Transgender pilots a big leap for Indian aviation

The DGCA took this action following a demand by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, which sought removal of undue conditions disqualifying a transgender person to obtain a student pilot license, pointing out that the existing norms are transgender. violation of the Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. 2019 Adam Harry, a trainee pilot who obtained his student pilot license from South Africa, had turned down his application for a student pilot license in India, on the grounds that he was still on hormone treatment after gender reassignment. He was told that he could reapply once the drug was stopped. This effectively meant a lifetime ban, as his medication was prescribed to be lifelong. This intervention by the Ministry of Social Justice has finally prompted the DGCA to come up with norms to allow transgender people to apply for pilot licenses of all categories.

India’s aviation is not that insular when it comes to accepting gender-diverse roles at senior levels in some other sectors such as energy. Female pilots and first officers are quite common. In fact, India has the highest percentage of female pilots in the world. About 12.4% of all pilots are women – more than twice as many in the US, the world’s largest aviation market. Women have been flying helicopters and transport aircraft in the Indian Air Force since the 1990s. Now they also fly fighter planes.

Paving the way for transgender people to pursue a career in aviation without any discrimination is a sure step for Indian aviation and the industry in general.

In doing so, India also reclaims the tradition that was disrupted and uprooted by the colonial rule and its laws and customs. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code declared “corporal intercourse against the order of nature” as an offense, leaving the order of nature undefined and automatically assumed to reflect the norms which the Lord Macaulay drafted the Indian Penal Code. In 2018 itself, the Supreme Court had abolished Section 377.

While it is nobody’s case whether traditional Indian culture upheld gender equality or considered gender fluidity to be par for the course, transgender people were assigned certain roles associated with good esteem. Traditional Indian society was hierarchical and unjust in many ways and therefore the treatment of the transgender community was neither exclusive nor extreme discriminatory.

It may be recalled that the canonical order is defined and refined by religious texts and epics. The Mahabharata includes two transgender characters who are portrayed in a positive light, overall, even if not quite celebrated.

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One is Shikhandi, a princess who is reincarnated with a neutral gender to avenge her kidnapping by Bhishma, while looking to win a bride for her half-brothers, and is later rejected by the prince. Had given. In the battle of Kurukshetra, the Pandava army confronts Bhishma, putting Shikhandi in the front, against whom Bhishma refuses to fight. This helps the Pandavas to defeat Bhishma.

There is another Brihannala. She was, in fact, the warrior prince Arjuna, whose reciting 10 names dispelled fears, who took the form of a eunuch, who had to serve as a dance instructor to the princess Uttara of the Matsya kingdom, to survive for a year. was for The Pandavas had chosen this land as their place of exile for a year when they had to remain incognito.

A warrior who helps the right wing, conquers the forces of the wrong, and transforms the ego of the most skilled archer and best friend of Krishna – these are not role models who defame transgender people. Even in Indo-Islamic culture, transgender people played a socially important role in the harem as well as in the market place.

This sensibility was replaced by colonial rule and its apparently reprehensible attitude towards transgender people. The recognition of transgender people as normal people by DGCA and endowed with the agency of people of other gender is, therefore, little more than a gesture to wake up to modernity.

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