There’s an article in today’s Hindu about a program being run by the Stenographers’ Guild for training transgender women in office management skills so that they can be placed in jobs. The president of the Tamil Nadu Aravanigal Association explained the reasons that members of the aravani (transgender) community need job training of this nature: “P. Aasha Bharati…said it was the lack of job opportunities that forced the transgendered to resort to begging or the flesh trade. Even in that, they had to contend with violence and risk of HIV and AIDS”. That’s very true: transgendered people aren’t often accepted in the straight community for jobs, particularly if they come from poor or marginalized groups already. (I do object to the moralizing inherent in the use of the phrase “flesh trade” to describe prostitution, but that’s another discussion.) It’s very commendable of the Stenograohers’ Guild to recognize that transgendered people can be trapped into poverty because of their identity and that they deserve opportunities to hold safe and decently-paying jobs. Good for them.

But in truth, I’m uncomfortable with another quote in the article from Chief Commissioner of Police, Letika Saran: “Commending Stenographers’ Guild for offering the program, she suggested that transgendered persons be merged with other batchers coming to the Guild. ‘That’s how mainstreaming can be done,’ she added.” I sure hope what she meant was that placing transgendered employees in offices with other members of the Guild will bring acceptance of an alternative sexual identity into the mainstream, and not that transgendered people will somehow learn to interact with the “normal” community and eventually rehabilitated from their marginal sexual status. There’s already a huge risk of the transgendered employees facing discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, and their right to be present in these jobs should be defended, not placed in the rubric of assimilation and invisibility.