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Sexual Orientation and Transgender Issues in Organizations pp 43–61Cite as

I Am the Man for the Job: The Challenges of Coming Out as a Female-to-Male Transgender in the Indian Organizational Space

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Abstract

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community encounters different levels of acceptance in the Indian social context. The stigma attached to sexual minorities and gender non-conformity during the colonial encounter further reduces the chances of acceptance and affirmation in the public sphere, including the workplace. There is limited documentation of workplace experience of transgender persons in India; to add to this, we do not have much information on how they negotiate their identity in largely trans-apathetic workplaces. Given the tendency to associate transgender persons with Hijra/Aravani community in the Indian context, it is also important to see how the negotiation of identity by a transman/transwoman asserts the male/female identity and deals with the challenge of liminality. This chapter looks into the case of coming-out of a transman and his efforts to negotiate his gender identity at work. We probe how gender liminality coexists with reification of gender binary in the process of transition and coming-out in the Indian organizational context. Based on insights from literature, we argue that the individual agency combines with contextual factors to structure the workplace identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Umbrella term for several traditional identities including biological men identifying as women, MSMs, eunuchs, hermaphrodites; often knit as a community with its own social system.

  2. 2.

    ‘Feminine Boys’ dedicated to the Goddess Yellamma who often lead a same-sex relationship (Bradford 1983).

  3. 3.

    Rama is worshipped as an incarnation of Vishnu, one of the most prominent gods of the Hindu pantheon.

  4. 4.

    Vrindavan is a city near Delhi, the capital city of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal, India

    Animesh Bahadur & Kunal Kamal Kumar

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  1. Animesh Bahadur
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  2. Kunal Kamal Kumar
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Correspondence to Animesh Bahadur .

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  1. Dept of Mgmt, Vienna Univ of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

    Thomas Köllen

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Bahadur, A., Kumar, K.K. (2016). I Am the Man for the Job: The Challenges of Coming Out as a Female-to-Male Transgender in the Indian Organizational Space. In: Köllen, T. (eds) Sexual Orientation and Transgender Issues in Organizations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29623-4_3

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