I’m not a pushover

“I knew many maids. They had to do it to eat. To go to somebody’s kitchen or keep somebody’s baby, or cook. That’s all they thought about: ‘I’m gonna wash and iron.’ They didn’t have anything else. They just took all the punishment and unfairness and everything.”

- 84-year old actress Millicent Bolton talking about African American maids in the early 1960s

“Recent history is witness that when religious fanatics feel their authority challenged, their impotence finds expression in a fatwa.”

- Hiren K Bose in her profile of Taslima Nasreen, author of Lajja

A Chinese Singaporean man married with kids recently wrote in to Singapore’s flagship English daily The Straits Times to complain about cross-dressing on national TV, in conjunction with the National Day Parade celebrations.  He opined that if the the TV station wanted to show transgender and transsexual characters, it should have given the programme a NC-16 rating, so he could stop his kids from watching the show.

I was stunned by his deliberate meanness and inhumanity.  I wonder what it’s like for a child to grow up with a father who treats transgender women like untouchables meant to be tucked away from society’s view.  Consider the backlash if he had called for the rating to be applied to programmes featuring certain races and religious groups.

Unlike in the 1960s when African American helps had to take “all the punishment and unfairness and everything”, we don’t have to bend our backs anymore.  The circumstances haven’t changed – society at large still discriminates against us, but our mindsets must change.  We cannot continue to accept “all the punishment and unfairness and everything.”  We must fight for fairness, freedom and the right to live life on an equal footing with everyone else.  We must call out those who deny us the basic human right of an equal opportunity, those who seek to censor us from public view.

I have not shared this before, but my voice today is largely shaped by heroines of the civil rights movement, namely, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks.  I often joke that my education at York did not bring me any practical benefits.  That’s only half true.  Without reading the writings of Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, and Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, I would not have found the courage and words to challenge Singapore society’s relentless defamation and subjugation of transsexual women.  They empowered me not to just take “all the punishment and unfairness and everything.”

I owe these women a tremendous debt of gratitude.

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