An Uncounted Rape

Already vulnerable, India's transgender citizens are assaulted or ignored by the very institutions meant to serve and protect them

- Avantika Mehta

ON the day of her arrest in Ariyamangalam, Kanmani (name changed) was wearing a black shiny sari with gold stars embroidered along its length. After the police cut her hair, they handed her a veshti, shirt and warned her to answer "male" when asked for her gender in court.

Three days after her remand to Trichy Central Jail, a warden raped Kanmani in her cell.

Yet Another Rape Story

An Enquiry Report, filed in a Trichy court by District Legal Services Authority (DLSA) Deputy Chief Counsel S Subburaj, says the prison authorities "checked the CCTV footage of the occurrence date... and found it (her allegations of rape) was true."

Kanmani's alleged rapist roams free. Her story is not an unusual one.

A 2015 report by the National Integrated Biological and Behavioural Surveillance (NIBBS), the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states that 31.5 per cent of transwomen said their first sexual encounter with a man was non-consensual/forced.

Most of the women reported being minors at the time of the sexual assault-30 per cent were 15 to 17-years-old and 26 per cent were under 14-years-old.

"The warden said no one will believe me"

Kanmani's earliest memory is when she was four years in an orphanage in Chennai. Declared male at birth, she'd been given boys' clothes to wear. Most of her childhood experiences are of abandonment, alienation and abuse-emotional and violently physical.

She never met her parents. The orphanage told her to move out when she came out as transgender at 18. Rendered homeless, she sought refuge with the elder transgender people (naiks). She was soon forced into prostitution. Even the naiks beat her with iron rods if earnings fell short.

"Sometimes I think, what else could this world have in store for me? It's a scary thought," she says.