"My family members were shocked and cried for two days when I informed them about the sex change operation," Kondapalli Shankar aka Ankita said. Shankar went under the scalpel six months ago in a Mumbai hospital.
But what made Shankar transform himself into a woman? He said acute poverty and humiliation by neighbours forced him to migrate to Mumbai in search of livelihood. "Nobody gives a job to a man. So I had decided to become a woman and earn money," he said. "My immediate priority is to earn money and bail out my poor family from the severe financial problems," he said.
Shankar lost his father Ramchander when he was a small child, and could not pursue education, which made it difficult for him to get any job. He disappeared from the village a year ago. "It took two months for us to trace him out. We were worried when he didn't call us immediately," his brother Purushotham, a daily wage labourer, said. Ankita, attired in a colourful sari and bangles, says she now earns Rs 3,000 a month at a small firm in Mumbai.
3 comments:
If you aren't transgendered from the beginning, you won't even consider having that kind of an operation out of financial desperation until you are so poor you are facing imminent starvation. And then you simply can't afford the operation anymore. Maybe she is telling this lie about her motives because that's what her family wants to hear.
"Yeah Mom and Dad, I underwent an expensive and dangerous operation because of financial problems (uh, no dont ask how I afforded the operation when I had financial problems as a day laborer) and you can expect me to help out with the funds from my new job. You'll be getting a check from Madame Whoppee's House of.... you know never mind I'll just drop cash by...."
This sort of surgery could be very cheap in India. Who knows?
In any case, if you have to take measures that drastic to get a job, affirmative action measures may have gone a little too far...
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