- Trinetra experienced intense gender dysphoria starting around age 3-4 and puberty intensified it
- She initially tried to fit in as a masculine boy but felt disconnected from that identity
- Trinetra faced childhood trauma and stigma, including ridicule at school for gender nonconformity
Dr Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju made her acting debut in Amazon Prime Video's Made In Heaven. She played Meher, a trans woman who excelled in her field but struggled in her personal life because of the taboo and stigma faced by the community in society.
Since then, she has used her influence and voice to advocate for the rights of the transgender community and other queer communities across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. In the Pride Month special episode of All About You, Soha Ali Khan's podcast, she opened up about her experience of growing up as a transgender person in India, overcoming trauma, and undoing shame and stigma.
Trinetra Recalls Puberty Hitting "Very Hard" In Her Teens
Speaking about gender dysphoria, she said, "With most kids, incongruence sets in pretty early. Dysphoria typically means what - it's discomfort. And gender dysphoria means discomfort associated with your gender being incongruent with your sex. And this incongruence is nothing but the difference. So the level of dysphoria varies from person to person. The level of discomfort is different."
"For me personally, I think at the age of 3-4 the incongruence was so obvious and evident for everybody, as far as social norms and things were concerned," she added.
When she hit puberty at the age of 12-13, her voice began to change and everything that happens to a "male body" happened to her as well. "That's when it started dawning on me that I am becoming a man," she added.
"On some level, there is this delusional child-like part of you that watches an Aaja Nachle at age 10, and just magically believes that I will grow up to be this beautiful woman," Trinetra shared, adding, "And when puberty starts happening, your body tells you, 'No, it's not going to happen.' That's when the reality of your biology starts kicking in and that intensifies the distress and discomfort significantly. Gender dysphoria kicked in very hard in my teen years."
She added that puberty made her socially acceptable and fit in with boys, but on a personal note, "it was deeply horrifying" for her. She initially brushed off the disconnect with the gender assigned at birth as insecurity.
"So I was like, 'I will become the most attractive boy ever. I went to the gym, I started playing sports, and I did this whole thing. I will be really masculine. I will try to fit in.' And it worked. I had a girlfriend for a bit, and it worked socially, not internally. It took me so much further away from who I was," she added.
"It slowly became evident to me that it was a gender thing. It wasn't an insecurity or a body-image thing or even a sexual orientation thing, for that matter," Trinetra noted, adding, "Who I was in my body, myself, at that time, I could not be the boyfriend she wanted because I wasn't a boy to begin with."
Trinetra On Feeling Different
Many transgender children grow up feeling different. The disconnect is not only with their gender, but society also makes them feel that they are different from other children, and not in a good way.
For Trinetra, the experience was the same. Recalling an incident, she said that she was a carefree and uninhibited child when she was 4 or 5." I would dress up in a way all kids do. Every parent puts their kids in drag for fun photos and all of that. But for me, I guess because it wasn't a phase."
One day, she wrapped her mother's dupatta like a saree, and her neighbour yelled at her, saying, "What kind of a boy does this?"
"This is the first time I felt something was wrong. This is not the way I am supposed to be," she shared with Soha Ali Khan.
She recalled another incident from second grade when her teacher asked a fellow schoolmate to keep aside her vibrant hairpin. Trinetra wanted one for herself, so she requested her classmate to let her keep it. When the teacher found it, she made her wear it for two periods as her classmates laughed at her. "I was seven years old," she told the actor.
"That takes a lifetime to overcome that trauma," Trinetra said, adding, "It was a lot of undoing the shame and stigma you internalise. You don't want to be something people laugh at."
Today, Trinetra proudly wears her mother's saree without a care in the world.
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