Of Womanhood, Beauty and Acceptance...

Today's discussion with Sneha and Tanvi changed my perception of and got me thinking about a lot of things, the notion of beauty being the very first one.

Uptil this point in the course, I had been envisaging beauty and the "superficiality" of outer beauty in a rather specific, "Modern Urban Woman" context. After meeting Sneha, I was struck by how feminine she is, not just physically and personality-wise, but also in terms of her dreams, aspirations and inner conflicts...infact, she is a true embodiment of the word "woman", as coined by society. However, the few characteristics of hers that may not fall into society's definition of a woman, give her the label of "not a woman", refusing to see beyond the superficiality of the same, at the real woman that lies underneath. And that, I realized, is a huge conflict in the definition of "beauty"; a "woman" who might murder her husband to be with her lover is still a woman, despite going against her basic feminine nature of caring and nurturing. But someone like Sneha has to go through innumerable tortures and still be unaccepted as a woman, all beacuse she may have a "masculine" voice!

I also realized today that for society, it isn't enough that people like Sneha are in acceptance of their beauty and in acceptance of what they are. They also need to be viewed as beautiful by the society to live a "normal" life, to achieve which they are expected to mould themselves according to the set norms. Beauty then takes a completely different meaning here, transitioning from something used to enhance one's aesthetic value to something that helps one in gaining social acceptance, or some sense of "societal normalcy" at the very least!

Because the society as a whole refuses to look beyond Sneha's transgender-ness and to view her for what she really is, a woman...a beautiful woman, both in and out, who is fighting for herself and for the many others like her, simply to exist in a very "normal" space, in this case legally.

We refuse to give her the chance to enjoy womanhood in the maximum possible way, yet we very conveniently and hypocritically state that she is not "one of us"...which side is uglier then? And which, the more beautiful one? Because beauty is no longer about the physical sense of the word...it is much, much more than that...