DEALING WITH PAIN
Urmi Jadhav was raised by her paternal grandmother in a Mumbai chawl, after her mother died when she was two. All through childhood, she was bullied and harassed for being an effeminate boy. “Even my teachers would scold me,” she says. With her grandmother, she had an unspoken understanding. “She knew I identified more as female. She would see me putting on kajal, and never stop me,” Jadhav says.
Jadhav says she was a good student, but the harassment took a toll. “I started making excuses to skip school. My grades began falling.” Jadhav failed her class 10 exam, dropped out of the system and joined the hijra community in Mumbai. “It was on the streets that I learnt to respect myself,” she says.
Four years later, at 20, she joined the NGO Humsafar Trust as an outreach worker. “It was there that I began transitioning. The confidence that gave me was very empowering. I met others who had faced physical and sexual abuse and started working to help them. I realised that I was not alone.”
One of the most challenging aspects of becoming a woman, she says, is not being accepted as one by other women.
Loving and losing has been another big challenge. “It was when I was transitioning that I fell in love for the first time. It was a great feeling,” she says. Their love story ended after six years; he married another girl.
“It took me months to get over the heartbreak. But it also made me stronger,” says the 40-something Jadhav. “The thing about women is that they might be more emotional, but they also heal faster… maybe because they just have so much more to handle,” she says.