From childhood to adulthood Revathi’s radical desires remain anchored in the hard to parse and interwoven vagaries of trans living and dying in the global South.
In a fascinating story shared early on in A. Revathi’s memoir Revathi: A Life in Trans Activism—one among several autobiographical vignettes illuminating the everyday stakes of trans world-making and vitality in southern India—Revathi describes dressing up as a female gypsy (kurathi) and going around her village singing hymns to collect donations for the annual temple festival in honor of the goddess Mariamman. At the time, Revathi was still a young boy (Doraiswamy), and the mere possibility of becoming the goddess held both pleasure and fear. Reflecting on the multiplicity of her gender non-confirming childhood, Revathi describes how she considered her stance: “[I] anyway appeared feminine,” and was “doing it for the sake of the goddess.” Here, the dread of being reprimanded by the family elders for dressing up as a woman dissolves before the dream of embodying a legendary feminine protector. What followed was a fabulous performance that regaled the entire audience of the village. Everyone was full of praises for the young child/goddess. So life-like was the child’s (queer/trans) embrace of this radiant femininity mediated through divinity that the boy who played the young Doraiswamy’s partner said, “You look like a real woman. If you were one, I’d fall in love with you!” Tender stories like this are a hallmark of Revathi’s sensitive and deeply reflexive writing style—offering, if only a temporary, refuge from the terse confines of compulsory heteronormativity and violent cis-gendered heterosexism.
A long term activist, archivist, performer, and actor from southern India’s Hijra (trans) community, A. Revathi has carved a distinctive niche for herself as a critical voice promulgating LGBTQ reform and recognition. Her Unarvum Uruvamum (Our Lives, Our Words, 2004) is widely regarded as the first book to be written by a Hijra person in Tamil. She next published The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010), which first appeared in English translation by V. Geetha and only published in Tamil a year later because A. Revathi feared the backlash that would come from her own friends and family.
Revathi’s account bristles with stories at once painful and personal. “To the world it must have seemed that I was playing a woman, but inside, I felt I was a woman,” Revathi writes, emphasizing the world-making power of feeling otherwise. She continues: “My eyes were lined with kohl and my lips painted red. I knew I looked beautiful. I looked at myself in the mirror several times and was astonished to see what I had become.” It is the collective force of such transient stories of everyday gender-variant performativity through which Revathi highlights the quotidian power of anticipating life beyond the tyrannical confines of biology and embodiment. Survival here hinges on the renewal of hope, and the invention of futures through fleeting gestures of imagination and acting-out that engender trans horizons in spite of or because of the here and now.
From childhood to adulthood Revathi’s radical desires remain anchored in the hard to parse and interwoven vagaries of trans living and dying in the global South. One moment, the imbrication of devotion, religiosity, faith, love, longing, and trans becoming serve as the existential scripts for the protagonist’s queer/trans self-fashioning. Yet, the very next moment these scripts mutate in the hands of heteropatriarchal society, which deploys them to justify and perpetuate transphobic violence and oppression. For instance, many years after Revathi started living openly as a transwoman in a big city, she returns to her village, where her brothers humiliate her publicly for having long hair. Then, they beat her up and chop her lustrous hair off as a sacrificial offering for the same goddess she was praised for inhabiting as a child in order to commit penance for her supposedly demonic actions.
Trans lives have known these jagged ambivalences all along. Revathi’s trans-sharpened subjectivity highlights how the cis-oriented world appropriates trans performativity and precarity when it serves them while routinely jettisoning trans lives. As Revathi describes, trans bodies risk becoming the simulacra for society’s own unresolved fantasies, including the policing of moral panics against ‘deviant’ sexualities, feminities, masculinities, and civilities. In the memoir , Revathi makes a reflexive move to interrogate trans-kinships not as mythically distant, exceptional, and materially divorced from heterosexism’s heartless manifestations in the everyday, but contingently and angularly at odds and in negotiations with it. Hers is a carefully woven ledger of the weight of interpersonal betrayals (within heterosexual families and trans networks or gharanas), the inhuman costs of breaching tacit cultural honor codes, the brutal pain of being illegible to both loved ones and strangers in moments of violence, and the failure of activism to account for the specificities of Dalit and disabled transfolx. She therefore demonstrates what transness does for the possibilities of living in excess of heteropatriarchy while also living in its crosshairs. Revathi juxtaposes memories and stories of her own coming-of-age and coming-into the life of a well-known transfeminine activist (in India and globally) alongside the lives cut short tragically of her own daughters and sons— the younger transfolx whom she cares for as a trans-mother figure. Extended excruciating testimonies of their (and her) experiences with surgery throw into relief how the biopolitics of transness and regimes of care and kinship are experienced in the folds of bodies and skins. The sharing of these embattled experiences sutures trans lives across generations, showing the radical possibilities of trans-solidarity and sisterhood.
Revathi is attentive to the power of trans-labor, reimagining trans-ness itself as a mode of (queer) labor in the world. Revathi deftly evokes the radical capacities of trans-mothering, where what is at stake is not just the preservation of embodied individual lives, but the survival of an entire community, including its epistemic and existential horizons. She chronicles her work with a variety of activist collectives and NGOs, including crisis intervention and training; the queer archiving of everyday violence; educating transfolx about legal safeguards; negotiating police brutality and injurious economies of sex work; and disseminating information about passports, voter ID-cards, and the updating of birth/death certificates. Here, transness poses a public challenge to the bureaucratic normativities of the state as well as the proprietary logics of bloodlines. Hijra gharanas too are observed as ambivalent spaces for trans activism that often (re)produce the exclusionary scales of erasure in tandem with the wider world. After her nirvanam (the process of getting gender-affirming surgery), Revathi wanted to marry a man, or at least have sex with men. But her community forbade even speaking with men. So, she left her community and joined another Hijra gharana where sex work was permitted. But after she was brutally raped by a local gangster, her new gharana refused to accept her, forcing her to return to her village. But through Revathi’s eyes these variegated spaces become complex and contradictory, neither essentialized nor idealized. All along, we are listening to the voice of an insider who is deeply conscious of her own shifting and intersecting poses.
For Revathi, transness can only be understood intersectionally. She reflects on how even within the trans world, the experiences of Dalits, disabled transfolx, and working-class trans people are often left out of the discussion. Revathi’s activism as a working-class, non English-speaking (non-Dalit) transwoman helps to recuperate the rights and subjectivities of these differentially marginalized trans lives. She argues that the fact that transmen are biologically female makes them uniquely vulnerable to sexual violence, which makes it more difficult for them to leave their families, although here too the risk of domestic violence and abuse is high. Moreover, this gender disparity remains largely unaddressed in the structures intended to support trans people. Revathi writes, “the existence of supportive spaces and structures such as the [Hijra] jamaat and NGOs working in HIV/AIDs prevention is something that is not there for trans men or female to male trans persons.” Revathi details how these erasures are shot-through with sociological and cultural faultlines, like the difficulty transmen face in finding female partners, or arranging for sex-reassignment surgery while navigating the callousness of the healthcare system, and also the psychogenic complications of living as a mis-identified transman on hormone therapy. Here, Revathi intervenes in this erasure by recounting about half-a-dozen stories of transmen told in their own words to her, which she then transcribes and translates as a record and a source of insight. These testimonies serve as a form of trans pedagogy—embracing the capacities of the maternal, archival, historical, and sociological all at once while advocating for the many (queer) possibilities of passionate and compassionate modes of archiving and kin-making.
It is here, in the encounter of translated testimonies in a work that is itself translated, that I became most attentive to the presence of Revathi’s own translator, Nandini Murali. She writes: “This book unfolded as a series of long conversations – spread over six months – between Revathi and me. We spoke in Tamil, our first language.” She then goes on to talk about how translation enabled her to embrace the “pluralism” of difference, and enact “a shared sisterhood.” The same is mirrored, in her own world, by Revathi who painstakingly gathers testimonies of her transfeminine interlocutors. Here, some narrative shifts are abruptly structured and it is not always clear to the Anglophone reader whose translational labor is at work. A little more clarity of context might have helped the reader to draw some conceptual circumferences and to distinctly recognize this text for being both a memoir of Revathi’s remarkable activist trans-life as well as an archive of the intersecting precarities of wider trans becoming in the world. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the literary labor of both Murali and Revathi Amma for making this rich archive of life-stories available in an eminently readable and recognizable form.
Revathi’s robust account deserves to be read by readers of all orientations, sexualities, and proclivities for its storytelling which illuminates the profound complexities of our everyday existence and the abundant ways in which ‘trans’ desires (often altogether unnamed) intersect with quotidian beliefs about family, kinship, divinity, care, pleasure, power, and politics. Readers of various hues will be diversely enriched by the text. Some may read the book particularly for its rich discussions of trans-specific legal hurdles and juridical legislations; others to understand the raw emotional and biopsychosocial resonances of trans lives better; some, for its careful attention to documenting trans histories as distinct from feminist and queer histories; others for its subtle emphasis on the poetry and aesthetics of anti-normative performativity; and, yet others might see this text as a layered archive of everyday trans precarities and possibilities from a part of the world that has (theoretically and legally) been isolated from self-serving and uncritically marked ‘global’ trans/queer discourses, which have ultimately served to consolidate whiteness, ableism and racial privilege. All will leave enriched, their sense of the possible expanded.
Nikhil Pandhi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. A sociocultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of racialization, decolonization, sexuality, caste and health from India, he completed his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University. He is an award-winning translator of the forthcoming anthology, Love in the Time of Caste (2025, Zubaan books).
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