QuoteSome organizations working for the rights of the people claim that they are neither male nor female. They say that these individuals are different than the general sex identities i.e. man and woman. They are somewhere in the middle, means, they possess characteristics of both men and women. Either they look like a man but behave like a woman or vice versa. The advocates claim that these people should be called the third gender (most commonly known as transgender) people who want to become a woman, despite being a man by nature, or a man despite being a woman by nature.
(emphasis mine)
It's true that in the Hindu world, "transgender" is taken to be automatically synonymous with "
third gender." The phrase "neither man nor woman" is characteristic of Indian views of gender variance.
But not where I come from. I am a woman. I am not a "third gender." This is an important distinction.
About the style of language--the essay was written in South Asian English, which tends to strike us as stilted and unnatural, because English is learned in school as a second language there, not spoken as a native language. English language instruction in South Asia has long been structured on Victorian British models, like so much else over there.
The author also gets sidetracked by chromosomal intersex, and would like to seize on that as the universal explanation for transgender, and dismiss all else. These days you see lots of people struggling to understand our issues, but often based on ignorance or incomplete knowledge. I think the author has a problem with gays and wants to explain away homosexuality using intersex. Won't work. But the conclusion that we should be accepted as "real people" is at least a positive step, even if a bit condescending.
