Born in Mumbai, Zainab Patel is a transgender person who is currently the Chief - Inclusion and Diversity at Pernod Ricard India. Before this, she was the Director - Diversity and Inclusion at KPMG. Zainab holds an MBA in HR and was the National Manager - Health and Human Rights at the UNDP country office in India and was the regional policy analyst on human rights in Asia.
Her areas of interest are health and social development issues, and she has over 20 years of national and international work experience.
Zainab currently serves as the Western India representative in the National Council for Transgender Persons. She is a Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellow, a part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Zainab is also one of the petitioners in the historic National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India 2014 case on transgender rights, and in the marriage equality case currently being heard by the Supreme Court of India. She spoke to Asian Voice to shed more light on the case from the perspective of a transgender person, and to inform the readers about how trans-inclusion works within Indian corporates and queer rights movements.
To begin with, could you talk a bit about your petition currently being heard by the Supreme Court?
Like everyone else, transgender persons aspire to form loving and committed relationships that are recognized and nurtured by society and by law. They hope to find a partner who can be a companion through the ups and downs of life’s journey and accept them for who they are. For transgender persons, this journey of becoming is marked by grief and struggle but is also a story of grit, determination and ultimately, triumph. Transgender persons must not only come to terms with their bodies and find a way of presenting themselves to the world that corresponds to their innate feelings of gender but must then find a partner who accepts them in the gender of their choice. This can mean being a companion on a long and arduous journey to transition from one gender to another which presents emotional, physical, social and financial upheavals and strains.
I have triumphed over these and other struggles to forge a committed, loving, secure relationship with my partner, of which we both sought recognition from the state and society. My petition hence requests the Hon. Supreme Court of India to “Issue a writ, order or declaration in the nature of a declaration under Article 226 of the Constitution of India that the right to marry a person of one’s choice under Article 21 of the Constitution of India applies with full force to transgender and other LGBT persons.”
The Transgender Persons Act 2019 does away with a lot of the progress made by the NALSA judgement, such as reservations, and punishment for discrimination against trans people. How do corporates in India currently fare in this context?
The progress made by the corporates in India has been largely variable. Some organizations have gone out of their way in creating and maintaining trans inclusion in the workplace. Some corporates in line with the rules of the Protection of Transgender Persons Act have framed and implemented an equal opportunity policy for transgender persons. Some have set up a grievance redressal system and made sure that trans people feel included and have given them relevant career opportunities. Some organizations have also made their policies and their procedure gender-neutral to enable a wide array of genders to be covered under existing access to justice mechanisms at the workplace. However, if you look at the whole of India in corporate, it largely lags behind on trans people's inclusion especially when it comes to affirmative action and access to justice mechanisms within corporate workspaces. There are yet many organizations that haven't implemented the protection of transgender persons as it is mandated by law within their own organizations and hence this is leading to a large discrepancy in terms of access to jobs and meaningful inclusion for trans people at the workplace.
What are your observations on the hiring and promotion processes of queer people? Do openly queer people even have the means to deal with biases overt and covert during the hiring process in a world where we hype merit so much?
Many small- or medium-sized organisations depend on external organisations or agencies for background verification checks. Sensitising your third-party vendor personnel is important. One has to keep professionalism at an all-time high. For example, when you do a house check, make sure that you check with the person- is this the right time to visit? Or, is it okay to visit?
Then on day one, when the new employee is being taken around, ensure that the person is not overwhelmed by the culture as workspaces can be intimidating.
And I think, during the assessment phase if you’re specifically looking at diversity candidates, let’s not look at meritocracy as an argument. If we were to use that argument, we would never have had reservations for women. If we leave people who are left behind to crawl back to the top of the wall, where we think we have a worldview of equality, that’s never going to work.
In common parlance, queer marriage is referred to as same-sex marriage. Would you say that there has been a trans-erasure in this, in the queer movement itself?
Yes, I think that we are using redundant and non-inclusive language by referring to it only as same-sex marriage. There are multiple trans petitions in the court about marriage equality at the moment. And marriage equality is a fair term as it includes persons of diverse sex, gender identity, and expressions as well.
