impassioned plea for an “Other” box to be added to “Male” and “Female” on government forms. The court decided in her favor, so now people who identify as hijra or sādhin (individuals assigned female at birth who perform masculine gender) have a way of legally declaring their gender identity. The decision also provided protections for non-binary citizens related to bathrooms, healthcare, and adoption rights.
Laxmi tells the story of her life in a memoir titled Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (Oxford University Press). “I’m like Cleopatra,” she says. “Crown yourself honey, don’t wait for the world to do it for you.”
Suzanne DeWitt Hall (she/they) is the author of the Where True Love Is devotional series, the Living in Hope series of books supporting the loved ones of transgender people, The Language of Bodies (Woodhall Press, 2022), and the Rumplepimple adventures.
