Neel (she/her) is the founder of the Womxn Writers Project, a writers/performers guild working at the intersections and edges of writing, and looks after programs at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University. 

As a transwoman and a dance practitioner, a never-ending challenge is to find art spaces that make it easier to perform my femininity in chorus with women dancers whose gender expression is less an aberration or annoyance. Growing up with Kathak I have been restricted to men and masculine characters on stage. Role-reversals are not uncommon in performances and seldom encouraged—however when some roles are less realised on stage—when transwomen rarely make it to the classical stage in her/their own bodies, it is important for the art world to realise that transwomen must have access to their bodies during the ideation and dissemination of art.

I wish to be a woman on stage as much as any other role, being as much as becoming. Indian classical dance performances often carry the subtext of a trans narrative without the body of a transwoman, her/their embodiment of rasa—the body is much more than the makeup and costume depicted on stage. The body is the breath the dancer/actor inhales and exhales as s/he/they births a character on stage. Let us transwomen dancers breathe. 

My disdain for the art world is not to shame the creative and erudite dancers and choreographers who continue to create powerful stories of women on stage. A criss-crossing of ideas towards a narrative certainly enriches it but to many of us transwomen, it belies the trans of it all. If art makers focus less on how they see us, and focus more on seeing together, art spaces and creations can be truly trans-formative. 

This Women’s Day, I argue not for inclusivity but a progressive politics of collectivisation. Art spaces and makers need to work together with transwomen dancers and actors in curating roles across genres, styles, fields, not limited to their bodies but their bodies as an anchor to the process. Inclusivity is often exhumed at the altar of artistry; cis-men and women with more years of experience owing to their easy access to such experiences are chosen to play the role of a transwoman but never a transwoman to play the role of a cis character.

Perhaps there is no creative harm in what I call fictitious enactments, it is a fiction that either dehumanises the trans woman or renders them invisible. I call on art-spaces, especially classical dance spaces, to do better, to acknowledge our bodies and honor their contribution to dance praxis—maybe we can play a more convincing Charulata or Chitrangada—to be seen, heard, felt as who she is.

Nothing more exemplifies safety to me as a dancer and a woman in the art world today than to be seen, heard, and felt for who I am, like millions of women out there. Happy March 8th to all of us.