Is Bollywood really inclusive in their trans representation?

Should only trans actors play trans characters?

In the upcoming film Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Manu, a buff pony-tailed gym instructor, falls hard for a Zumba teacher named Maanvi only to discover the truth about her gender that sends him reeling. If Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan was meant to mainstream gay love in India, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui is tipped to do the same for transgender romance. Ayushmaan Khurrana, the lead in both films, called CKA a "beautiful, progressive love story that will also touch your hearts." Whether it touches the box office also remains to be seen, but it has drawn flak because of its casting. While Khurrana plays the muscle boy Manu, Maanvi is played by Vaani Kapoor, not a trans actor.

"The only good thing is it is usually done by a cis-hetero male, and now for a change, it is done by a cishet female," laughs Living Smile Vidya aka Smiley, trans and Dalit rights activist, actor and writer. She is right. Until now, that trans role has usually been the preserve of men—Paresh Rawal in Tamanna, Sadashiv Amrapukar in Sadak, Riddhi Sen in Nagarkirtan, Vijay Sethupathi in Super Deluxe and the latest entrant to the club, Akshay Kumar in Laxmi. What annoys Smiley is it's always treated as a role to show off one's acting chops. "They always claim they did so much homework," she says. "Remember Dawn of the Planet of the Apes? There Helena Bonham Carter and the actors practised with a monkey trainer to walk on four legs, jump like an ape, speak like a monkey. It feels like these people are doing the same thing."

There's a reason why a Vaani Kapoor is playing Maanvi, though. In this case, like Kukoo in Sacred Games (played by Kubbra Sait), the character has to pass as a cishet woman. The easiest way to do that is to get a cishet woman to play her. Anubhuti Banerjee, founder of Wings, the LGBT employee resource group at Tata Steel, says the story, as suggested by the trailer, isn't that far fetched. "A lot of trans women do want the life where they can pass and want to fall in love, as a woman. That story needs to be told. It would just have been better if it was told by a transperson with that experience."

But she says that conversation about representation is in its early days here. For example, Eddie Redmayne, who won international acclaim for playing a trans character in The Danish Girl, now says he would not take that role now because there are trans actors who can do it. Likewise, Scarlett Johansson, who famously said she could play any "person, tree or animal", turned down a transgender role after pushback, as did Halle Berry.

A way to earn brownie points

In India, trans visibility in popular culture has come a long way from the hijras as comic relief or hijra as kidnapper tropes. It's not just in films. This year Bhima Jewellers won kudos for its advertisement that featured a trans woman coming into her own and being married off by a supportive family. Most heartening, the model in the ad, Meera Singhania Rehani, was herself, trans. Earlier, Dabur put out a heart-warming ad about a transmother seen through the eyes of her adopted daughter.

But do these stories do more for the corporations, winning them brownie points for being progressive, than for the trans community itself? In a recent post on the LGBTQI+ website Gaysi, trans man (a far more invisibilized community than trans women), Aryan Pasha says that he has stopped giving interviews to fitness platforms as a bodybuilder. "Everyone wants a piece of my story, but nobody wants to fund me. They want to use me to appear progressive, but they fail to put their money where theirmouth is," says Pasha. But Parmesh Shahani, author of Queeristan and LGBTQ workplace inclusion advocate, says, "We should never underestimate the power of popular media. It makes conversations happen about inclusion in our homes and workplaces." More importantly, says Smiley, it also makes her feel "seen by these companies as a customer and client. So far, we have been invisible.

A Vicious Cycle

Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui might bring transgender issues to the mainstream, which is welcome, but will it bring into focus the real day to day struggles of the trans community like the transgender sensitive teachers training manual that was dropped like a hot potato by the NCERTafter protests?

The debate over representation in India gets trapped in a vicious circle where one side says, "Where's the trans actor who can headline a film?" And the other side says, "How will that ever happen if you never give one a chance?" Shahani hopes that the filmmakers at least "collaborated with trans writers and trans organisations to ensure that the representation is meaningful" because "media about queer lives need to be made with the active collaboration of queer people."

Smiley, who was once rejected for a trans role because she was deemed not "trans enough", says she's been asked to be a sensitivity consultant on some projects since. It's a welcome step though she laughs and says it might be so that filmmakers have someone from the community to point to if they run into trouble. Banerjee herself is in talks to take her own story to the OTT platforms. She says even if Vaani Kapoor plays this role well, it's a missed opportunity for real change. "No one will make that story again soon." But the next time someone says there are no trans actors to play a trans role, Smiley has something to tell them "If you can train a cis male to be a trans person, you can totally train a trans actor to play a transwoman."

As for Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Banerjee says she had no real intention of seeing it. "But now, after talking about it, I just might."