Rumi and his friends: The story of a trans man and much more Premium

Rumi, a queer transman and gender-rights activist, is not new to prejudice, misinformation and bigotry. Born Sumathi Murthy, he spent over 40 years in a body he could not feel at home in, constantly battling the gender stereotypes he encountered in the Hindustani classical musical landscape he belongs to.

Rumi Harish still remembers the policeman he met in 2015 or 2016, who was in a frenzy killing all the mosquitoes that ventured near him. “We were wondering what was wrong with the person,” says Rumi, with a laugh, recalling the intensity with which he was squashing the insects. Then, he heard the man tell someone else that homosexuality spreads through mosquitoes. 

Rumi, a queer trans man and gender-rights activist, is not new to prejudice, misinformation and bigotry. Born Sumathi Murthy, he spent over 40 years in a body he could not feel at home in, constantly battling the gender stereotypes he encountered in the Hindustani classical musical landscape he belongs to. 

“Because of the music tradition I came from, I was forced to identify as a woman, could never express the man inside me,” says Rumi, who has recently released his memoir Jaunpuri Khayal, co-authored with noted Kannada writer Dadapeer Jayman and published by an independent publishing house, Aharnishi Prakashana. The classical music landscape demanded a very traditional lifestyle, something he did not want for himself, he says, even frowning upon the fact that he refused to get married. 

“They rejected me in the field of music because I was not married. They can’t think beyond that,” he says, recalling, with a laugh all his attempts to escape the institution.  “I have done all kinds of drama to escape every groom-seeing,” he says, listing some of them — running away, digging his nose, unnecessarily coughing, proclaiming he was infertile. “I lived like that for a long time,” he says. “I knew from childhood that I was a man. But I could never express it.” 

Many of these struggles find themselves in the memoir, one of the few attempts to document the trans-man experience in India, perhaps even the first-person narrative of this journey. Rumi, however, is loath to call this the first autobiography by a trans man. “I don’t believe in calling anything first,” he says. But he does admit that a first-person narrative of a trans man is rare. “It is because of the secondary situation that female-assigned people get in society,” believes Rumi. Also, unlike in the case of trans women, no culture or history is associated with the trans man experience. “We become specimens,” he remarks. 

This even shows up in the medical profession when female-assigned people choose to opt for gender-affirmation surgery. “Some people treat our bodies like guinea pigs,” says Rumi, who began researching the surgery 17-odd years ago. “We researched not just for ourselves but for others,” says Rumi, who has been doing crisis intervention work for a long time. “I see that people have gone through all kinds of extremes,” he says. 

By his early forties, Rumi had changed his name and started dressing like a man. “It was very late,” says Rumi who struggled with severe dysmorphia for many years. “I never saw myself behaving like a woman...wearing sarees was a curse,” he says. At the same time, the nuances of grooming himself as a man was challenging at first. “I had never worn jeans before this,” says Rumi, who credits his old friend, Sunil, a fellow transman, with taking him to the barber shop, teaching him how to wear belts and use Old Spice.