TransFormers: Empowerment through Employment

Himali Thakur, Class of 2019

The battle for equality has been, and looks like it will be, difficult for transgender people for a while in India. Society attaches social taboos to transgenders, and there is no shortage about the myths of sex work around them. Despite recent initiatives that are trying to help the cause of transgender community, finding employment that does not give them additional mental stress and harassment is a challenge. For instance, while the Kochi Metro employed transgenders to work in Customer Care and Housekeeping staff, some stigma still exists around them. In a video released in January last year, one of the employees pleaded, “I want you to look at me, and just see a person doing their job.” Even after employment, there is no guarantee that the transpeople will not be harassed, and it is because of the lack of such guarantee that startups that attempt to provide jobs with such security cropped up. In 2015, 1008 Jobs became the first online portal in India to allow access to stable employment opportunities for transgender people.

Here at Ashoka University, a Young India Fellow, Soumya Bhaskaran, along with her ELM partner, Kushal, decided to change the scene in and around NCR. They started “TransFormers”, which like any other job portal, attempts to provide employment to potential employees, except it is focused on the transgender community. TransFormers helps the local transgenders by putting them in touch with companies that are willing to employ them. This involves the creation of a database of companies that are open to employing transgender people, finding the right sort of employees for these organisations, sensitizing organisations to their transgender employees and training the transgender people for job interviews and application processes.

TransFormers began with an unease in Soumya’s mind during her undergraduate days. She would see transgender people begging on the streets despite them wanting to work. “I had a transgender person working at my house at one point,” she says. “I interviewed a lot of her friends, who were also interested in doing housework instead of begging.” However, the stigmas attached to transgender people were so strong that many of them had to continue begging. Many also did sex work; it was an easier way to earn, but it also gave them a sense of purpose more than the work environments where they were ill-treated and had no control. “People feel that there are a lot of taboos and social stigmas associated with [transgenders] in terms of their looks and that these people are scary. These are some of the myths around them that I really want to bust,” Soumya adds.

The initial months were tough. “We had a lot of setbacks, in terms of people not responding or picking up our calls,” recalls Soumya. Building trust in the transgender community was difficult because of the suffering that the community has faced. “This also sort of pushed our project behind because we thought that we’ll get all the transgender people in one go but that doesn’t happen. A lot of them blatantly rejected our proposals.” They also had to set up databases and carry out need-based analysis of companies that could employ members from the transgender community. “July and August were spent in doing literature work with the community,” says Soumya. They had to understand the perspective of the transgender community — or get as close to it as possible: “How do they feel?” Right now, TransFormers is working with around 250+ transgender people to help them find employment. Even after the transgender people are employed, they will have to follow-up with them to make sure that the people are happy in the jobs they applied for.

For now, the TransFormers project is quite small, so it focuses only on the NCR region. “It’s difficult,” says Soumya, “But we’ll probably expand it to other areas as well. Especially, we’re focusing on the Northern part of India. Even if I expand, I’ll expand to Chandigarh, Punjab, and Haryana for now.” Right now, the TransFormers team has only begun some basic work in Haryana.

Despite how well the project is shaping up, Soumya says that she is still anxious about some issues. “I have received a lot of support from Ashoka University. For instance, the Rotaract Club has some people working as volunteers for the Research, Fundraising, and Media & Marketing departments with us. They really helped us a lot. I am also sceptical about the kind of response that I would have received if I was working outside Ashoka, though.” The resistance that they faced initially, and still do in some cases, makes them a little jittery and extremely uncomfortable.

In order to really bring tangible change in the lives of the transgender community, access to the job market is the most important factor. The Transformers Initiative is building a platform for that access. As the initiative expands and the years draws to a close, Soumya plans to galvanize TransFormers project into her own start-up venture some day. “I think we do good work here,” she says. “Eventually, I want to make the entire hierarchy of the venture employed with members of the transgender community. These are roughly my goals for the next five to six years.”