Sometimes, we wrest joy and humour even from moments that could cause pain.

Alice once realised she was wearing a dress while she was enroute to the airport. When she reached, the security personnel who reviewed her passport said, “Madam, this is your husband’s.” Worried about missing her flight, Alice showed them an official identity card relating to her law enforcement work. The mood shifted immediately. “Oh, undercover mein ho?” [Oh, are you undercover?] said the officer.

Alice has learnt to negotiate such straight readings of her queer identity, and even find some amusement in them. She is not alone. This idea of being thought of as “undercover”—where people accept that others deviate from what they consider ordinary, but do not understand them—is a common experience for queer folks.

Last year, when all of Ritash’s cousins got together, one remarked that Ritash had always been a “tomboy.” Ritash sports closely-cropped hair and wears clothes that could be construed as androgynous. Ritash laughed it off then, but wondered out loud during our conversation if they did so because it was the easiest response.

Ritash’s family perceives their relationship with their partner, whom they married in a ritual-free wedding more than two decades ago, as strange. Their partner, a queer trans person who was assigned male at birth, does not have a transgressive gender presentation. “I think we are seen as strange less because of that and more because we are an openly agnostic couple who have chosen not to have children,” Ritash said. They followed up with a quip about their and their partners’ asexual identities. “We are a neurodivergent couple who’ve seemingly ‘ace-d’ our ‘queerelationship!’”

Nevertheless, incorrect readings have yielded inadvertent allies for Ritash and Alice. For Rumi Harish—a Hindustani singer, playwright, and trans activist—accidental subversion is a recurring feature of the art form he practices, and a source of private delight. 

Khayal, a widely-performed genre of Hindustani classical music, frequently encompasses queer ideas, Rumi told me. “We are always complaining about the mother-in-law not letting the bahu [daughter-in-law] meet her clandestine lover—which will be a woman most of the time,” he said. Often, straight artists render these lesbian compositions beautifully, despite being inattentive to their import. “I’ll be sitting and laughing, thinking, ‘they don’t know what they’re trying to say,’” Rumi said.

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It is impossible to talk about trans joy without talking of the very source that sustains it: community. 

A few years ago, as the isolation of a semi-closeted life wreaked havoc with Alice’s mental health, her therapist urged her to build chosen families—spaces in which she could thrive as herself.

Alice asked a former colleague to connect her with queer networks and began attending in-person queer support circles. “We talk about books, we talk about movies, we write our thoughts into poems, and we talk about them; we write letters to people we hate, and then we burn those letters there,” Alice said, “It’s very cathartic in that way.” 

Through these support groups, Alice forged friendships that offered new possibilities. “I realised that suddenly, the world is so different when you ask for queer support,” she said. Such spaces offer trans people respite from the hostility of cis-normative society.

The same sense of community was palpable in my conversation with Rumi, who turned 51-years-old on the day we spoke over a long video call. Friends breezed in and out, some even popped into the screen to greet me amid the merry cacophony. I worried about intruding on the celebrations. “No, this is how the house is everyday,” Rumi said. He co-owns his home in Bengaluru with Sunil Mohan, a well-known trans rights activist who is Rumi’s former partner and closest friend. Sunil’s mother and Rumi’s father stay with them too.

Over the last several decades, Rumi and Sunil have been active members of queer collectives in south Indian states. They have engaged in crisis intervention work institutionally and independently. This has meant helping people access safe spaces, mental-health support, as well as gender-affirming healthcare. Late last year, Sunil won the Kamla Bhasin award for gender equality in South Asia.  

Although neither Sunil nor Rumi do crisis intervention work as frequently anymore, their home is a hearth for local queers.“It’s a space where you can even come for a residency type, you can chill here, we’ll pamper you, you can do what you want, write, or read, or whatever,” Rumi said, “Sometimes nobody will be there, sometimes there will be lots of friends, sometimes poetry sessions will be there, sometimes we’ll be singing.”

Rumi’s own journey is testament to the power of allyship. He began training in Hindustani music when he was six-years-old. Since gendered expectations tend to loom over the classical music community, he was coached into respectable girlhood. As his fame increased, so did the discomfort of performing the role of a well-mannered conformist. He routinely showed up to concerts in kurtas and jeans instead of the traditional saris imposed on ‘female’ singers.
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Rumi moved out of his parents’ household, which he described as being a “traditional type of Brahmin family,” in his early thirties.  His mother, a sculptor, defied caste and gender norms, but only to a certain extent. When Rumi left home, he sought to reject all aspects of not just the gender he had been assigned, but also his Brahmin identity. 

For more than a year, Rumi stayed in the home of Du Saraswathi—a celebrated poet, playwright, and Dalit activist who considers the community and the self to be twin constituencies. After he left, Rumi drifted between the homes of his friends with a backpack and all his bare essentials in tow. He used a bike to travel, and the commute allowed him time to practice his music. “I always had accidents,” Rumi told me, with a grin, “Whenever Sunil saw me, one or the other part of the body would have a plaster.” 

In 2020, when Rumi was in his late-forties, he opted for a gender transition surgery. Rumi was hesitant to admit that he wanted to transition, but his friends helped him arrive at the decision. Sunil, who was with Rumi when we spoke, recalled telling him, “You have lived almost your entire life on their terms, now also if you don’t want to assert yourself…then the loss is for you.” Rumi’s friends took care of him during his recovery post-op. They nurtured him as he navigated the loss of his mother, who died soon after the surgery.
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The transition altered Rumi’s voice. After a dedicated practice that had spanned more than three decades, he suddenly found himself unable to sing. The experience left him severely depressed. He sought the help of fellow musicians to work with the new texture of his voice. Some stepped up. Celebrated artists such as TM Krishna, MD Pallavi, Rajeev Taranath, and Samarth Nagarkar offered him guidance.

Rumi worried about the impact that his transition would have on his career, even apart from the physical changes. But he had staked professional success for his principles earlier too. In his mid-thirties, when Rumi performed at a concert organised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—the ideological fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—he sang only Sufi compositions. “I realised my music career stopped the day I took a risk to challenge the RSS,” Rumi said. Besides, he was already being sidelined from the big sabhas because he wasn’t married and was openly queer.

Jaunpuri Khayal, Rumi’s autobiography, which is narrated by him and written by queer Kannada poet Dadapeer Jyman, is full of stories such as these. Rumi was initially reluctant to memorialise his journey. But his friends were persistent. He decided to tell his story by honouring the people who shaped it. “I live a politics of social justice, a politics of love, a politics of human rights,” Rumi told me. 

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Where rejection can cause deep hurt, the healing of generational fissures is a welcome salve.

For over three decades, S, a 54-year-old project manager based in Hyderabad, remained estranged from their family. Then, younger relatives pushed for change. S, who was assigned male at birth, identifies as non-binary. 

A few years ago, S’s family members rudely recounted an incident from their teenage years—S had been discovered kissing a boy and was severely punished for it. S’s twin nieces, both in their twenties, spoke up in dissent. They reached out to S later. “It started out with them helping me get back in touch with a few less extreme members of the family. But they have become my best friends,” S told me.

S is introverted. They attend online queer events sometimes, but are mostly content in the company of their nieces. “I love spending time with them,” S said, “My nieces were the first people I came out to as non-binary. They’ve helped me feel comfortable in my skin.”

This is evident in S’s changing relationship with their body. At the boys’ school that S studied in, sports and fitness were ways to exert hyper masculinity; they were often bullied when they did not participate. With their nieces’ encouragement, S is beginning to embrace exercise as a form of daily movement instead. “I’ve been enjoying lifting weights at home,” they said.

Ritash too has found allies in the adult children of their much older cousins. “I’ve been very open about my identity with them, and there’s been this fantastic and immediate acceptance,” they said. Although Ritash shares an affectionate bond with their cousins, they continue to be guarded around them.

Ritash is active in online queer groups and among the co-founders of RANG Foundation—a pan-India grassroots collective of and for queer people, through which they offer mental health support, legal referrals, and converse with queer persons from diverse backgrounds. (I was invited for one of these conversations two months ago.). “Many of my closest friends are much younger than me,” Ritash added, “I think that’s very queer!”

As trans people, we are often made to be—or have to choose to be—illegible, which makes it difficult to trace our trans lineage unless we search for it, through cracks, pauses, and resonances. When I said so to S, they said that this discovery was much like magic, echoing a quote by the writer Roald Dahl: “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

It is akin to magic, this defiant pursuit of happiness, community, and a joyous future. As a post I had once seen on the microblogging platform, Tumblr, went—“Everything is a transgender allegory, except for being transgender, which is about being alive.” 

Alice finds joy in dressing up to grab a nice meal with her friends, in modelling, in working with government authorities to better queer lives. For Rumi, joy is in the everyday. It lies in desire, music, friends, and making art. To S, it’s game nights with their nieces and building relationships with new people. For Ritash, it is the ability to affirm asexual happiness through their writing, activism, and peer counselling.

Then there is the joy of realising that we never really stop becoming. A close friend of mine, who is in her fifties, took an interest in the conversations I was having with older trans people. She asked if genderfluid people always understood their identities as flexible. Perhaps the experience preceded its articulation, I responded. I asked her what prompted her sudden interest. “It’s not sudden,” she said. A slow, brilliant smile spread across her face.

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This story is supported Mariwala Health Initiative.