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Showing posts from July, 2018

'Us' and 'Them'

I remember a 10-year-old me trying diligently to submit a gender-neutral school essay using his/her, he/she wherever possible. It seemed unfair how skewed the language was towards the male pronouns.  A little while later, I came across the concept of 'Hijra'. As a child, I thought that they were men dressed as women. But then, I was told that they were 'cursed to be neither male nor female'. People feared and ridiculed them, and prayed that a Hijra child not be born to them. Such a shame that would be, and the Hijras would come and take their offspring away. Now, if the English language was unfair to women, it totally lacked the vocabulary to adequately address this community. 'Why should a creation of God be feared and ridiculed?', I would think. Why is there so much stigma attached to a natural phenomenon that parents are forced to send their Hijra children away? Why can't they live normal lives, study, work, play like the rest of us? They are h