An Oral History of the COVID-19 Crisis: 'The cis gendered population does not perceive trans people as capable'

Aryan Pasha is a Delhi-based lawyer and India’s first transman to become a bodybuilding champion. I think it was probably sometime around last year when Ratnesh Pandey, a professional mountaineer, had visited Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi (transgender rights activist) that he proposed the idea of a mountaineering expedition to Mt Friendship in Himachal Pradesh with a group of trans people. You see it’s a general perception among the cis gendered population that trans people are not capable. Many consider transmen as women, and often look down upon them as being physically weak. They believe that if one is a transwoman they would only be engaged in makeup, fashion or maybe cooking; they are considered incapable of doing any physically demanding activities. With this expedition, I wanted to give trans folks a ray of hope amid a pandemic, an opportunity to achieve something. Read more from the Oral History Project here. Had this lockdown not happened and if I hadn’t gone out for relief work, I would have never come in touch with these people and would have never known what they were going through — their journeys, their challenges, their highs and their lows. We began our expedition on 3 October with our team of 25, where apart from Ratnesh [Pandey] sir, everyone else was from the transgender community. It was on 11 October that we started our summit trek from our base camp at Lady Leg, and we made the final attempt of the summit on 13 October at around 2 am. It was around 6.30 pm and we had reached the shoulder of the peak. The ice on the slopes had already started melting and hence the path had become quite slippery. Then there came a stage when we had to cross from one rock to another using a rope and as we started preparing for it we could see there were severe rock falls. Some four members had already crossed the rope and that is when Ratnesh sir decided that we could only move ahead with another two members. He asked the entire team to start moving towards the base camp and assured us that even if one person completes the expedition it will be considered [an achievement] for everyone in the team.

FirstCulture · Aryan Pasha

[caption id=“attachment_9161251” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Members of the expedition[/caption] Once we completed that stretch, my body gave up. So from a team of six, it became a team of five. Being a bodybuilder and with no fat content in my body, my muscles got stretched and I felt extremely tired. I knew I couldn’t go ahead and even if I did I would become a liability. Ratnesh sir understood my situation but he strongly suggested I didn’t sleep. “If you shut your eyes even for once you should consider them shut forever,” he told me. Because of the low oxygen level at that altitude, people lose consciousness and end up dead — such incidents are very common there. I remember there was one instance when I’d actually closed my eyes and then suddenly woke up in complete alertness.  I slapped myself across the face and started walking around stones to keep myself awake. Finally, the ones who went to the summit came back and narrated their experiences. They were in tears of joy and had such a sense of accomplishment. Once we came back from the expedition, the professional team told us that by far we were one of the most disciplined, organised and efficient groups they had ever came across. Now we are getting the whole trip filed at IMF (Indian Mountaineering Foundation) and we have also applied for [inclusion in] the Guinness Book of World Records and Limca Book of Records because we were the largest group [of transgender individuals] that went for a mountaineering expedition. — As told to Suryasarathi Bhattacharya Write to us with your COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown experiences for inclusion in the Oral History Project at firstculturefeatures@gmail.com