LGBTQIA+ Science EXPLAINED by Sayantan Dutta

Abhijit: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Rationable Conversations. I'm Abhijit, as usual. And today, we are going to be delving into this world of the LGBTQIA plus community and the science behind it, social circumstances, and more.

if you've got any questions regarding the LGBTQIA plus community or feel that it's somehow unnatural or strange or you fear them for some reason, this is the show you need to be tuning into. I've got a very special guest on who I've been coordinating with for a while to get this show done. Sayanthan, welcome to Rationable Conversations. I'm so glad we could make this happen. Sayanthan is a faculty member at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy at Krea University and an independent science journalist, which immediately got my eyebrows and ears perked up.

I was like, ‘I have to get in touch with this guy. Their work lies in the intersection of gender, sexuality, science, health, and caste. We can't get to all these things, but we are definitely going to be delving into sexuality and science. every aspect of sexuality that is relevant in this area.

So Sayanthan, welcome to Rationable.

Sayantan Dutta:Thank you. Abhijit. I must apologise for not making it to the last meeting. I'm really glad that I could come to this one.

Abhijit: Yeah. I'm glad, and I'm sorry for being so scattered, but that's just me, but I try to be rational in everything else.

So first and foremost, your pronouns are they, them. Now.’. Now.’. Now. Now.’ Now this is something that has been blowing up on social media, on news channels, and on basically every platform: being able to understand pronouns, because people have a very deep misunderstanding, or lack of understanding at all, about pronouns and why they're important.

Why are you/they/them, how has this whole pronoun thing actually gotten rolling, and why has it suddenly become so important to discuss?

Sayantan Dutta: The idea of pronouns, if one were to look at language, is... Pronouns are rather simple, right? Pronouns are basically words that act as placeholders for nouns. So if my name is Sayantan, and if I go by they/them, then in a particular sentence, you should be able to refer to me, not by using my name, but by using my pronouns.

That applies to the conventional traditional pronouns that we have, which are he, him, and his and she, her, and hers. And what we call the neo pronouns, which would be ‘ze/zim/zers’ and ‘xe/xim/xers’,', and there are several others. They and them, interestingly, are not neo pronouns in the sense that they and them have existed in the English vocabulary since we speak the kind of English that we do.

And irrespective of whether we pay attention to it or not, oftentimes when we do refer to a group of people, we end up using they/them pronouns without really affecting our language and the ease with which we use language. So this entire issue of finding it difficult to incorporate new pronouns or new uses of pronouns in language is probably driven by the kind of homophobia and transphobia that drives queer and trans people outside of society. Coming to the question of why I use they/them pronouns. I identify as a non-binary person. By that, I mean that when one talks about my gender, oftentimes gender is imagined as a binary spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have cisgender men, whose assigned sex at birth and the gender that they identify with are completely congruent. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have cisgender women who are again assigned sex at birth, and their gender identification is completely congruent. And then there are identities in the middle, in some sense, of these two cisgender identities, called transgender identities, where there is a certain degree of nonconformity between the sex assigned at birth and the gender they identify with.

The idea is that this is one model of gender that assumes gender is organised as a spectrum; you have these bimodal distributions of cisgender people on two sides and a minority of transgender people in the middle. And then there are different models of gender, which also tell us that gender might not be a binary at all; in fact, there are far more complex models of gender. That tells us gender is constructed on a day-to-day basis; in the kind of situations that you participate in, gender is constructed in the kind of social spaces that we occupy. These models tell us that gender might not be articulated as a binary at all.

People who believe that their gender identity does not necessarily fall within these binary classifications of gender often go by the term ‘non-binary’ and often prefer ‘they/them’ as their pronouns. I'm not essentialising any of this because it is not an essentialised thing. I can't say that all non-binary people go by they/them pronouns because they don't. And I can't say that anybody who doesn't believe in the binary model of gender identifies as non-binary. Does that answer your question?

Abhijit: Ah, and you mentioned pronouns earlier on.

Yeah. Did you say xe/xim?

Sayantan Dutta: Yeah. So there is X E slash X I M, which is how Z is this? and then Z E, and then there is ‘zir’, which is also a set of pronouns that are used.

Abhijit: So what do those entail?

Sayantan Dutta: Oh, it would entail the same thing as replacing your name with the pronoun 'he'. I'm assuming that you go by the pronoun he’, so it would entail the same thing.

Abhijit: Would it have the same implications as ‘they/them’ for one of the sides? Would that be fair to say?

Sayantan Dutta:This entire model of one of the sides – I don't think there are two sides to gender at all. I think these are deeply problematic models of gender, in the sense that there's no reason to believe there are these two sides, and we can ascribe one pronoun to one side really. It's an idea of how you identify and what... What language do you find that you think can help you understand or articulate yourself better? You do not get born and are told your pronouns are ‘ze/zir’ because your gender lies somewhere here or there.

You grow up, and you have confrontations with the sex that you've been assigned at birth and the gender identity that you've had to live with. You start looking for vocabulary, and then you encounter vocabulary, and once you encounter vocabulary, you have this intuitive understanding that this seems to be working out the best for me, and you go ahead with that one.

So that's how people come to their pronouns. It's slightly hard to pinpoint where in that line of gender a particular pronoun falls, and for that matter, one deeply doubts whether gender can be neatly organised in that line at all.

Abhijit: Okay. So we're going to get into as much science as there is to get into, but a little bit later on; first, I want you to tell a story. How did your journey of understanding your gender and identity happen? Just start at the beginning.

Sayantan Dutta: I grew up living primarily as a man for the bulk of my life till I was in my undergrad. In my undergrad, I realised that I'm probably queer. There was no doubt about the fact that I am somebody who's been assigned male at birth, and I like people who've also been assigned male at birth.

I think that was quite clear by the time I was in my undergrad, and then I lived with the label ‘gay’ for some time. Eventually, around my master's or so, I had already read up significantly on sexuality and gender, and I was working a lot with transgender people in the country.

In Hyderabad, where I did my master's, I filed... public interest litigations around the rights of transgender people. I was also writing for a magazine called Gay Laxi Magazine. It's still in publication. It was one of the earliest journalistic platforms that I wrote for.

And eventually, one started questioning the gender that they've been assigned as well. It took some reading, it took some conversations, and it took some shuttling around between different possible identities that one could occupy. For the time being, I have settled on the label 'non-binary'. Like all labels, it is subject to change.

So yeah, I wish it was more dramatic than that, but unfortunately it is not.

Abhijit: No, I didn't mean it to be dramatic. It's more that people these days have a tendency of reacting to memes and soundbites without really understanding the story and the life that is behind it, or the perspectives that are behind it.

And I find that very unfair to the people who are speaking because a lot of times the things they're saying are misunderstood. One thing I did want to do was go through the prominent letters that make up the name of the community and kind of flesh out each one and how the distinct one is distinct from the other.

So we have both, of course, sexual orientation on one side and gender identity on the other side. First, of course, I think the first couple of people probably know thatLG is lesbian and gay, homosexuality first with females and then with males.

Gay is with males. Now, Transsexual is something that is deeply misunderstood. So could you take us through what exactly transgenderism is versus Transsexuality? let's start there and then we're gonna dig deeper

Sayantan Dutta: I'll start by saying that Great move at identifying that there are distinct kinds of communities when we are talking about people who fall in the LGBTQIA plus bracket.

like you identified, there are gender identities and there are sexual orientations, both. Which effectively tells us that this is not a homogenous community. one of the things that we've been trying to do is...

Abhijit: It's a community of communities,

Sayantan Dutta: We're trying to say that it's LGBTQIA plus people or LGBTQIA plus communities, rather than use the singular.

That's one of the things your listeners and my listeners might want to take note of. The second is the question of vocabulary in terms of whether you call people transsexual or whether you call people transgender. And the idea is that till 1990s it was more or less okay to use the term transsexual.

But since then, the theory of gender has evolved significantly, and we have a clear understanding of what is sex and what is gender, for most people, the term they prefer is transgender. I'll come to explaining what this is in a bit.

The other point that I wanted to talk about is that We often talk about these as if they are conditions, right? So we say transsexualism, transgenderism and homosexuality the idea of ISM, the suffix ISM, has often been used to signify medical conditions, which these identities are not.

So we specifically try to then not use those ISM terms. we don't say transgenderism, but we say transgender people.

Abhijit: It's something I need to ingrain in my mind too because isms are also used in describing ideological systems or belief systems.

So atheism, for example. that's why we have to be aware that this is not an ideology. This is not a belief system. It's far, far deeper than that.

Sayantan Dutta: I think we're basically talking about identities when we are trying to talk about labels. the individual is very important to the idea of an identity, right?

There's an I in identity, which is really the crux of what constitutes identity. And the reason why I pointed that out is because this is that space where one can talk about language, both in terms of how it should be used and in terms of what it means. So now coming to the question of how does one talk about.

transgender people. the idea is that when one is born, one is born with a certain genital organ system that you can observe from the outside, right? if you were to observe the genital organs of a newborn baby, there's a high chance that you will ascribe that baby one of the three sexes that we know.

there's male, female, and intersex. intersex is a very vast term in terms of the different kinds of intersex variations that one can have in terms of their external morphological conformation. this is all happening at the level of external morphology.

So we are not even talking about anatomy or physiology, all of us have internal genital organs physiology, would mean there are hormones that are contingent upon your sex Most often than not, doctors take a look at genitals that they see externally, and you're assigned a sex at birth. doctors will say, this is M, or this is F, or this is I, which is intersex. sex is itself fairly complex.

We understand that Even if we study developmental biology from a very basic level, we know that until about a certain period of time, the fetus has virtually no sex, right? It has a chromosomal conformation, which would be either XX, XY, or a combination of XXY, X0, etc.

these combinations are what is called the chromosomal sex of the fetus. After a point of time, the fetus develops and sometime in fetal development, what happens is the Y chromosome, if present undergoes what is called transcription and translation.

there's a region in the Y chromosome called the sex determining region of Y.

Okay. So the Y chromosome is a chromosome composed of DNA that is wrapped around proteins. And this DNA We'll have genes which are basically sections of DNA that code for a protein.

in that Y chromosome there's a region which codes for a protein called sex determining region of Y. called SRI.

Abhijit: Okay, I understand.

Sayantan Dutta: This is a coffee table conversation.

Abhijit: I wish I had some coffee actually.

I was going to make one, but I got late.

Sayantan Dutta: so once SRY is produced it acts on the gonadal tissue, which is developing in the fetus. before SRY starts getting expressed we have a bi potential gonad. It can either become the uterus, the fallopian tubes and the ovary, or it can become the testes, the vas deferens, the sperm tube, the other secondary sex organs of the male.

Body, which would include the seminiferous tubules, the prostate, and the penis. Once the Y chromosome starts expressing, it suppresses the bi potentiality of the gonad, and transforms it towards a male internal sex. you start forming early testes tubes that will eventually become the sperm tubes, through which sperm is going to get ejaculated.

you will have the secondary sex organs starting to form, like prostate being one example. In the absence of a Y chromosome, the bi potential gonad is expected to develop into the female gonadal system, which would basically be the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the uterus. And this is just, so basically we've already identified several aspects of sex.

So you have chromosomal sex, internal gonadal sex, which is at the level of the fetus. in the case of males, right before the fetus is born the testes descend into the scrotum and the penis is formed just before that.

that is the external sex. Anne Foster Sterling, a biologist who's written about this calls it. layers of sex this model has been well explained by scholars like John Money, reproductive biologists who have worked on this for a long time.

sex is itself very complex. It's not something like male, female, and there's some issue and you have intersex. But there are these several layers, these several processes, and they don't necessarily always agree with each other.

Abhijit: for the feminists to notice that it is the default state most of the time in the absence of a Y chromosome, you just turn out to be a woman. So ladies, you are by default, how humans are.

Sayantan Dutta: the point is that XX might not be the default chromosomal state but even X naught, for instance, so there's no Y chromosome and there's a missing X chromosome would lead to the formation of a female gonadal system.

we don't need to think about chromosomes in terms of presence of XX, but definitely the absence of Y chromosome which becomes critical to the development of the female gonadal system. once you're born, you have a certain external sex that somebody is going to classify you as either male, female, or intersex you start growing, you also exist in a society. in a society as you grow, you are often told there are gendered roles. Anna Foster Sterling and several neuroscientists have noticed, that mothers tend to talk more to their girl children and Push their male children to be more physically active. from a very young age, they'll try to make the boys walk and the girls talk. This is, something coming from a social construction, have good language skills. So you start pushing your children to do that because you've been born up in that system. So as you develop within these. social systems within these ideas of what you're supposed to wear if you have a certain sex, what you're supposed to eat, how you're supposed to eat, how you're supposed to talk, what are the subjects that you're supposed to be good at.

science and mathematics are notorious for being male dominated and there's been a lot of conversation around how men are particularly pushed in since a very young age to do science. Indeed. you're growing up within a society which has a certain pre existing notion of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman.

And as you grow up within these systems, you imbibe some of this, and towards the time when you're hitting puberty, you have what is called a gender identity consolidating. So either that gender identity would correspond very cleanly to the kind of sex that you've been assigned at birth. So if you've been assigned male at birth and the gender identity that you take is that of a man. if you're okay performing as a man, if you're okay living, breathing, walking, talking, eating, studying like a man, then you're a cisgender individual. There is no mismatch between the sex that you've been assigned at birth and the gender identity that you seem to have developed over the time that you've grown.

if there is a mismatch between the two, you would be called transgender where there is a mismatch between one's gender identity and the sex assigned at birth. oftentimes, people who have this mismatch go through intense discomfort.

This discomfort is often with their bodies. This discomfort can be a result of the families that they live in, the expectations of society. all of this contributes to this feeling of discomfort, called gender dysphoria.

often people try to alleviate gender dysphoria by affirming their gender, people can choose to socially affirm their gender bodily affirm their gender, and medically affirm their gender, which would include taking hormones or blockers.

there are two kinds of medications and undergoing surgeries, if they so wish.

Abhijit: I see. a lot of people have a tendency of saying that gender dysphoria is a mental illness when this is something that transgender people suffer with when there is that conflict between their identity and their physical body.

what would you say to people who say that this is a, just a mentally disorder? You should just see a therapist and get fixed.

Sayantan Dutta: Oh, the thing is that every psychiatric and psychologist body in the world has... declared uncontroversially that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness.

We have the American Psychologists Association, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition, all of which has depathologized gender dysphoria which means that Being transgender is not a mental illness, neither is being lesbian, gay, bisexual. So being queer and trans are not mental illnesses.

The idea is that if I am going through certain kind of discomfort, if I have cancer in my body, for instance, and I have depression because I do not like my body anymore. I have had to undergo, the removal of a limb, and I do not like my body anymore. That would be a kind of body dysphoria that you or I could have without necessarily having gender dysphoria.

And we would still go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist in order to seek intervention for that discomfort. So we would say, "Hey, I don't necessarily hate my body, or I don't necessarily think that I am mentally ill because I got a limb chopped off because cancerous or gangrenous, but I am depressed because I'm in this body that I'm not comfortable with.

Can you address that discomfort? Not my identity per se." So one has to think of it in those ways. It's not really being transgender, which is a mental illness. All psychiatric bodies, all diagnostic manuals tell us that uncontroversially. But the reason why one can still go to a therapist if they so wish, and that is why we need therapists who understand this really well, is that I might be seeking ways to understand and address this discomfort that I'm facing.

It's not really a question of my identity. a therapist should not be trying to cure me of... the fact that I'm transgender or homosexual, but should really be affirming my gender and telling me ways in which I can not feel discomforted with the body that I have or the body that I wish to have.

What are the ways in which one can address that? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. That totally makes sense. people do have dysphoria of various kinds. It's not just gender dysphoria. I might not like my body for a different reason, not necessarily because of the sex organs that it has.

I might not like the fact that I have a belly that stands out. I might not like the fact that I have legs which are of unequal sizes. I might not like the fact that my hair starts falling. That doesn't make you mentally sick but you would still sometimes perhaps go to a therapist to seek remedy.

Abhijit: That does make me a little self conscious though,

Sayantan Dutta: As I spoke about this, yeah. It's me who is losing hair. It's me who has a paunch that stands out.

Abhijit: It just goes with, unfortunately, having testosterone in your body. It comes with the territory, You had mentioned that there is a... difference between having a physical gender presentation, or would you call it sex?

I keep getting completely confused between these two words, though.

Sayantan Dutta: sex would be something that the doctor assigns to you. So it would be a culmination of things like you have a penis, you have a scrotal sac, you have testes, vas deferens, you have a certain level of testosterone in your body, you have x y conformation, etc.

All of that would contribute to your sex. Gender presentation might actually be how you wish to present your gender. So you might wear a t shirt and a trouser and have a beard and present yourself as a typical man in society or you might wear a sari, clean shave your beard, and present yourself as typically seen as a woman, or you might keep your beard and a sari and present in a way that unsettles this entire question of what is the typical woman and what is the typical man.

All of these would be gender presentations in their own right.

Abhijit: these days on social media, as well as TV shows, there have been models and, other personalities who wear feminine clothing, but have a beard. I think that causes a lot of people discomfort, seeing that I think it's more being confused and not really being able to understand what is going on.

Plus, you had mentioned that, gender fluidity or being non binary can change from day to day. Does that happen frequently?

Sayantan Dutta: I didn't say that they can change from day to day. All I'm saying, I don't think day to day is something. I misrepresented that.

I think I get your question. So one is the question of confusion. gender fluidity, non binary what I'm saying is that it's not that today morning I wake up as a man and tomorrow I wake up as a woman.

I don't think that's what we're talking about when we say that gender identities are subject to change. What I was talking about is that the labels that one finds describing themselves the best can change over their lifetime. one might start by saying I identify as transgender. And then 10 years later, you find this label called non binary, which seems to work better than transgender in terms of you feeling that this is defining you the best.

So, you then choose non binary as a label to live with. the gender identity remains somewhere there, something same. But the kind of vocabulary that you use to describe it, what you think is explaining it the best might change over a period of time. I know thousands and thousands of transgender people, and I've never known somebody who's claims that their gender changes on a day to day basis.

Abhijit: thank goodness. thanks for clearing that up. with the confusion that is online media. There are people who say that this sort of thing can happen, which I found surprising. maybe I misrepresented what you'd said earlier and confused it with that.

it's hard to understand the transgender community, nowadays, there are lots of people, especially what's called the woke community, especially in the US, that is having a very unusual effect, especially on social media, when it comes to this sort of thing, where they're saying that children are being allowed to have medical interventions, which I don't think is a real thing. how young does this sort of thing tend to present itself? How young can a child be when they feel that they are

So how young can a person be before they think they identify with a different gender from what they have been assigned at birth, How often can this be just a child's mind exploring the possibility of itself?

Sayantan Dutta: Okay, so the first question, to my knowledge, I know that Children as young as three have often expressed being gender non conforming or feeling like somebody of a different gender. The idea so what the question that you're asking of how much of this can be that of a child's play?

Sure, I'm not denying the possibility that many of these children might have some idea of play when we are talking, when they are talking about having different gender identity but the kind of interventions that you're talking about, medical interventions, doctors give that even to adults after a battery of tests and meetings rest assured that if a doctor has decided to let their patient however young go through any kind of gender affirmation procedures, be it puberty blockers, be it testosterone blockers, be it estrogen supplements, rest assured that the doctor has had to go through several sittings with this patient; the patient has had to go through several tests, psychiatric, endocrinological, and general medical before this has happened. The second is in these conversations, one finds it really surprising that the worry is around medical supplementation for children when, for several other conditions children go through severe medical interventions, which includes taking hormones, by the way including people who have delayed puberty, people who would whose bodies just don't produce the enough hormones. go through medical interventions and that's okay. part of this is really having faith in modern medicine when we talk about whether it is okay for very young children to go through medical gender affirmation procedures.

And my sense is that I would trust the doctor taking these decisions because it's not, even for adult, if you were to walk into a clinic and say, I want to start testosterone blockers and estrogen you would not be able to do that for quite a significant time.

The doctor would evaluate all parameters of your body, then you would be sent to an endocrinologist and a psychiatrist and only after that would the three decide how to go about this. So, a lot of this is about having faith. In modern medicine and the doctors who practice it, it's not as much a question of having a faith on the child.

Abhijit: I feel that there are not enough people in this world who have enough faith in medical science or in their family doctor. With good reason and some, without Now socially, especially in India, what's it been like to be a non binary person? Somebody who has told people that these are the pronouns I prefer. How have people responded to that in your life?

Sayantan Dutta: Yeah. So I think for a substantial period of my life most people would not understand what this is and I doubt several, many people understand gender and the fact that gender can be non binary at all. That said, thanks to the... excellent work that queer and trans people have done in the past two decades or so. I do think that the situation is changing, perhaps in elite urban circles, which is probably where I find myself located most of the times.

So I often find myself in circles of people who are either highly educated or decently making a living. in cities, elite urban circles I see the situation changing in the sense that people seem to be making an effort to respect pronouns. They might not necessarily respect me as a person, they might also not necessarily understand pronoun use or not be comfortable with it, but they're making an effort, which I think is a good start.

I think we can live with that.

Abhijit: have you had some unpleasant experiences in these circumstances?

Sayantan Dutta: Yeah, I think every queer and trans person in this country has had unpleasant experience growing up queer and trans. I'm trying to think of one that I could mention.

But yeah, perhaps I'll not if that's alright.

Abhijit: That's fine. Whatever you are comfortable sharing or not. That's totally up to you. you mentioned queer as well, which is another term that a lot of people don't understand. my understanding is that a person who is either lesbian or gay, or maybe another definition that might not be included within those two classifications or labels does queer go beyond that or is it just a all encompassing term as well?

Sayantan Dutta: The term

Abhijit: does it go far beyond that?

Sayantan Dutta: Oh, I would think it goes far beyond that. So queer as a term was primarily used as a slang for gay men, probably for a long time. Was it for queer women as well?

Abhijit: I don't think anybody seems to have a problem with lesbians,

Sayantan Dutta: the point is, oddly enough, it was often used as slang.

when in the US the gay and lesbian rights movement started one of the terms that was reclaimed in terms of the fact that something that was initially used as a slang, but then the community chose to use it for themselves and articulate their identity through it in an act of resistance. So queer was one of the terms that was reclaimed, and it means weird, and the idea was that yeah, we are weird, so what?

But operationally right now, as we understand the use of the term, what we see this term representing is people who do not conform to the stereotypical and normative ways of being sexual or being gendered. anything beyond the normal ways in which people identify their sex and gender, identify who they have sex with, and how they have sex would constitute queer as a term.

it's a very expansive term and there's a lot of work in gender and sexuality studies, which has conceptually defined the term queer It has theoretical implications for the kind of knowledge produced in gender and sexuality studies.

And there's an entire branch of theory called queer theory that's emerged in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and continues to be a very blooming field in terms of the work that's happened there. it's talked, a lot about how gender is socially constructed, it's spoken a lot about sexuality, it's spoken a lot about the relationship between sexuality and nation state, political economy, a lot of very interesting work coming from there.

queer theory has had very interesting conversations with science, particularly biology, early work has been about finding instances of, homosexuality in, the natural world. So you go and try to find out monkeys, okay, they seem to be having homosexual sex.

Okay, bonobos seem to be having homosexual sex. Penguins seem to be having homosexual sex. Scarab beetles seem to be having homosexual sex. You name an animal and there's a high chance that they also have homosexual sex. we've had some excellent work on the genetics of sexuality and some very interesting findings that have come from there.

Abhijit: what are some of the biggest findings?

Sayantan Dutta: the biggest finding in recent years is that there's no gay gene and that, contradicts our assumptions in the 1990s when people posited that there are certain locations in our genome, certain genes that can be traced to homosexuality,

In 2019, a Nature paper looked at half a million genomes and did something that is called a genome wide association study. basically you track positions in the entire genome, and you try to see in a family, who are the people who report being homosexual, and then you take a look at their entire genomes, and then you see whether there's any parts of the genomes that have moved across generations.

And whether these two correlate, so sexuality and the kind of inheritance that they show. the most amazing finding is that there is no gay gene, which is one of the most brilliant findings from a large scale, rigorously done scientific study. What we do understand is that sexuality as a whole, both heterosexuality and homosexuality are partly heritable. this partly is a loose term. So if you ask me, is 50% of your sexuality heritable? I don't know. I don't think anybody does. It's a very loose term, but at least it's partly heritable. But any knowledge of genetics cannot determine the sexuality of a person. even if I tell you my genetic composition you'll not be able to correlate it to a certain kind of sexuality.

some of this is interesting work from the genetics of sexuality. We've also had some very interesting work that's even raised the question of why investigate sexuality through a scientific lens. people are divided on this question.

One of the main reasons to not necessarily be concerned with this investigation is because in the past, whenever science has been used to investigate the origins of any community that is marginalized, it has been extremely violent. if you take the example of black people and the kind of eugenics work that happened the world over, particularly in Europe and the US

And we know that's not been great. When you look at women, as somebody who was trained in neuroscience, one of the earliest things that one realized needed debunking was the idea of the male brain and the female brain and the myths used to substantiate, which have been deeply patriarchal and misogynist.

Absolutely. the skepticism of scientific investigation into sexuality is well founded, The skepticism is deeply grounded in the idea that whenever science has in the past tried to investigate marginalized communities, it's not done that with great intention.

Abhijit: at this point we know that science is very important in the natural way of things.

Sayantan Dutta: one of the things science is indeed an important way.

there are other ways you can also investigate something like gender and sexuality, especially when people have used methods from the social sciences particularly qualitative research. Ethnographies, have been foundational in influencing what we understand as the science of sexuality if you look at even the 2019 Nature paper it was done in conversation with social scientists the strength of the study emerges from the presence of a social scientist in the group. we are looking at a highly Interdisciplinary landscape.

I think there's good reason to be skeptical of a value neutral scientific investigation, quote unquote purely scientific investigation, into origins of sexuality, its evolvability, its genetics, etc. And I think if that kind of research has to be done there needs to be the presence of somebody who understands the ethics and the history of sexuality and somebody who's trained as a social scientist and can supplement these methods with more qualitative methods including interviews and ethnographies that can help put the scientific findings in context.

absolutely. we are looking at a highly interdisciplinary landscape where we do not want the sciences and the social sciences and their understanding of sexuality to be in conflict with each other. to my understanding, they're actually not, The idea is that there's A deep seated skepticism of one discipline for the other and I'm hoping that the skepticism can be set aside and people can work together as we understand experience.

Abhijit: there is, then it should be at least it should be helpful, it shouldn't get in the way of things. Absolutely. Now you had mentioned earlier that there is no gay gene, this has been very well established, so is there a better understanding of what leads to homosexuality in the first place.

It is heritable to a certain extent, but but what

Sayantan Dutta: so if we were to imagine sexuality as the trait that we are talking about, and you have heterosexuality and homosexuality and they're not necessarily two sides of a coin, right? There are sexual orientations and there are people who would not necessarily be only homosexual and only heterosexual.

But for sake of a simplistic argument, Let's try to imagine the trait as sexuality, and then we're talking about its different forms, heterosexuality and homosexuality. Anybody who studied Mendelian genetics is familiar with this kind of argumentation. You have seed color, and then you have green and yellow, two kinds of seed color, right?

And then you would try to do these crosses. What we do understand is that sexuality as a trait is perhaps governed by a cluster of genes. And this is not a small cluster that we are talking about, it's a fairly complex cluster of genes.

Abhijit: after all, this is one of the purposes of DNA is procreation.

I would imagine that it's an extremely

Sayantan Dutta: large part of, yeah, so sexuality itself. As the trait, so just like seed color would be influenced by several genes, sexuality as a trait is perhaps influenced, partly influenced, by a cluster of genes. And we also understand that there are epigenetic influences, so the kind of modifications that happen not at the level of the DNA, but at the level of the RNA or protein that is produced, epigenetic modifications also have some role to play.

And we also understand, all recent studies of homosexuality, both in animals and human beings, tell us that there's a very large... Part, large role of social influences in constructing any idea of sexuality. And this is not just about homosexuality, it's as much about heterosexuality.

Abhijit: And there's, I think there was one article I read which said that the more boys or girls, a mother gives birth to, the higher probability, the next one will be homosexual. Is that does that have any,

Sayantan Dutta: I've not come across that, but nothing that our current scientific model of sexuality and gender tells us leads me to think that this would be true.

Abhijit: All right. Fair enough. Now of course, bisexuality, I think at this point of time, most people would have understood that it's both heterosexuality and homosexuality in the same person, the person can be attracted to either sex or maybe even a non binary person for that matter.

would bisexual include that?

Sayantan Dutta: Absolutely. bisexual, pansexual, yeah, these terms.

Abhijit: Pansexual, yes, there we go. I think there's one part which very few people understand, which is asexual. That's basically a person who is not interested in having sex with anyone? Is that accurate?

Sayantan Dutta: I think one needs to qualify that definition a little more in terms of saying that might be a person who doesn't have strong sexual attractions towards people of any sex, but I do think that asexuality is one of the identities that we have very little narratives from, when we do not have enough narratives the identity gets to be invisibilized and we might all be not understanding this very clearly.

So I don't want to talk about it without having a very clear understanding of it myself. But that would be my sense. I think a lot of form of qualification to that definition is needed. it's not that they do not want to have sex at all. It might just be that they have sex, but our sexuality is not just an act of having sex, it's something that you embody for an extended period of time in your life. if you're attracted to women, it's not the one act of sex that makes you heterosexual, but the idea of being sexually attracted to women as part of your life that extends over a period of your life. I think that extended period is very critical when we think about something like asexuality, that for the most part, they are not sexually attracted towards people of any sex.

Abhijit: Indeed, and I wanted the listeners to understand, at least from my understanding, that when we have this collection of communities in the LGBTQIA plus, these classifications of labels, these communities, when we're talking about gender identity, we're talking about gender, like sexual orientation, there is no... there is no straight line. There is no actual, clear distinction. Everything blurs into the next. We're talking about an entire spectrum as the rainbow flag kind of tries to, portray. There are, everything has blurred lines. So one line can blur into the next. am I being correct here?

I don't think there's any exact distinction.

Sayantan Dutta: Yeah. I think the idea is that we like to think of the world as, there are people as living in boxes, so there are these very big boundaries that you're able to draw in terms of one's identities The idea is that it's not really that strict.

These are not big boxes that we are living in. These are these nice blurry zones and one should be able to inhabit those also.

Abhijit: Absolutely. one thing, intersex, which is the last letter. And of course, plus means everything else that can be included in the atypical or non binary sexual identity and orientation world.

intersex is what I feel a lot of people feel, constitutes the community of a person who has both sexual physical representations on their bodies. is that. Accurate? You have worked with the community quite a bit.

Sayantan Dutta: I wouldn't think so.

So I think the term hijra would mean something very specific in the sense that it is a cultural identity. It's actually not something that offers a gender identity in the sense that it doesn't define just gender. It talks about a certain way of living. It includes the kind of clothes that one wears, the kind of religion one follows, the kind of family structure, the kind of kinship structure that one follows, gender being a part of it. simply put, not all hijra people are intersex. Also, not all transgender people are hijras. There's a certain protocol that you have to follow to be called a hijra and it's a cultural community.

It's not a community defined by a gender or sex identity.

Abhijit: So could you help us humanize the community a little bit more? Because a lot of people misrepresent them, look at them in, of course, speak about them in derogatory ways. I've met plenty of them.

Some of them have been very nice. Some of them have been there just for, collecting money as they are supposed to do. I've watched documentaries, I've read articles about them, you said you worked, have you worked with that community?

Sayantan Dutta: I've worked with Hijra people for a significant period of time, a lot of my formative work in gender and sexuality has really come from about seven months that I spent very closely in the hijra community in Hyderabad, particularly for the kind of public interest litigations I was filing, along with two other people. I do not want to speak about the community in great detail. It's discouraged when you're not a hijra yourself. Part of it is because it's far more complex than the conversations we can have here. And there's no good reason to make these practices that have been going on for at least 5, 000 years, we have very good historical evidence in very private community spaces to make it open and open to discussion for people who are not hijras.

I do want to address the question of Begging and sex work, which are the two traditional occupations that people from Hijra communes are often employed in, there really is no option, more often than not, for people who come from hijra communities to find any other kind of employment for the longest part, they were not even considered valid citizenship by the country.

So only in 2014, when the NALSA versus Union of India judgment came, were transgender persons, including hijra people, given the right to self identify their gender and equal citizenship in par with every other individual in the country which meant that years of oppression, so about 200 years of colonial oppression and some more after that, what that has meant is that they've been really pushed into the margins to the point where Accessing education, accessing employment has been both extremely tenuous and the traditional occupations of begging and sex work have been the only ways they've been able to fend for themselves and for the communities that they inhabit.

so what that means is that we need more structural interventions at making education more accessible, transgender friendly, making employment more transgender friendly and accessible for people to be able to find other modes of employment if they so wish.

Abhijit: I see. All right, I think that would be very important in getting them, into having more dignified lives.

I think that's the most important thing because they do not get much dignity as it is At least in my life, I try to interact with them in as Respectful a manner as I possibly can I think anybody listening. that's the first and best thing that you can do Until we can see, bigger social change and, move that forward.

Now oh, but you're good for time?

Sayantan Dutta: Yes. Perhaps we can close in another five minutes. Is that okay?

Abhijit: I just wanted to get your thoughts on how the transgender community is most misunderstood at least as far as you've encountered, unless we've already, unless you've already addressed that.

And what is it that we, us in terms of people who are not within the LGBTQIA plus communities, do better to help, these communities be better accepted and understood in Indian society?

Sayantan Dutta: Wow. That's a hard one. I already mentioned that one of the ways in which transgender people are substantially marginalized in the country are by really the kind of lack of access to opportunities for education, employment, and other civil and substantive rights, as we say.

Really, what can, you and perhaps listeners do includes Thinking about how to increase this access, right? So how do you ensure that you're able to get trans people into education and employment? if you're somebody who can hire, please hire trans people. If you're somebody who can educate, who runs a school perhaps, or has some influence in running a school, please do that.

And if you are none of those, then you can perhaps begin by putting the money where your mouth is, which means that do not try to save your 10 rupees from the hijra person who's begging on a train. For you, probably that 10 rupees is what you'll spend in a cigarette in the next ride. But this person is really trying to live on a day to day basis with the money that they make.

So, I think some of these are starting points. It's really hard to pinpoint ways, but yes, educate others around you so that the general myths and misconceptions that people have also start to shatter and break down.

Abhijit: Absolutely. Thank you so much. And at least on my part, I try and contest these ideas about non binary people who don't conform to typical norms. heterosexual behaviors or sexual orientations, I do try to just say that guys just, speak about them respectfully, don't make fun of them just from that perspective or anything of that sort.

And I think all of us can do that a little bit by just educating the people around us our immediate families, because I think a lot of that as well, are deeply I'm not... are not willfully ignorant. They've just been brought up in a particular way where they haven't been exposed to the open discussion of sexuality and gender identity out in the open.

So just Open up, talk to everyone, in context, of course, and I think a very important thing is if you know someone who is, talking about their identity, feeling that they have some gender dysphoria or that they are not the gender that they have been born into, that you help them find they need, maybe a therapist, who is knowledgeable about gender and gender dysphoria just help them out the best you can. Thank you, Sayantan, for helping us understand the communities. I think this country has a long way to go before we become completely accepting of everyone. this is a transitory phase, we're all going through.

And I think media is doing harm as well as good, both helping people understand and misunderstand the thing. having these kinds of open conversations is very helpful in clearing this up. thank you very much for your time. I hope to have you back. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. If you have any questions for Sayantan, they are on Twitter. What's your Twitter handle?

Sayantan Dutta: Queersprings,

Abhijit: All right. any other places where they can find your work or contact you?

Sayantan Dutta: Yeah. my... Twitter handle has my portfolio that one should be able to access, which I update fairly regularly with all the work that I've done.

Abhijit: Thank you so much. Thanks for And thank you everybody for watching. This has been Rationable Conversations with Sayantan Dutta, and we've been understanding the LGBTQIA plus communities a lot better and a lot deeper and I hope this has helped you clear up any of your doubts and thoughts that you have.

If you have any questions, please contact Sayantan or put your comments down in the Give this video a if you enjoyed that. And do subscribe for more like this. Thank you much for us.

Until next time, be rationable.