Mumbai:
Although born in a male body, Revathi who always considered herself a woman and even underwent a sex reassignment surgery to reaffirm her sexuality has landed in an identity crisis all in the name of a driver's license. Her unique driver's license sports two names and no gender specification.
"I finally had my driving license. The license did not specify whether I was male or female. Instead it referred to me as 'Revathi who is Doraisamy', says A Revathi whose autobiography '
The Truth About me: A hijra life story' has been released recently.
Born as Doraisamy, the youngest son of a lorry driver from Namakkal in Tamil Nadu's Salem district, she went for a discreet sex change surgery in her early twenties and rechristened herself as Revathi.
On the grounds of being a trans-gender, the driving license inspector had initially refused to accept her application and had agreed to do the needful only after Revathi agreed to bribe him.
"To get my license under the name of Revathi, I had to go through all this. It was exhausting, and worse, what ought to have cost me a hundred fifty rupees set me back by two thousand rupees," she says.
Even to get the legitimate share of her father's property, she had to sign her name as Doraisamy. However, after a prolonged battle for gender identity, her ration card and passport now recognises her to be a woman.
"Don't we want all those rights that are granted to other citizens: the right to have a ration card, to hold property, the right to work, to marry, adopt or raise a child," she writes in the book sharing her treacherous emotional journey seeking a life of dignity and fulfillment.
Recounting her teenage days of bewilderment arising from gender non-conformity, she says, "Why did I love men? Was I mad? Was I the only one who felt this way? Or were there others like me, elsewhere in the world?".
"I had to live in the midst of people who did not understand me. I wondered if there would ever be someone who understands me," says Revathi in the first of its kind book to be written by the one belonging to the third sex.
Facing alienation from her family and the mainstream society, she bonded quickly with the
hijra community.
Writing about her new-found guru in the
hijra community, she says, "I had known her only for a day, but I felt towards her as I did towards my birth mother; in fact I felt even more torn about her, so natural did all of it seem to me."