TCS NQT Verbal Mock 11

I drop Khasnobis at the Park Hotel – I suspect he has a booze session there – and dart quickly out of the heart of Calcutta. The Salt Lake City is on the right side of a alodrous road leading to the Calcutta airport. This new township is relatively clean and its roads are broad – Bengal’s Chief Minister lives here – but it lacks the tang of old Calcutta. It has some bizarre buildings. My guest house, for instance, is an architectural flimflam. One first walks into a cavernous hall painted pastel blue. A concrete carbuncle erupts right at the centre of its otherwise flat roof. Its cavity is painted baby pink. Mock Corinthian pilasters protrude from its walls. At the end of the hall is a flight of stairs, which leads to a set of rooms with ornate wooden doors. One of the rooms is mine. My room usually smells dank, but today it is prussic acid. I call the caretaker. “What is this smell?” He wrinkles his nose and sniffs the air. “It is room freshener, sir.” He fishes out a container from one of the side cupboards and hands it over to me. It is indeed the room freshner. It assures you of a redolence of wild roses. “I was happy with dank, friend”. “Sir?” “Never mind. Is there another room vacant? I can’t sleep in this room.” The caretaker wrings his hands. “No room is vacant on this floor sir. I could ask one of the guests to swap his room with yours.” “No, I don’t want that. What about the rooms on the top floor?” “We have two rooms on the top floor, sir. One of them is vacant. But it is not air- conditioned.” “I don’t mind sleeping there. Kindly get the roon ready for me.” The night is breezy and pleasant. I light up a mosquito repellent and, in the whirring comfort of the ceiling fan, lapse into a delicious sleep. I wake up with a start, sweating all over. The ceiling fan has ceased whirring. The power must have gone off. The mosquito coil eyes me with an orange glow. Where is Ghosh sleeping now? Does he have a ceiling fan in his room? Or a mosquito coil? Does he have a room at all? Is he sleeping in the open? As I stand up and walk towards the window the ceiling fan begins its drone. The light that comes from a window a few yards across from mine is not strong enough to illuminate my room but bright enough to show me what is going on in that room. I silently draw the curtains and get back to bed. I am not a voyeur.

When we arrive at the crucial tension at the heart of gender identity politics, and one that most of its proponents either haven’t noticed, or choose to ignore because it can only be resolved by rejecting some of the key tenets of the doctrine. Many people justifiably assume that the word ‘transgender’ is synonymous with ‘transsexual’, and means something like: having dysphoria and distress about your sexed body, and having a desire to alter that body to make it more closely resemble the body of opposite sex. But according to the current terminology of gender identity politics, being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change your sexed body. What it means to be transgender is that your innate gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. This might be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess. You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been perceived as another. It is a key tenet of the doctrine that the vast majority of people can be described as ‘cisgender’, which means that our innate gender identity matches the one we were assigned at birth. But as we have seen, if gender identity is a spectrum, then we are all non-binary, because none of us inhabits the points represented by the ends of that spectrum. Every single one of us will exist at some unique point along that spectrum, determined by the individual and idiosyncratic nature of our own particular identity, and our own subjective experience of gender. Given that, it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender. None of us was assigned our correct gender identity at birth, for how could we possibly have been? Once we recognise that the number of gender identities is potentially infinite, we are forced to concede that nobody is deep down cisgender, because nobody is assigned the correct gender identity at birth. In fact, none of us was assigned a gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals. We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for people of that sex. We are all educated and inculcated into one of two roles, long before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on the gender continuum. So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people. The logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this is a profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion, and one that serves both to obscure the reality of female oppression, as well as to erase and invalidate the experiences of transsexual people. The way to avoid this conclusion is to realize that gender is not a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then build our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed all the way through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes, occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity over femininity. The truth of the spectrum analogy lies in the fact that conformity to one’s place in the hierarchy, and to the roles it assigns to people, will vary from person to person. The solution is not to reify gender by insisting on ever more gender categories that define the complexity of human personality in rigid and essentialist ways. The solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to naturalise and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people, and constrains the development of individuals of both sexes. Reconceiving of gender as an identity spectrum represents no improvement. The solution to an oppressive system that puts people into pink and blue boxes is not to create more and more boxes that are any colour but blue or pink. The solution is to tear down the boxes altogether.