Hey Transgender India Community.

Trigger Warning: This is a sensitive topic and it might mention multiple trigger points such as mental & physical abuse, sex, mental health, suicide, death etc.

People who have been active here or any other online trans spaces all know that there there definitely a lot of people who tell us that they want to join the Hijra community as a part of guru chella system.

I wanted to discuss the ethics and reasons, if or not we should help them and alternatives.

Before I tell you my thoughts on the matter, let me list out the reason why people want to join the community:

Social support
transition support (finance and knowledge)
no minimum qualification required
wider network/availability to be able to run away and restart their life.
dysphoria and urgency
place to stay and food to eat after running away

I have been working as a volunteer/activist/event organizer or whatever you want to call it for nearly two years now, and the thing that motivated me to do it was a incident where a queer teen unalived themselves, hence I want to prevent that from happening.

With that said, I for one am leaning more towards helping them find the community they want.

If we are speaking pure ethics, we cannot in good conscience recommend people to join the community because we know that it can be exploitative and abusive. Which is why all activists now a days suggest people to finish their education and try getting a job, and obviously I do believe that should be the first option as well.

However, when a person is reaching out and asking regarding joining the community, it is possible that they are in that dire circumstance to do that, ofcourse they might have considered education route themselves.

Most trans people have dysphoria and among them some people have it so extreme that it feels like a do or die situation for them. Trans people often are drop outs due to bullying and dysphoria, depression, not everyone knows how to google or what to google, or even how to learn.

It really just seems easy to lean into the already existing system for mental comfort. So, i do believe we need to educate people on the difficulties faced by the Hijra community and let them make an informed decision on their life. I believe this will reduce suicides on the very least.