On a Friday afternoon, on 16 January 2015, the student soon to be formerly known as Krishna Singh stepped up in front of a packed assembly hall at Delhi’s Vasant Valley School. “I guess I always knew I was different. I wasn’t exactly a normal kid,” Singh said. “But then again, what is ‘normal?’ Everyone is different, everyone is unique. So why aren't we allowed to flourish with our individual identities?”
Over the next few minutes Singh went on to describe her struggle with gender and identity, and eventually come out as a transgender woman to her peers and teachers.
From that point onwards, her transition to Naina Singh became an assertion of her right to be comfortable in her own skin. As the youngest Indian to have identified as transgender, Singh was all over social media, the news, and public discourse; her private decision was suddenly under the glare of the public eye. And she responded with aplomb—she spoke at public events, appeared on news channels and even started a YouTube channel, where she documents her progress with Hormone Replacement Therapy, and answers questions that pertain to gender and identity. Part agony-aunt, part-activist, and a tall, striking, young woman, NainaQueenB (as she is known across her various social media accounts) has travelled a long way from the fear and stigma that had shrouded her early years.
At 17, she is a role model for transpeople across the country and perhaps the world, some of whom are born into environments harsher than hers. She recounted speaking at length with a transperson from Saudi Arabia who was feeling suicidal. “I’m not going to be India’s youngest transgender for long, but it’s not like I will stop trying to create awareness or not help,” she told me. Singh said she always stresses that she is not a counsellor and encourages people to seek one, but that she is familiar with how confusion and isolation “sucks, and can lead to self-harm and suicide.” “I can’t counsel people–I am not trained and do not know their circumstances. But I can prevent them from being dead,” she said. She described how she once accidentally called the Dutch police while trying to help someone in the Netherlands find a counsellor, and recounted the time she told a girl from a small town in Uttar Pradesh to choose life or she’d never be able to give herself the beauty and the joy that she deserved.
My first impression of Naina when I met her at her home on 30 April 2016 was that she was like any other teenager; Instagram and boredom were recurrent themes when it came to conversations about everyday life. The most exciting thing about her life, she said, was the makeup course she wanted to pursue over the summer holidays.
“I love crying—it’s like my favourite thing to do,” Naina laughed while recollecting her childhood and early adolescence, a large part of which she said was spent avoiding her peers for fear of persecution, staying indoors, emotionally cutting herself off, and shedding copious tears. From an early age, she experienced a strong dissociation with the gender expectations that were imposed upon her. “Boys don’t cry was something that I was often told and I remember, thinking even then, ‘Can I not be a boy, then?’”
Gender—with its social, medical and individual interpretations—is difficult enough to define, but as soon as Naina understood the difference between a “boy” and a “girl” through the social constructs and contrasts that define each, she knew she was a girl. “I always knew I couldn’t say it, but I could hint at it subtly. So instead of saying I don’t want to be a boy, I’d say, ‘Oh I want to wear a dress.’” The response to such requests were efforts at masculinisation—her father enrolled her into a cricket coaching academy, a stint that lasted barely a few weeks.
Her dreams were perhaps the earliest answers to all her questions. Singh told me of a recurring dream she had when she was younger. “It’s just me as a woman—tall, thin and gorgeous long hair—in the sitting area of a palace, with my husband and kids,” she described, while stressing how comforting these surroundings appeared. During a family holiday she found herself, all of 11 years old, eyeing a man who would use the gym in the hotel they were staying at. She realised she liked men. “I had a boyfriend in eighth grade—the girls”—her friends at school—“knew, and I’d told them not to tell anyone,” Singh said. But they spread the word immediately. “Because of such incidents, I developed trust issues,” she told me. And although her friend problems are a thing of the past now, then, the boys in school only got meaner, and she plunged into depression.
Identifying as gay seemed the only feasible option to Naina at the time since her boyfriend, who was in the tenth grade, did. “I didn’t know what the ‘T’ in LGBT stood for,” she said. But the onset of adolescence raised further critical questions. “You can see the development of breasts on your friends and you wonder, ‘Why is that not happening to me?’” In her school sex education classes, she learnt about the changes a body underwent at puberty. “But then you’re like ‘I don’t want this body—can I have that one?’” She spoke of her growing obsession with wearing her sister’s clothes or her mother’s heels secretively, making, what she referred to as an “unlady-like” mess; stumbling over herself, and feigning fake accidents to cover the bruises she received from falling. It was this quest for grace in heels that led to her discovery of Gigi Gorgeous, or Giselle Loren Lazzarato—a Canadian transgender actress and internet personality, who Naina describes as “goals AF” (or goals “as fuck”)—when she was in the tenth grade, in 2014. “Even [Gigi] used to identify as gay, she hadn’t transitioned and I found her while YouTubing videos of how to walk in heels,” she told me. What began as the recognition that there was “someone like me—a guy in heels,” became a journey of discovery. Before long, Naina was hurtling down the rabbit-hole that is research on the internet. A lot of reading and self-education later, she realised she was transgender. Before anyone else, she wanted to confront her mother, her greatest ally. Mishi Singh’s response was to hug her and pledge support. “I just remember telling her one day that ‘I am having problems with my boyfriend,’ and she decided to tell me about how relationships are about communication and such things, instead of ever asking ‘Why do you have a boyfriend?’” Naina recalled. Buoyed by the support from home, she decided to come out in school, in front of an entire assembly. She took her teachers and the school principal into confidence and told them about what she wanted to do. “They were extremely supportive of what I’d planned but they were not sure if everyone was ready for this.” Thus, classes six, seven, and eight were asked to leave the assembly and standards ninth to twelfth were in attendance.
“I had come out twice, which was, like, two times more than half the population anyway,” she said. She described her transformation to Naina within the short span of a year and a half since then. She was allowed to dress up as a girl at home but soon realised that if she couldn’t go out like that, she’d never be able to live as herself. She threatened to leave home until she was given the freedom to dress the way she wanted to. At school, she wore her unisex house shirt—a round-neck t-shirt in the colour of the house the student was affiliated to—and shorts, which was something all the students could subscribe to. “I rolled those shorts up so high, they made me wear the salwar kameez,” she laughed. Incidentally, her moniker “QueenB” was her way of addressing and mocking what everyone in school called her—“queen bitch.” “My aggression was completely outwards. Now, when I look back I realise I was full of hate,” she said, referring to the persecution she faced at school. For most students, she was a subject of gossip and “the boys were mean; from teasing to death threats, I’ve faced it all.” Not that the girls were much kinder. “Everyone wanted a gay best friend,” she said of the time she had identified as gay, but inevitably the things she told her friends in confidence would become common knowledge and her identity, a spectacle. She credits her mother with helping her rediscover her gentler side.
Naina still has to contend with a 17-hour gender reassignment surgery. She’d rather talk about Hormone Replacement Therapy, “I’m having great fun with it,” she laughed, but mention the surgery and QueenB deflects with: “After my boards [exams], let’s talk about something else.” As her transition continues, the recurring dream seems to recede in frequency, like a signifier of the much-delayed coming-of-age. “It’s like Krishna is dead and looking down from above and saying ‘yes girl, you’re doing great with your life!’”she said. “Krishna died so that Naina could be born.”