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Eunuch marriage for third gender comeback in India
Hi Girls
Please see the article from the London Times today… Maybe we’ll see Bollywood or even Inda accept us as “real” soon!!http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6913249.ece
Love to all
Maria
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Quote:In the days of the Mogul emperors, India’s eunuchs were the bodyguards of queens and privy to the most sensitive of state secrets. Today they are most often seen begging at traffic lights.Now they hope that the internet can help them to edge their way back into mainstream society — by finding them suitable husbands.
The first matrimonial site in the world for hijras — a catch-all term for South Asia’s eunuch, transgender, transvestite and third gender communities — has been launched from the eastern Indian city of Madras.
The home page of Thirunangai.net explains that “transsexual women by birth may not be physically women. But, by soul and heart, we are real women”.
So far, it has six would-be brides and has attracted more than 350 proposals of marriage from men in India, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US and the Middle East, according to Kalki Subramanian, the site’s creator.
Ms Subramanian, an activist for hijra rights and a transsexual, hopes that the first wedding will take place on February 14 in Madras. The ceremony could be a landmark for a community that has been part of Indian society for millennia, but which became ostracised when the British imported their Victorian taboos.
“Many of us would like to marry men; most of us would like to have children, to adopt,” Ms Subramanian said. “But for too long, because of our place in society, these have been distant dreams. People think of us as sexual perverts or clowns.”
There are an estimated 200,000 hijras in India. Social stigma forces most of them to abandon their education. Many end up begging or resort to prostitution.
However, there are indications that India may gradually be becoming more accepting. This year the country witnessed its first transsexual fashion model and transsexual television presenter. In the recent Bollywood historical epic Jodhaa Akbar, a hijra was portrayed as a trusted lieutenant of the heroine queen — a break with a tradition that has relegated transsexuals to comic roles.
Ms Subramanian hopes that Thirunangai.net will add momentum to the hijras’ cause by putting India back in touch with a more permissive past. “It wasn’t always like this,” she said. “Only in the past 200 years, under the British, did we become too narrow minded.”
Changing times
— In September 2008, Nepal became the first country to recognise the third gender officially when it gave a third gender identity card to Bishnu Adhikari, a 21-year-old woman who dresses as a man
— In a secondary school in Thailand transgenders have been given their own toilet, marked by a figure that is half woman and half man. Up to 20 per cent of pupils at Kampang Secondary School are transgender
— A Japanese television host, Haruna Ai, won the Miss International Queen transvestite beauty pageant in Pattaya, Thailand, earlier this month