Aanjneya Tandon

“Coming from India, where despite the protections on paper (which are themselves limited), the rights of the community continue to remain highly curtailed, my first thought after reconciling myself with my identity was taking steps to improve the lives of fellow trans people back home. Given the stage of my career, the only way I could think of to achieve this was by spreading awareness. Accordingly, since coming out I have tried to give voice to the trans experience in the following ways:

 

First, having won the right to speak at a main debate at the Cambridge Union on whether Feminism needs the West, I sought to expand the understanding of feminism through my speech by arguing that the debate must also take account of the trans perspective.

 

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I was particularly struck by the blind eye turned to the experience of trans women in South Asia which is markedly different from that of trans women in the West. To remedy this I organized an awareness event with the support of my college where I invited LGBTQ NGOs from India and Pakistan to share their respective activist experience and to shed light on the lived experience of trans women in these countries. To this end, we also made a short documentary where we interviewed trans women in Pakistan. To my great satisfaction, many LGBTQ attendees reached out to me after the event to tell me that they finally felt seen, which was one of my primary objectives in the first place.

 

Finally, I intend to continue contributing to the advancement of LGBTQ rights throughout my career (which is just beginning in many ways). Thus, being a law student, I am even presently engaged in a research project where I compare the rights granted to the trans community in India with the UK in an attempt to find out how the two jurisdictions can learn from each other and thereby improve the protections that they grant.”