I was six or seven years old the first time I understood that my body was not entirely mine. A male relative was coming over, and I was told not to wear shorts. Nobody explained patriarchy, objectification or modesty culture to me. They simply changed the rules around my body and expected me to understand why.

That is how it begins for many of us. Not with theory, but with instruction.

To a female body, knowing that the world feels entitled to it is not a foreign fact. We have felt it and lived it since we were children. In homes, when we were told to cover up because men were around. In schools, when teachers categorised girls far too easily based on skirts, behaviour or visibility. In the memory of the first time somebody assaulted us without permission and assumed access to our agency and autonomy, most of us have one by the age of 15. 

Society has built itself around managing the female form, sexualising it, objectifying it, controlling it and still expecting it to perform care, beauty and reproduction. Our bodies are constantly treated as public text open for interpretation.

But to be queer in a body that is read as female creates a different kind of fracture too. We call it dysphoria, but that word often feels too clinical for something that is so deeply lived. You move through the world trying to express yourself as honestly as possible, androgyny, softness, masculinity, fluidity, whatever combination feels true, and still remain "girl" to most people who look at you.

I am misgendered so often that sometimes I forget my own. I am not someone who hides my queerness, but visibility does not automatically create understanding. Friends, colleagues, relatives and even people who love you can still struggle to see your gender nonconformity because they are trying to fit you into categories that feel easier for them.

That is why I celebrate loudly all year, not just in June.

The conversations around Pride in India are often flattened into imported aesthetics and corporate rainbows, but the reality here is far more layered. There is a huge difference between New York and Bengaluru, Mumbai or Delhi. Our fights are shaped by culture, caste, religion, family structures, colonial morality and a deep homophobia that often does not even originate from our own indigenous histories.

The Transgender Persons Bill terrified me because it treated identity as something that could be administratively validated. It threatened the right to self-identify without institutional approval, and that cuts to the centre of what so many queer people are fighting for: the right to define ourselves without being examined, certified or corrected by the state.

The irony is that I never wanted to change my body in the way people assume transness always requires via surgery, that is. The truth of it is, that in an urban city with no wish to have surgery, i am protected. I am relatively safe, although, do understand that this is not the case of all trans individuals everywhere. Yes, trans people are everywhere this is not a western concept that rules our identity and expression, it is not a commodity as easy as it may be for some to categorize it as such. 

When I came out as non-binary, I saw myself less as moving from one gender to another and more like Shiva, a force that holds masculine and feminine simultaneously. I am not trying to become one thing. I am trying to exist fully as both, neither, and everything in between. I’m not even religious and yet my gender expression came rooted to one of our gods. We should not be hateful to what we have already tolerated and inculcated as Indians. 

My favourite description of my gender came from my best friend in college, who once called me "an abstract concept." That felt correct immediately.

I am a canvas and I paint myself every day, through my pottu, my rings, my silver jewellery, my energy, my clothes and my tattoos. Tattooing has never felt separate from my gender expression because it was always already part of how I was building myself.

Expressing queerness itself is resistance, mind you. It is political, our very existence is political, because the state would rather see us perish and conform or hide than see us as anything but degenerates, abnormal, or worse perverts. 

When we asked gender-diverse artists in our archive what tattooing had done for their relationship with their bodies, their answers circled the same idea from different directions.

"As a genderfluid / transmasc individual, I've always hated the flesh that I got," Shamoon told us. "Getting tattoos made it a lot easier for me to look at my skin and not feel repulsed by disgust."

 

That sentence stayed with me because it is not romantic. It is not the neat self-love language social media prefers. It is relief, a quieter relationship with the mirror, a body that becomes easier to inhabit. It is my preferred kind of raw expression, because i know the special kind of horror it is to be a queer individual assigned female at birth. 

Ramaa described something similar through a different lens.

"It made me see my body as a canvas when all I was receiving from the society around me was objectification and sexualisation of my body."

That is the shift, from being looked at to becoming the author of the look itself. Expression and liberation are intimately tied with one another, let it be from women' s rights to queer rights, we have found confidence, agency and autonomy in free expression while wanting to remain unlabeled. Much like the CEO can also be a mother or the electrician who loves her cats, a femme presenting individual may also be a lesbian, they are not all masc, flannels and carabiners. Not all nonbinary folk have their heads shaved and colored (while we might have at one point xD) 

Tattooing does not solve dysphoria. It does not erase insecurity or magically create self-acceptance. But it can offer something many queer people rarely receive consistently: authorship. A reminder that the body is not only something that happens to us. It is also something we actively create.

This is why tattooing and queerness keep finding each other. Not because every queer person gets tattooed, and certainly not because every tattooed person is queer, but because both communities are deeply engaged with the question of self-construction. What does it mean to build yourself deliberately? What does it mean to mark your body according to your own narrative instead of somebody else's expectation?

Ramaa said, "I didn't walk out of the boxes I was in to re-enter more, even if I choose and package them myself."

I think about that often because identity can become another performance if we are not careful. Labels can help us survive, understand ourselves and find community, but freedom is not always hiding inside the label itself. Sometimes it is hiding underneath it.

And this is where I get angry about the way queerness is discussed in India today, because so much of the moral panic around gender and sexuality is treated as though it is ancient Indian tradition when many of these anxieties were sharpened and institutionalised through colonial morality.

Indian history was never a utopia, caste violence and patriarchy are real and longstanding, but our relationship to sex, pleasure, embodiment and gender has always been more complicated than contemporary conservatives admit. If desire itself was inherently shameful, why would erotic sculptures exist in temples? Why would intimacy, pleasure and bodies appear in sacred spaces at all? The Kama Sutra itself reflects a culture that did not approach sexuality with the same puritanical horror that later Victorian morality imposed.

What many people now defend as "tradition" is often a strange fusion of colonial respectability politics and upper-caste aspirations masquerading as timeless Indian values.

Which brings me back to Pride.

People often ask what Pride means now, as though it must either be celebration or protest.

For me, it is both.

For Shamoon, it was this: "Pride will always be a protest for me, because I don't want the next person I mourn to be my friends or an individual who was denied the right to live just because they were queer."

For Ramaa, it was "the freedom to constantly be flowing. Choosing my own path. Being celebrated and accepted in it."

I think those answers belong together.

Pride is survival, grief, visibility, authorship and possibility all at once. It is the refusal to let somebody else define what your body means. It is the insistence that we are allowed to exist outside rigid binaries, outside state approval and outside the narrow performances of respectability that society keeps trying to hand us.

The body is not a problem to solve, the body is a conversation.

And some of us choose to write directly onto the page.