This podcast is about a close encounter that I had with the third kind in the year 1994. And this will be a dramatic podcast, where I will be telling you the story of my first such encounter, I dared where angles feared to tread.
It was that era when the world believed God created only Adam and Eve. God did not create them. The were neither. They were derelicts, social outcasts, feared, despised and ridiculed by men and women alike. Their coarse voices, their filthy language and obscene gestures embarrassed the ‘normal’ and the ‘civilized’, who would never know what is it to be neither… or both.
The pain was written in their lewd hostility. If nothing else, their unabashed strip-tease was sure to make people shrink away. Yet, at the core of that body, which is neither male nor female but an ungainly mix of both, lay a soft human heart. Eunuchs (or transgenders) eat, sleep, drink, pray, bleed and shed tears just as anyone else. And they were not considered humans among humans.
At least, until after April 15, 2014, 20 years of my write-up appeared in The Telegraph, when Supreme Court in India granted transgenders the right as a third gender on, issuing the landmark verdict recognizing transgender rights as human rights, saying people can identify themselves as a third gender on official documents.
Before that they did not even have voting rights. Now there are transgender principals in schools, and they are a part of the working class. Even in the Aadhar card in India there is a 3rd gender, called “Others”.
This is a podcast just encompassing the natural-born eunuchs., or third kinds. This is not about the other others.
(Read and view the picture of Hamid Masi here: https://kaberic.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/a-close-encounter-with-the-third-kind/) Please remember there were no internet news stories those days and as such, there can be no link to the newspaper. But we do have a photo of the original newspaper. Check it out!
Write to me at kadchat51@gmail.com
