On the first day of my job, I saw her.
In a cute blue striped shirt and palazzo pants, wearing a fabulous dark maroon lipstick with a metallic tint. I was struck by her flair and confidence, even if she was just screening resumes on her computer.
The only trans-person in the team.
“Omg, I want to be her,” I told myself.
In a few months, A and I were good friends. I got to know about her journey, her choices, her taste in music, how she always wore pastels. We celebrated our birthdays together, went out shopping, and were there for each other even after office hours.
I had not seriously considered the idea of transitioning till then. I had thought of myself as a woman only within the four walls of my room, never knowing how to let it out.
Being with her made me realise how badly I wanted to transition. There was joy in the freedom of being true to yourself.
Soon, I gathered courage to “come out” in my office – as Rochelle.
The previous night, I shopped for clothes and kajal, rushed back home and tried them on. I was nervous when I sent the picture to A.
“Mashallah, Rochelle,” was her first reaction.
It gave me the strength to stride into the office in my maroon-violet half-kurti and formal pants, kajal in my eyes and my heels click-clacking. I felt welcomed by my team, in a different way, in a way that they truly celebrated me. I asked them to call me Rochelle.
Their responses were of encouragement, of celebration and respect. To my surprise, they also assured me their support and a patient ear if I needed to vent.
That social transition helped me muster the mental energy and courage to let go of the stares and confused looks from strangers.
It was the feeling of turning a new chapter in a book.
Often people ask me, ‘When did you first feel you were a woman?’ The answer is always, ‘Since childhood’.
I never wanted to be a man. To be a woman is what I know, is what I always knew, without a doubt.
At the all-boys school I attended, I got bullied for being effeminate. I was not very good at sports. For me, the thrill came in dancing and singing or even participating in speech competitions.
I remember in Class 9, a classmate telling me, “What will you do when some men enter your house and take your wife bro? How will you protect her?”
I had no answer, but I always had doubts. Why do I need to meet certain parameters to be a man?
I never understood the psyche of a boy. I could relate to the things that only girls did. Accepting and nurturing that inner girl started from childhood – and through the freedom that I found during afternoons.
Naptime for the rest of the family allowed me to dive into my diva self, with my mom’s dupatta and lipstick.
While boys of our age loved running around in the sunny playground, my neighbour Aman and I got lost in the swirl of dupattas and our favourite game – Didi-Didi.
One day I would dress up as the good, sanksari didi, and the next as the style didi, with too much make up and a mufatt, brassy attitude. Sometimes one of us became the baby of the house and the other the harried mom.
To me, these characters held some hidden truth. The inner self in me wanted to be someone’s didi one day, flaring the pallu of her saree extravagantly. These characters made me believe my inner self is much more than my body.
In Class 10, I ended up joining a Jesuit seminary. It was less about a call of faith and more to do with me escaping a system that constantly made demands of me – boys don't wear pink, boys don't cry, be a man.
Coming from a religious Catholic family, where both mom and dad are regular church goers, I could not but conceal my feminine nature. That’s the power of religion or rather an ideology that punishes us for straying from the norm.
The one thing that made me happy about church was to wear the outfit of altar boys, the white cassock. The experience made me wonder. Perhaps I will be a complete woman in my next life and not this one.
The priests failed to acknowledge the complexities of raising a teenager with gender-bending thoughts and feelings. They taunted me for the way I walked, and asked me to dribble on the football field like the other boys.
It was not until I entered college – St Joseph's College, Bangalore – that I could see a way out of the gender binary.
We had some madly cool professors, who could flush out boredom from a class with a conversation about cows, who wore striking saris and organised panels on the scrapping of Section 377. I was a shy queer kid myself, but seeing queer folks being on a panel in college, made me realise how powerful it is to be oneself, especially when everything around you tends to manipulate you to see yourself in a way that does not align with your truth.
Education gave me what rightly was mine.
I came out to my close friends in college, I started wearing more floral clothes, I went for my first queer event. It was rejuvenating to be among the folks who shared similar feelings of belonging. Rainbow became my new comfort; and friends my new family. I started modelling. I remember the day I painted my lips red, wore a nose ring and went to the pub. And I have never stopped.
Until I joined college, I had longed for fulfilling companions, or allies who can understand my innermost desires. But the pain of losing networks, of being pitied or considered a disgrace always made me crawl back to my room.
That desire never went away.
When I was winding down my Master’s degree, I applied to a few inclusive organisations. One of them was Godrej Properties. I cracked the interviews online and travelled to Mumbai on the same day I finished my viva. Oh, the excitement of going to a new city, a big city. And to have an opportunity to finally be myself.
It was at this workplace that I found a culture that genuinely welcomed people from the queer community, and allowed them to be “exactly what you want to be”. It was here that I found A.
Exactly a year later, I decided I wanted to become the woman I am. I decided to transition.
It’s been more than a year now that I have been on hormone replacement therapy and the journey has been a mixed one.
You start living another life, you develop different habits and schedules, which your body has not imagined in the last 28 years. But you do you because you have learnt to prioritise yourself before anyone else.
Transitioning is not always easy or euphoric, I have realised.
Your body and your mind are going on different journeys, and you are trying to understand both, pay heed to both. There are days where I still question myself and feel completely lost. Am I doing this right? Do I need this pain? There is stress and anxiety lurking everywhere. You don't really relate to the womanhood that you see on TV shows, or in your female colleagues at work.
But there are moments I feel damn euphoric about the smallest things – when I get addressed as ‘madam’ or called ‘maladay’ by a few Hinge boys. It is a wonderful thing to be seen, to be acknowledged and to be called as someone of your gender.
But let’s not belittle the days where you feel anxious even to step out of the house, when you have to deal with the exhaustion of dressing up or putting make-up every day, or even dealing with the unsaid pressure of passing as a cis-woman. I think these things need to be spoken of, so that it helps us and fellow trans-persons who are embracing their journeys of transition.
Along the way, I realised something that helped me to be kinder to myself.
If you are transitioning medically, your body is now a baby again, learning to change. I am 29 now and I started my HRT 15 months ago. So, my inner self is yet a one-year-old baby girl, who is trying to navigate the changes within and outside.
If you are 33 and started to transition three years ago, treat yourself like a three-year-old and not an adult. That’s the patience we require while we transition.
Today while I look back, I wonder why I had never paid attention to the possibilities of me embracing my true self in public, how I never allowed the actual magic of being myself, despite all odds and challenges.
On difficult days, I think, if I can face this much of it, then why not face a little more every day with sass, energy and grit. I think of Lana Del Ray and what she says in one of her songs, “It’s never too late to be what you wanna be, to say what you wanna say..”
And then I put on my make-up, my best floral dress, line my eyes with kajal and step out to claim the world.
