Some could afford to pay private tutors to help with their education. Though they were all capable and working hard at their studies, their different backgrounds had an impact on their success. I was in a classroom, helping teach young men and women from different backgrounds. I was living in an idealistic bubble until I started volunteering when I was 17.
It was the rose-tinted version of absolute equality. My first understanding of equality started with a history text in high school. Tinder lists 37 gender options for its users to choose from. Being a spectrum, gender is far beyond the binary – male, female, transgender binary, transgender non-binary, agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, gender questioning and so on. Gender, a social construct that has nothing to do with sex, is fundamentally about what one chooses to identify as. One can be born with male, female or intersex anatomy. I’ve learned that neither gender nor sex is binary. The “third gender” as it was known, was presented as an aberration. I was aware of the hijra transgender community in India as I was growing up, but they have been ostracised from society and portrayed as comic relief and caricatures in films and TV. There was never dialogue about what the two terms actually meant. In India most of the forms I fill out use sex and gender interchangeably. I realised that gender is not water tight and that those who identify as male are also vulnerable to abuse and gendered oppression – particularly when there are other elements to their identity that put them outside the so-called norm. He was sexually abused and taunted for his sexual orientation when he came out at the beginning of high school. He told me that in his younger years, he was bullied for not conforming to what a boy was supposed to be. It started with a conversation with a high schooler who identified as gay. Slowly I’ve realised that gender and the fight for gender equality is not binary. When I was younger I ignorantly believed an oversimplified version of gender equality: that men and women were all that constituted gender.
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