‘How can you be raped?’ Doctor’s words to transgender in India an example of the ‘transphobia’ that stops many getting health care
Health staff show ignorance, hatred or fear of patients who are transgender, despite it being officially recognised as India’s third gender. Many self-medicate rather than seeking health care, and suicide rates are high
Eleven years ago, Sohini Boral, a 29-year-old transgender woman, visited a government-run hospital in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata for consultation for a persistent fever. When she joined the women’s queue to buy a token, she was pushed away. The men, too, did not allow her to stand with them.
“I was 17, and had just started expressing my femininity by keeping my hair long and wearing women’s clothes and nail polish,” recalls Boral, who now works as a strategic information assistant at Amitie Trust, a network set up to improve the lives of sexual minorities, in Serampore, some 30km (18 miles) from Kolkata.
When she entered the doctor’s room, he unabashedly ran his eyes up and down her body and asked, “Why are you dressed like this?”
“I like to see myself in this get-up,” she told him.
“OK, sit for a while. Let’s talk about this. I want to know more about you. We could get to your fever later,” he said.
“And his very next question was, ‘What kind of genitals do you have?’” Boral says.
“That was enough. I left his room, shocked and traumatised by his behaviour,” she says. Boral never went to a hospital again in the next six years she was in Kolkata. She self-medicated for fever, stomach pain and allergies.
