At New Delhi’s first transgender salon, men born as women find freedom at last
- La Beauté & Style salon is about more than providing work and skills for an underprivileged community. It is a way of educating society, of helping cis-people understand that transgender people are ‘just, well, people’
- The team includes India’s first transgender man bodybuilder, a famous rights activist, a receptionist scarred by his past and a beautician who worked as a secret milkman for years to earn enough money for sex-reassignment therapy
The salon is a first for New Delhi. It is owned by a transgender duo and staffed entirely by transgender men – people who were assigned the female gender at birth but identify as male.
Its co-founder Aryan Pasha is a lawyer, activist, and India’s first transgender man bodybuilder. Pasha opened the parlour with his life partner Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a famous trans rights activist he met in 2015, to give transgender people a safe and inclusive place to earn a living.
Pasha’s parents supported his transition, but most transgender folks he meets have faced ostracisation and abuse for their identity, even from family. He said he saw first-hand the discrimination most transgender people faced while house-hunting and looking for work.
“Either landlords would stop calling when they learned we were a transgender couple, or they would ask for three to four times the normal rent.”