Bhubaneswar: Sridevi was all of 13 when she ran away from her home in Warangal in central Telangana to escape the daily violence inflicted on her for asserting her identity as a trans woman. She tried to start a new life in Secunderabad, an unknown city full of unfamiliar faces, but realised that her troubles had just begun. She longed for a home of her own.
Two years later, her family found her and took her back to Warangal, and the violence resumed. Soon after, she escaped again, pledging to never return.
In the years that followed, the teenager begged on trains, took to sex work, and slept on railway platforms and footpaths. Faced with starvation, she realised that she had to return home – not to live with her family but demand a slice of the ancestral property that was rightfully hers.
When she returned home at 18, she asked her father for her share in the ancestral property.
“We are five siblings and I had always been told that the land my father owned would be divided equally. But when I went home, the land had already been divided amongst my siblings; I had no share. They then told me that the house we grew up in was in my name. I was happy – I thought I had something to fall back on when I was in need,” says Sridevi, now 60.
But even this assurance was short-lived.
“It was a lie. It was never in my name and I trusted everybody. The house belongs to my brother’s children now. I have nothing to reminisce about with my parents, nothing to carry forward from them,” she says. Sridevi, who makes a living performing ritual songs, now lives in a corner of a 2-bedroom house she shares with 10 others in Hyderabad.
“Par tab akal nahi thi na…ladne ki, toh kuchh nahi kar payi. Ab baccho me akal hai aur unhe khud ke liye ladna chahiye (back then we did not have the brains to fight for our rights. But the generation now is better aware and should stand up for itself),” she says.
Like Sridevi, most transgender persons are forced to leave their natal homes in the face of non-acceptance, discrimination, abandonment and at times, harassment. Often they are inducted into the guru-chela system and live with other members from the community.
Transgender persons find it hard to get rented accommodation, as queerbeat had outlined in an investigative report published in Behanbox, with landlords and housing societies either outright hostile or exploitative. Property ownership and safe accommodation for transgender persons thus become vital for the prevention of discrimination and harassment directed towards them.
Studies have also shown that property ownership improves a person’s social standing. As trangender persons routinely face issues like limited income, unavailability of jobs and housing restrictions, owning a property which translates to financial security, becomes essential.
A transgender person’s gender identity does not match the sex assigned at birth and the category includes trans men, trans women, persons with intersex variations, gender-queers, and persons with socio-cultural identities, such as kinnars and hijras. According to the 2011 Census, India has 487,803 transgender persons, the number however can be an undercount. Sex related data in the Census is represented in the binary format of male and female and the rest are tagged as ‘others’. But those with transgender, intersex and other non-binary identities are excluded from the representation.
In the landmark NALSA judgement of 2014, the Supreme Court observed that the exclusion of transgender persons in inheritance and succession laws is against the principles of equality enshrined in the Constitution. It attributed the existing inequality to two major reasons – the binary notion of gender and the difficulty in identifying successors. Inheritance rights of transgender persons are not mentioned in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 nor in the succession laws. Most civil rights, including succession, inheritance and property rights have been organised along gender binaries. This divide is also reflected in policies.
Interviews with transgender persons show that they are denied a fair share of their property rights by families because of gender binary notions of inheritance, social stigma and long years of dissociation between trans persons and their families. Despite all this, there is a longing among trans persons to return to their roots.