New Delhi, India
— "I feel trapped... my mind is crisscrossing...
I am neither embarrassed nor traumatised. But I have a
feeling of being incomplete" — this is what Subhash
(name changed) wrote in his declaration to doctors at Lok
Nayak Hospital. He underwent a sex-change surgery and is
now called Kajri (changed). He was lucky.
Most are not. A large
majority of people whose minds are similarly
crisscrossing or are confused about their sexuality
don’t even know they can do something about it. They
end up perhaps like Shanthi Soundarajan, who was recently
parted with her Asiad silver medal. That dramatic
turnaround has raised the question: could Shanthi have
escaped the ignominy?
Do people out there know
enough about sex-change procedures? Do they know about
laws on sex-change surgeries? How common are they,
anyway? TOI checked out the issue with some big Delhi
hospitals. And the findings were a surprise.
Sex-change surgeries
— say leading doctors — in Delhi are not so
uncommon these days. A bulk of them are for a medical
condition called gender identity disorder (GID), where a
person is born with the sexual characteristics of one sex
but "feels" like the other. The incidence of GID is said
to be one in 100,000.
Says Dr R C Jiloha, head
of the department of psychiatry, G B Pant Hospital: "Till
around 10 years ago, I had seen no case of GID. I saw 20
in the last decade. Not all of them go on to get the
surgery done but there is still the feeling of being
‘trapped’. People with GID at least have the
confidence today to seek medical opinion."
