Pune: Members of LGBTI community share their experiences at #Inside Out panel discussion

“Being judgmental is unethical and we wanted to step up awareness about the LGBTQ community among our members,” said Bhavna Mayur, one of the club’s founder members.

The panel was anchored by Nupur Pittie, with ACP Bhanupratap Barge as a special guest.

Trinay, who is a trans man, said that being born a woman was a suffocating feeling as his brain was wired to think like a man. “In the third standard, I used to wonder why I was wearing a girl’s uniform. The worst was still to come as a teenager when I started getting my periods. All this disturbed me a lot and the doctors did not make my life any easier. They told my parents that I had a woman’s hormones and some psychiatrists said I was abnormal,” said Trinay.

While Vijaya and Trinay’s lives have been dominated by suicidal thoughts because of the ridicule they faced due to their trans woman and trans man identities, for transgender Payal aka Rahul Khalade, it was a matter of moving out of his house and being accepted by the transgender community. “We sing and dance at weddings, but if there is any job vacancy, please contact me,” said Payal, who was dressed in a bright saree with a large bindi adorning her forehead.

Bindu Madhav Khire, founder of Samapathik Trust, a men’s sexual health organisation that works primarily with the LGBTI community, and its project coordinator, Anil Ukrande, spoke about their struggles in coming out as gay men.

Khire, who is a computer science engineer and author, came out a long time ago when there was no internet or easy access to information. “I was studying engineering but my time was spent searching medical books in libraries to understand why I had a different sexual orientation. I was academically strong and my parents failed to understand why I had failed in 10 subjects. This was a long time ago and after I went to the US, I found Indian gay groups. Still, I was depressed for a long time and the worst mistake that I made was getting married. It ended in divorce within a year,” said Khire. On his return from the US, he set up the Samapathik Trust and has been working for the welfare of the LGBTI community since then.

Sharing his experiences, Anil Ukrande spoke of the happiness in the gay community when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was struck down. Shraddha, who is a cisgender queer (cisgender relates specifically to gender rather than sexuality. A person can be cisgender and have any sort of sexuality), also shared her experiences and urged people to be happy as they are.