A battle with self

Here she was, trying hard to go by the society’s rule, failing and yet not accepting herself… creating herself a battle.

The early times were tough. The battle within, however, had a silver lining. The alone time helped Aqsa concentrate on her studies. She excelled academically and secured a medical seat in one of the finest government medical colleges, Seth G.S. Medical College MUHS, Nashik, Maharashtra.

She entered college thinking she had left behind the trauma of school. Bigger city, professional people, she thought, would be more accepting. She was up for disappointment. “School students and teachers do not know it at all. Here it was seen as a mental, psychological issue – in a medical school!”

However, Aqsa too till age 21 hadn’t found the right terminology to categorise herself in. “Thus, there was a lot of stress and anxiety. I had to take medical consultation for constant high blood pressure.”

Probably the medical world was her rightful place, she thought. “I never discussed it with my parents. I never had any friends to share my thoughts with. The first time someone asked me, it all automatically came out and revealed my confusion. It was my doctor!” The doctor, she says, was a lovely person to say it was all “perfectly alright” and suggested she consult a mental health professional too. “I then went through a long two-month counselling session in college and it became clear what my orientation was. So, the search for many answers finally ended in my college’s psychiatry department. I was 21.”

Aqsa then sat her parents down to talk to them and tell them that she now wants to live as a woman and that she wants to have a sex-change operation. “Though they probably had suspected all those 21 years, they objected to it.” They told her it was a passing phase, there is nothing like that and to play active sports and get married. “It was very emotionally distressing. I didn’t know what to do – it was my third year of medical college. I knew I had to anyhow complete my studies, forego the depression. You know, back then, depression too was a taboo.”

She cleared her exams with flying colours but chose not to attend the convocation. “Let me try to explain what each one of us go through: We first battle ourselves, then family, then society. My parents told me they’d sever ties with me if I remained me!”

Aqsa decided to move away from family – for safety purposes – to Delhi where could peacefully research and understand SRS for herself.

She suddenly found wings. She joined HLPPT, a not-for-profit organisation, performed well and made some good friends. Later, she joined HIMSR. Flourishing, she bought herself a home and a car. When she eagerly awaited her surgery, her mother told her she’d die if that ever happened. “You know what this confusion, rebuke, rejection do? I told my mother that I’d await her death to get operated upon. That’s what it does to us. Things made me walking dead.”