‘What superpower do you want?’

It’s the sort of question that gets asked to break the ice. Or used as a trigger to reveal something about our strengths and weaknesses to the facilitator. We laughed good-naturedly, smiled at one another and settled in for the team-building day. After a moment of hesitation someone answered, ‘to be able to fly.’ Others followed; ‘invincible strength,’ ‘time travelling,’ ‘invisibility,’ and so on. Nodding our heads, we mentally ticked off the superpowers in the Marvel Universe, shifting nervously when someone said, ‘x-ray vision.’ Finally, my turn came, and, having had time to think, said ‘shape-shifting.’ I’ve never paid much attention to why I chose that; it was over a decade ago. Perhaps we were running out of superpowers, or I wanted to appear enigmatic amongst those colleagues.

That shape shifting ambition came back to mind when I recently read an unfamiliar story in the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. I’ve started to use it as inspiration for my own writing, to retell its stories and find iconic tropes for my own characters and plots. Discovering something new in the work shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the sheer number and variety of narratives it contains never ceases to amaze me, as do their regional variations. It’s a work that famously needs a lifetime to read and appreciate, one described as containing the world, hence the reader is always bound to come across something new.

This particular one was hidden in the Tamil version and away from the legendary incidents such as the famous Game of Dice which ends in exile and sows the seeds of war, the mighty battle scenes between the Pandavas and Kauravas at Kurukshetra, and the seminal spiritual text that is the Bhagavad Gita. My immediate interest in the story was because it dealt with gender fluidity. It involved the Kalappali, a human sacrifice on the eve of battle — a familiar scene from other epics — said to appease the Goddess Kali and ensure victory for the Pandavas. In offering himself for this ritual, the minor heroic character Aravan makes a request that can’t be refused. As a bachelor, he asks to be married so that he is given the proper funeral rites. No one steps forward to be his bride, no one wants to be a widow after a single night of marriage. The God Krishna solves this impasse by taking on his female form, Mohini, marries Aravan and spends the night with him.

Krishna’s gender mutability, and Aravan’s acceptance of this to the extent that he takes Mohini to be his wife, had impacts that are still felt today. The hijras of Tamil Nadu call themselves the Aravanis, and hold an 18-day festival every year, where they dress up as Aravan’s wives and mourn his death. Hijras are regularly called the ‘third gender’ or ‘transgender people’ of Indian culture, though a definition of that term is more complex. They are people assigned male at birth who have come to identify as female, through a set of processes that may include emasculation, and equally importantly, self-identification, initiation and acceptance by existing members, and, as Gayatri Reddy has discussed in her 2005 book With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, subscription to a set of social and cultural relations and practices.

The power this story had over me was different though. I realised that a large part of what I meant by shape shifting back in that training room was the ability to gender shift like Krishna/Mohini. I don’t mean a desire to become Aravan’s wife and annually mourn his loss, as the Tamil hijras do. I wanted to be both Aravan and his wife, both Krisha and Mohini, to be able to oscillate between each part of the gender dyad or along the spectrum in between. While I have always known that I contain feminine elements and sometimes dressed in drag, taken on a female name, referred to myself as she, as often happens in camp conversations, I’ve never felt as if I were trapped in the wrong body. As a result, I don’t feel as if I have spent a lifetime misgendered, having suppressed a wish to immutably change gender. It was in Krishna, and his action, that I saw my desired superpower for what it was, or what it wanted to be, but I did not have the language or the self-knowledge to describe it at the time. It embodied an often-recurring fantasy I’ve had to be able to move along the gender spectrum at will since my youth.

Growing up in post-Independence Myanmar, it was an unconscious desire to be both James Bond in the film of Dr. No, to be as stylish as he was in his Savile Row suits and choice of gin for martinis, and Honey Rider, when it came to emerging from the sea in a dazzling bikini and nuzzling something like Sean Connery’s hairy chest. As my cultural education expanded, the desire to be both Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and Léon Dupuis, Zorg and Betty Blue, all became more conscious. For a time, my inner narcissist saw itself reflected in Juan/Ángel /Zahara in Almodovar’s Bad Education, or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This fantasy found expression in a story I wrote which told the story of Robbie/Roberta, an AI that lived in a world with technology that allowed it to choose which gender it wanted to be, and to change it at will, given the day and circumstances. Robbie/Roberta gained self-awareness and developed compassion for the plight of indentured robots, enough to become a rebel and lead an alliance to fight for the liberation of their own kind. Now here was a Hindu God, a revered figure from my own heritage and culture, not a colonial import, finally revealing all this about me — showing me this superpower in action and its ability to inspire and incite adoration many centuries into the future. It felt like a validation. At the same time, it made me acknowledge that this ability to fluctuate no longer belonged in the world of fantasy but had become an intrinsic state of being that I’d always desired.

After an adulthood identifying as a gay man, this encounter has made me reckon with the concept of gender again, and specifically with how it applies to me based on this new self-knowledge. I know there is a term for what I believe I am, non-binary, one I didn’t know back in that training room and which in any case wasn’t part of everyday language at the time. The word is now in common usage but it’s one I find that I resist, not wanting to be defined as not being something, with the ‘non’ prefix suggesting it’s an exception to a norm, that I can only be positioned against that norm. There are other words I could use that have entered our lexicon; genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, all of which can be reduced to an X or a checking of the ‘rather not disclose’ box in official documents and forms, at least in Australia. For me, part of that resistance is knowing that as a person of colour, I’ve never felt I fully occupied the label of gay man — the role models available have always been overwhelmingly white and American, British or European. And I never embodied the word man or male within that gay context, and its associations with the words top, bottom, versatile, or fully embraced aspects of gay culture like camp, or drag, or leather, though I have ventured into them all. So I’ve been asking myself, why should I take on another inadequate label now that I am on the other side of middle age?

Language is often difficult, so culturally specific, and faced with this complexity, I’ve sought to simplify things for myself by an increasing use of the word ‘Queer’ as a catch all to represent my rejection of normative expectations. This rejection, at least, is something I am sure of. ‘Queer’ feels provisional, however, until I find something that feels right. Part of that resistance to the adoption of existing words or terms stems, I think, from the inability to transpose the meanings they hold in English when translating it to the South Asian culture of my heritage and upbringing. Colonised peoples have always known this, from the Aravanis to the Sistergirls from the Tiwi Islands, the Two-Spirit Muxes of Oaxaca, and the Mariposas del café — Colombia’s Emberá Wera Pa coffee plantation workers. Each example resists a label or the checkbox as a sign of cultural colonisation. In her 2021 book The Transgender Issue, Shon Faye says ‘what it means to be a woman or a man (or neither) is not a fixed and stable entity, but a complex constellation of biological, political, economic and cultural factors, which may shift over time. In contrast to this complexity… a commonsense approach breezily waves nuances away.’ It’s the reductiveness of labels to something fixed, their inability to account for complexity and nuances, which makes me wary of them.

Judith Butler quotes Faye’s words in their 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender when they criticise the usage of terms like ‘common sense’ or ‘natural laws’ by anti-gender forces such as the Vatican, Right-Wing politicians, gender-critical feminists and TERFs, all of whom use these terms to justify their discriminatory stances. Butler rightly asks, ‘how many people feel that the ‘common sense’ idea of how they should live their assigned sex, or presumed gender, actually does violence to who they are?’ Towards the end of their book, Butler recognises the difficulties of language and its power to abet colonialism, imperialism and fascism. Just as the historical, economic, social and cultural context of hijras means that they cannot be meaningfully called transgender, American Indigenous and queer actor Lily Gladstone reminded us recently to decolonise gender when they stated on Twitter (confusingly now called X) ‘Two-Spirit is not a catch all term for 🌈; it’s way more specific and it’s a term that originates with Diné. I’m not Two-Spirit: I use non-binary pronouns.’ They then corrected this to say Two-Spirit is an Anishinaabe originated term. Butler’s request ‘not to generalise a way of life, but to become attuned to the various vocabularies that make life more liveable,’ and for ‘gender to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition,’ seem relevant here. I love Butler’s exhortation to bring about a world where people become more open to the ways that gender can be done and lived without judgment, fear, or hatred. Their call for a ‘wild’ gender echoes Jack Halbertam’s idea of wildness as an unbounded and unpredictable space for gender and sexuality. Yet how is that possible within the context of the anti-gender war that Butler spends most of their book documenting?

 At the International Keynote Address on the opening day of the 2023 Sydney World Pride Human Rights Conference, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, rightly invited applause for the statistic he shared that, with the legislative changes in Spain a week before his speech, 397 million people across the world would be living under laws that offer freedom of gender identity and decriminalisation of LGBTIQA+ peoples. Seated in the audience, I applauded this alongside the rest of the delegates. It truly sounded like a vast number and seemed like a massive achievement. In 2023, however, the world population was estimated at eight billion. The statistic Madrigal-Borloz quoted therefore represented just under 5% of the world’s population. On their website which tracks the international progress of LGBTIQA+ rights, Equaldex.com’s analysis as of the writing of this essay shows that only 17 countries recognise non-binary or third gender identities in the world, with almost all of Asia, Africa and the Middle East and, surprisingly, much of Europe, coloured red as a sign of non-recognition.

Later in the World Pride Conference, the panel entitled The Impact of the Global Refugee Crisis on Displaced LGBTQIA+ People focused on the rights and protection needs of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the context of human mobility. We heard stories of the violence, sexual and physical assaults faced by non-binary and transgender peoples in refugee contexts, compounded by intersectional factors at play in their lives. UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, estimated that the global refugee population has doubled within the last seven years, reaching 36.4 million people as of mid-2023. There is an obvious dissonance between the slower rate of global growth in freedoms for queer people and the accelerating rate of displacement and its attendant restrictions, a rate that is expected to increase with the impacts of climate change.

Just as I start to develop what liveability looks like for me and struggle to find a language for it and wish for myself and for everyone else a world that is open to the many ways of embodying gender without judgment, fear or hatred, the global context that we find ourselves in suggests that this is at best, a Sisyphean task. And that context seems more likely to deteriorate than improve through the work of the Vatican, Right-Wing politicians and gender-critical feminists. In response to the rise of such anti-gender actions, Butler provides some hope. They ask us to form coalitions, alliances and show the world what a radical affirmation of gender looks like. Butler calls for a vision of gender that ‘holds out a promise of freedom, a freedom from fear and discrimination, homophobic violence and murder, femicide, incarceration, restriction from public life, failed health care, either permitted or enforced by expanding state powers.’

 I’ve come to a realisation about my gender identity late in life and with the privilege of living a country that recognises non-binary gender. The conditions surrounding the liveability of my remaining life doesn’t seem as urgent an issue as it would be to many people around the world, particularly in those countries on Equaldex.com’s red list and in those populations of the displaced. But I cannot take my freedoms for granted while an overwhelmingly significant percentage of the world chooses to deny those freedoms and anti-gender rhetoric grows. If writing is a form of confession, Robbie/Roberta, in that early story I wrote, revealed another part of me. An activism that desires to protect both my existing freedom and to create the circumstances of a liveable life for all who live life on their own terms. In engaging with this part of me and to realise Butler’s call for a vision of gender, I want to bypass Fleming, Tolstoy, Flaubert et al., and create ways of acting from my own standpoint at the intersection of culture, creativity and gender.

The Mahabharata story of Aravan and Krishna/Mohini isn’t unique in Hinduism. For example, there’s the story of Ardhanareeshvara, the lord (in this case Shiva) who is half woman. But it has become a gateway that’s led me to search out other legends about Mohini to support what this activist part of me might look like. There is one where a marriage takes place. The Gods are worried that the demon Akara has become all powerful because of the vow of chastity he has taken. Krishna transforms into Mohini again, and spends three nights seducing Akara, destroying his bonds of celibacy and the source of his power. Thus weakened, Mohini is able to kill Akara. It seems a perfect parable to show how gender destroys all who would deny or reduce it or bind others through a definition. Mohini’s legends confirm for me that gender is unstable, undefinable, untameable and hence wild. Because in the space between male and female, there appears a vast expanse of power that isn’t subject to control, and only needs new imaginings to explore its possibilities. The Tamil Aravanis, Tiwi Sistergirls, Emberá Wera Pa and Mexican Muxes already know this space. The task seems to be to establish a community of Wild Mohinis, to form the coalitions of radical affirmation that Butler calls for with these groups and realise this potential.

Wild Mohini — I like that term so much more than shapeshifter, non-binary, genderqueer or X. It’s the superpower from the Hindu Universe that I’ve always wanted. Is there a checkbox for us please?