Life on the margins: Review of Transgender rights activist Akkai Padmashali’s book A Small Step in a Long Journey: A Memoir

The searing truth of her struggles as an activist fighting for social inclusion

Akkai Padmashali is averse to sympathy. Her battles as a transgender woman have been for acceptance and equality. “My existence itself is resistance against those who are sexist and commit violence,” she says in her new book, A Small Step in a Long Journey: A Memoir.

She faced egregious sexual violence but by narrating how she overcame the humiliation, Akkai shows how not to be seen as victim gives the strength to take on challenges. From her harrowing abuse she develops the determination to raise awareness about her community.

Raising awareness

She wants society to understand that transgenders have desires and wonders why people fear them so much. It is the failure to accept gender diversity, in legislation, judiciary and society, that hurts the community the most. Akkai and others like her will perhaps take some solace in the Tamil Nadu government’s glossary to address the community, as directed by the Madras High Court, but words won’t be enough to live a life of dignity.

“No one has the right to decide my identity. It’s the constitutional right of every Indian to define things for themselves,” writes Akkai, who was born and bred in Bengaluru. While growing up, she was compelled to behave like a boy even though she liked to dress up. She was teased, harassed and bullied because of her voice and body language. Her teachers did not accept her and she dropped out of school when she was 12 years old. The direct and subtle threats and snubs from family and neighbours triggered her into attempting suicide twice in her pre-teens. At 16, Akkai found acceptance in a group of hijras and her fight for the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people began. She was driven by the need to explain that transgenders are not unnatural people. “Begging and sex work, their means of livelihood, is not easy and the sari is a struggle for a trans-woman,” writes Akkai.

Stigma and discrimination

She recalls how poverty ruined her family as her father went from respectability to penury when she came out. When there was no food at home, she would bring the food kept on bodies before last rites. Akkai turned into a leading voice against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and describes the long fight before the Supreme Court, which finally decriminalised homosexuality in 2018. She remains a vociferous critic of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. Once she took off as an activist with LGBT rights group Sangama in Bengaluru back in the 1990s, Akkai kept breaking stereotypes. She fought for separate wards for transgender persons in hospitals and land for their funeral rites; pushed for banks to support her community; founded the Karnataka Sexual Minorities Forum. Akkai became the first transgender person in Karnataka to register for marriage to a trans-man and in India to get a driving licence with her gender orientation described as female.