‘Confronting my demons’
It was emotionally turbulent for me to step into my school, Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, after 20 years, as a panelist at the Hyderabad Literary Festival. After graduating from HPS, I hope my revelation embolden survivors of structural violence to speak up. Not being cisgender, it was quite a nightmare for me at HPS as a child struggling with her transidentity. Being a gender dysphoric child, I’d express my gender identity from time to time; sometimes with kohl and sometimes with lip gloss, sometimes with a “girly schoolbag” and sometimes with nail polish. I used to get violently bullied, groped by male seniors in hostel and senior day scholars who would often physically harm and sexually violate, denude, rape and coercively penetrate me in the pretext of ragging. Pencils, erasers and chalk pieces were pushed up my posterior and if I resisted or screamed for help I was ruthlessly kicked on my genitals.
After dragging me out of the hostel on wintry nights and stripping me nude, they’d make me do frog jumps. At 12 to 14 years of age, I didn’t even know what I was up against, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the language to express and all I knew was that it was utterly frightening. Some of the day scholars were sons and grandsons of MPs, MLAs and Union Ministers whose daddies and grandpas, were grand donors and patrons of the school. On another occasion, a teacher who spoke up against one of those betas and pothas of mantris (ministers) and vidhaayaks (legislators) was played with hockey sticks by a bunch of goons who pulled up in vans. This incident was in the public domain as it was widely reported in the newspapers then.
Often, I used to feel rotten and some friends in another section were my big escape from the transmisogyny so entrenched in the system. I used to look forward to those breaks with them and would go running to them all to escape that violence. My
Not being cisgender, it was nightmare for me at HPS as a child struggling with her transidentity
assailants would threaten, “Bas**** bhen****, if you dare complain to anyone, we will storm into your home, ra** and parade your mum nu** on the streets and hang her on a pole through her va****. We’ll slit your dad’s throat!”
Ragging was not criminalised in the statute books those days. It was criminalised the first time ONLY in the state of Tamil Nadu in 1997 after the murder of Pon Navarasu. It slowly began getting criminalised in India around the late ’90s across SOME states after some more brutal murders. Four years later in 2001, the Supreme Court criminalised ragging throughout India through a historic and a watershed judgement. Those days and perhaps even now, when a child complains of ragging, people call the child a coward, and a sissy. Similarly, when a transchild complains of it, she/he/they are blamed for their “gender non-conformity”. Unfortunately for me, HPS Begumpet was quite a cesspool of sexual violence, transphobia, transmisogyny and violent and virulent forms of cisnormativity and patriarchy. Although very late, I found some peace and I confronted the demons of my past head-on with something as small as setting foot on my school’s soil.
Ragged mercilessly while studying at Hyderabad Public School, LGBT activist Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli shares her harrowing tale
At the pretext of bullying, I used to get violently groped by male seniors and day scholars
Being a gender dysphoric child, I’d express my gender identity from time to time; sometimes with kohl and sometimes with lip gloss, sometimes with a “girly schoolbag” and sometimes with nail polish