Chennai: Chennai will celebrate 10 years of Pride today with over 1,000 expected attendees, organised by the Tamil Nadu Rainbow Collective (TNRC) aiming to raise awareness on the discrimination faced by the LGBTQIA+ community in the country.
The community, this year, seeks to address the involvement of parents and will be talking to people about this as they march.This comes at a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently announced that it no longer considers gender dysphoria a mental illness. “Gender incongruence” has been moved out of the chapter of mental disorders and into the sexual health chapter in the WHO’s newest International Classification of Diseases (ICD) catalog and will be reflected in future catalogs as well, it said.
“We need to work on how it is not a condition we can cure,” said one of the organisers. “We will be having a cultural event ‘Naangal’ where we will tell people that being born LGBTQIA+ is only natural and request them not to take their children to any doctors to 'cure' them,” said Jaya, one of the organisers and general manager of Sahodaran.
Members of the community agree that the biggest obstacle they face while “coming out” is making their parents and every other elders understand that it is not a condition that can be cured. “The first thing my father asked me was if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. You must understand that it makes us feel like we are abnormal, like we need fixing,” says Meghana.
Psychiatrists in the city say that psychology plays a huge role in a particular individual identifying themselves with the LGBTQIA+. “The way a child is raised, his background and upbringing surely plays a part,” says Dr Latha Janaki, a psychologist in the city. “Sexual identification is predominantly dependent on one’s psychology,” she believes.
