Apologies for the long disjointed post. Too many thoughts jostling around in my head.

I think we might want to distinguish between ‘prove’ and ‘perform’. The stories that Pritham performed (I was somewhere in the crowd, like you), only one struck me as a ‘proof’ story: the one where she performs the castration on herself to prove a point to the people questioning her ‘real’ identity. The rest of her stories told us about intersexed and transgendered identities through the performance of very specific gender roles. So, the question I asked myself was not necessarily whether I needed the display (as you put it) of womanhood, but: how will I know what ‘feeling’ like a woman is in the absence of symbols that mark me as a woman? It’s actually quite easy to point to secondary sex organs (breasts, vagina etc) as cues to mark the sexes, but there is such diversity even within these so-called fixed characteristics (as the physicality of Pritham illustrated), that I am forced to acknowledge that much of Pritham’s performance as a transgendered individual reminds me of my own ‘fixed’ identity as a biological woman (identified and identifiable as such).

What was also striking about Pritham’s performance was that we were perfectly willing to believe her transgendered identity when she performed it for us, and then, we were perfectly willing to believe her ‘straight’ ‘biological’ identity when she disclosed it to us. Nothing changed except a few simple words. Yet, our perspective shifted planes. To me, it underlined our insistence on the stability and categorization of identities, our insistence on the ‘right’ performance of these identities, and the privilege of a few identities (over others).

And we have to look no further about this process than our young commentator, Amisha. She is clearly getting cues that dressing more feminine will mark her as a woman and therefore, of interest (to the heterosexual male gaze). Now, we can debate on what those feminine qualities are, whether they are desirable,and the societal influences on them. But mostly, I am reminded of a transgendered friend of mine whose insistence that she knew she was born in the wrong gender, when at the age of three, he put lipstick on his lips, and realized that it fit who she was on the ‘inside’. As a biological straight woman (identifiable as such) who has a visceral dislike of lipstick, this is not the yardstick by which I measure my ‘womanhood’. But it’s easy for me to dislike lipstick only because my performance as a woman is believable and hers isn’t. And my performance as a woman is believable only because it falls within the range of acceptable behavior and hers doesn’t. So, ultimately, the responsibility of the reification of gender roles and identities falls back on us, the guardians of acceptable performance. And I, for one, am glad Pritham was able to shake our foundations enough to see that they are based on fairly flimsy ground.

Sheila – yes, that is part of what I was thinking too, that do you feel the need to “prove” your identity if it is denied to you.