Kalki Subramanian is young, educated and liberated. She is searching for a suitable boy, “one who is loving, compassionate, educated but not necessarily rich and most certainly an Indian.”

Kalki, a transgender and an activist, knows it’s a tough search and has now set out to help other transgenders like her by setting up an Internet matchmaking portal, which will be launched later this month. The challenge, she says, is to find a “liberal man, willing to raise a family with transgender women who are now left with no choice”. The idea behind www.thirunangai.com, she explained, is the same—to find a suitable man, one who is not concerned about their sexuality, and of course religion, caste or dowry.

Though socially isolated and pushed to crime, prostitution and begging, there have been men who have fallen in love with the transwomen and married them—but all clandestinely.

“After a while, they will marry a female, leaving the transwoman in the lurch. Our attempt is to find someone genuine; one who is not ashamed of sharing a relationship with a transgender,” said Kalki, one of the few educated members of the community who once published Sahodari, a magazine for transgenders, when she was a masters student of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Neglected and disowned, many of them are forced to become sex workers, criminals or beggars. They mingle only with the ‘family’, a group of daughters, sisters, nieces, mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Men, she noted, were never there, or to put it correctly, they were never seen among the group.

... contd.