India's First Openly Transgender Mayor in Her Own Words | Hacker News Reader

India's First Openly Transgender Mayor in Her Own Words

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32 pointsbhaumik18 comments

An article about a politically significant LGBT person in South Asia without exploring or giving a more substantial background on the concept of Hijras feels a bit like having pizza without cheese. Being from the West and growing up with its binary sex and gender concepts, even reading the Wikipedia article on Hijra makes for some eye-opening reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)

Thanks for sharing. In my last trip to India, I visited Bahacharaji and didn't understand why most people would pray with (and offer money to) the transgender women before entering the main shrine. I had no idea they considered themselves to be part of a third gender.

Highly recommended Joothan [1] if you want a first-hand account of a Dalit (member of the "untouchable" caste). "Joothan" refers to chewed up food or leftovers on a plate that a higher class would throw out. Many Dalits in Indian slums would resort to that for food. Fascinating autobiography with controversial theories on the origins of vegetarianism in Hindu culture.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Joothan-Untouchables-Life-Omprakash-Va...

The pre-Islamo-Judaic-Christian world was more open to such transgender people in Asia. It was not anything that people concerned themselves with. I hope they can integrate themselves in mainstream occupations. I think things have come full circle now with a greater acceptance.

I'm sorry, but my main take away from the discussion wasn't about the LGBT community at all. It was that India is still not ready for democracy. A candidate decides to try out this election thing without any agenda and plans, and they win without any reason. They don't even know why they won and what they can really do for the community. Giving government jobs to beggars isn't a plan. And I'm saying this as an Indian.

"A candidate decides to try out this election thing without any agenda and plans, and they win without any reason. They don't even know why they won and what they can really do for the community. Giving government jobs to beggars isn't a plan."

Actually, that sounds like normal democracy in action to me. Unprepared candidates being voted in happens all the time in all democracies. And this candidate seems reasonable and may end up doing a good job.

If you look to other democracies for comparison, Talkeetna in Alaska has had a cat named Stubbs as the elected mayor for years. Mel Carnahan got voted into the US senate in an election 3 weeks after his death. And Tiririca the Clown got voted in to Brazil's congress and was completely inexperienced and was accused of being illiterate. He apparently worked really hard and did a very good job of it.

Remember, democracy is not a plan and nobody is ever 'ready' for it. It just tends to be usually less objectionable than the alternatives, especially the planned alternatives.

edit - Also, Ms. Kinnar did not win for no reason.

"I have no experience, I’ve never made a public speech, but while campaigning, I went to every household."

And she seems to have a clear idea of what she wants do to for the community.

"I feel the most-important responsibility I have is towards my people. My community. I have to stop them from begging for money on the trains. Instead, I want to give them jobs in municipal corporation. Apart from that, the deplorable condition of roads and drains in the city worries me. Raigarh doesn’t have a water shortage but taps often run dry. I want to make sure people in Raigarh get adequate water supply."

I agree that democracy is arguably just better than other alternatives. Nothing more. However I can't be happy about a candidate just because they are at least not a clown. Yes, they may do a good job. But that's as good as randomly choosing a candidate and hoping that they do a good job, right? We can surely do better than that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

"In governance, sortition (also known as allotment) is the selection of officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.

In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing political officials and its use was conventionally regarded at the time as a principal characteristic of democracy."

I think we ought to give it a go, see what happens.

I accidentally started to think seriously about your quip, and I think it belies the profound difficulty of the problem. I would contend that it's not obvious that we can do better than random elections.

There's all sorts of perverse and misaligned incentives otherwise. I'm not politician or historian, so I'd love some insight into the consequences of such a system. Intuitively, I would assume it'd just implode from incompetance, but bureaucracies are shockingly resilient on government scales. And I'd have no idea how to reliably find qualified individuals; the USA has a long history of effective leaders coming from seemingly random backgrounds. (Whether these individuals did good or not, well, that's hotly debated to this day... I don't often grok politics.)

Yeah doing better than random is more of my wish than anything based on facts. Now that I think about it, considering the population that self selects itself out of politics in India, maybe random selection of a candidate from all of the population may do better than what we have currently.

"Now that I think about it"

This is one of the best phrases ever invented.

By the way, I am not meaning to attack. I completely understand the frustration of watching completely unqualified assholes run the country. I live in the UK.

However, to see what happens when qualified assholes run the country, look to China. They are the world's most successful technocracy. There are more people with engineering degrees in government there than anywhere else I know of. (if anyone cares to correct me on this, please do)

The results of this are nicely mirrored by your respective space programs.

China has people in orbit.

India found water on the moon.

Just so you know my biases, I like what I see as India's democratic openness and China's secular practicality (being a stereotypical Brit who goes around stereotyping stuff so it will fit into all the neat little display boxes).

We can certainly do a lot worse. We could select someone randomly and only be able to get rid of them by killing them. Historically that has been the usual method.

Also, if you plan who should have power, who gets to select the person who makes the plan?

I think you're being a bit cynical, and detracting from the point of the article. Yes in this particular case democracy didn't work so well. But the takeaway is that such a large group of people were not only OK with having a transgender as a mayor. That is good news anywhere.

Yeah cynical is perhaps the right word. As an Indian, I won't be shocked if people voted for this candidate just because it would be funny.

It says in the article she visited every household. That's proper old-school political campaigning. If people voted for her because they thought it would be funny, then they only thought that because she did the legwork.

> and they win without any reason

Maybe the other candidates were very bad/corrupt so the people thought lets give this person a chance.

Comming back to your point, unfortunately there are still parts in India where candidates win just because they are from the same caste/community as the majority of the people in that constituency.

She is not India's first openly transgender mayor. My city elected one more than 10 years back. She was later disqualified because India's Supreme Court did not recognize "third-sex" officially then and she contested stating her gender as female, and my city's mayorship was reserved for women . Here's a link about her dismissal: http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/13up.htm .

Failing to see why pop morality is on HackerNews?

This is a new section for things that are both popular and moral.

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