Sensitise teachers on transgender issues
By the time she was four or five, says Ranjita Sinha, she knew she wasn’t like other kids at her all-boys school. She didn’t want to play sport, preferring instead to dance and sing. “There was no word for me back then,” she says on the phone from West Bengal where she runs a shelter for transgender people. “They called me ‘half lady’ and bullied me endlessly.”
Sinha now identifies as female and survived the torment largely because of family support. But the bullying of transgender kids is routine despite the Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA judgment that recognises the “third gender” as equal citizens. In 2017, the National Human Rights Commission found that 82% of transgenders in four Uttar Pradesh districts had never been to school or had dropped out before class 10.
The first-ever training manual to sensitise teachers to different gender orientations has the potential to set right a historic wrong. Sadly, the 115-page Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and
Roadmaps has been mired in controversy after it was uploaded on the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) website and taken off a week later, as reported by Fareeha Iftikhar of this paper.
Issued in the wake of 2020’s New Education Policy that envisages a Gender Inclusion Fund for girls as well as transgender students, the manual is designed to integrate transgender kids in an environment free of stereotypes. It defines the diversity of the population from intersex to gender non-conforming, and recommends the addition of gender-neutral toilets and uniforms.
Critics of the manual, most notably but not limited to the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), seem to have missed one crucial fact over fears of moral pollution: It is written for adult teachers and not their pupils.
Many objections are so poorly worded that they are incomprehensible. “The idea of creating removing [sic] binaries shall deny them equal rights of children of diverse biological needs,” writes NCPCR chairperson Priyank Kanoongo to the NCERT director in a letter with the subject line “conspiring to traumatize school students in the name of gender sensitization” – a phrase taken from former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak Vinay Joshi who also complained.
“The objections are in such vague language that you really wonder what they are,” says Nilakshi Roy, a retired English professor and mother of a queer child who started an online petition asking NCERT to retain the manual. Schools should be safe spaces for kids with diverse identities. Very often, teachers themselves are ill-informed and, so, are incapable of protecting children from discrimination. “We need to educate the educators,” says LGBTQI activist Harish Iyer.
Who better to impart this education than the community itself? “You can’t succumb to transphobic people,” says Ranjita Sinha. “You have to involve the stakeholders.”
India’s laws and the highest court have provided the direction. The challenge is to get its institutions to fall in line with the law.