Chand (she/they) is a second-year PhD student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, USA. Their Master’s degree was in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences where their dissertation explored the process of queer collectivisation on a university campus. They are interested in the fields of trans studies, queer theory, anti-caste philosophy, social movements, utopian studies, political economy, and the anthropology of development. They are a published poet and previously worked in the development sector.

Akshita: Hi Chand! It’s great to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to meet with us today. Without further ado, let’s start with our interview. The first question is how would you define a ‘safe space’ for LGBTQIA+ individuals? Why is it important, especially on university campuses? 

Chand: Actually ‘safe spaces’ have had a long history and the definition would vary based on which place we are talking about. Essentially, safe space is such a space where one feels safe from harassment and discrimination. Marginalised individuals have always tried to create safe spaces for themselves across time and space because the outside world has been inhospitable for them. Women, queer and trans persons, caste-oppressed persons in India have always been creating safe spaces for themselves. Safe spaces in the way that they often circulate are depoliticised and the assumption is that there won’t be any conflicts, but there can be no safe space without an exchange of ideas, which will create some bad feelings leading to conflict. I learnt this from black feminism, which talks about the messiness involved in coalition building. Being in a queer collective while doing my Master’s, I did not have this insight; I did not know this and I used to think that a safe space is such a space where we choose the most politically correct option and we stick to that and we turn away from conflict. After all, when you are already fighting against power structures then you don’t want to be arguing with the people whom you are aligned with and whom you have an affinity towards. By fighting with them you don’t want to have all those bad feelings, but it is necessary. I don’t know if colleges and university campuses can build safe spaces given that they are located in very hierarchical power structures. I don’t think a space is safe inherently or becomes safe just by the intent to make it so. To make a space safe it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and I don’t think these spaces can be safe. I think you can move towards creating a safe space, but I don’t think a safe space in itself exists. I don’t think that is possible.  

Akshita: Okay, thank you so much for sharing. This was really insightful, leading me to my next question – whose responsibility is it to create safe spaces? What role should university/college administrations play in this? We’d also like to ask if allies have a role to play here, and if so, what? 

Chand: Allies definitely have an important role but I will address the question about university administrations first. I believe that the main role is that of university administrations. It is their responsibility because they hold all the power, don’t they? Even the Trans Act, which is a very problematic law in itself, and which has a lot of critiques from the trans community, says that trans students should not face discrimination and violence in the university or in academic spaces. Despite this, the reality is that discrimination is very common. Even though there is a law, there isn’t much I feel. The law in itself is very sloppily made or the implementation is not happening. But I think more than laws, it is about a mind set or a perspective primarily towards creating safe spaces for queer and trans students. I think change has to happen at the mind set level, and university administration needs to think about how they will create a supportive safe environment for LGBTQIA+ students, and what steps they’ll take. There should be a queer inclusive curriculum, a queer affirmative counsellor in the university campus, a cell for addressing complaints, and spaces should exist for students to be themselves so that they don’t have to hide. It can be a queer collective, a support group – there should be some space, basically. And this is the least they can do. This is not asking for the skies, this is basically the bare minimum that a university administration can do for its queer and trans students. I am an advocate for structural change so I don’t believe in individualist models. I mean of course I will not say oh you know you got this individualistic change, very bad. I will not say that. I will be happy for you that you got it. But for me, I believe change has to happen structurally. And these are some structural changes that I think are very much needed for queer and trans students.

Coming to the role of allies, given that of all these stakeholders, a lot of them or most of them will be allies, they are the ones who have to then learn. They have to take the responsibility to learn about LGBTQIA+ identities, read up about it and then work with queer groups, trans groups. I think the role of allies primarily is that they have to learn by themselves, not put the burden of educating them on queer and trans people, but they should reach out to queer and trans people for more resources to learn. I think allies play one of the most crucial roles for creating structural change. I know I said that I don’t believe in individualistic models but I do think when allies are everywhere, even if you are cisgender, you are not trans, even then if you use your pronouns he/she, he/him, she/her, when you use these you make that environment safer for trans people to also come out, which in itself is a structural change. So it’s an individualistic thing leading to a structural change. So I think these are also some ways that allies can contribute to the struggle. 

Akshita: Definitely! Since we were talking about the role of university administrations, I would love to hear more about your experience during your college days. You’ve studied in different university campuses in different cities in India (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) as well as in Sydney in Australia and Washington DC in the US. What has been your experience in these spaces as a queer student? What do you think these spaces need, in order to be safer?

Chand: I will go chronologically. First was DU. In Delhi University I was in PGDAV College. There was a lot of bullying and harassment there if you were queer or trans. I don’t really know how I felt. DU’s curriculum was not queer inclusive. Nor was there any support group for queer and trans students. We put in effort for creating a gender and sexuality society in my third year of college. LSR had a women’s development cell (WDC), but I was not interested in a WDC model, I was thinking more broadly even though at that time I did not know I was trans, I realised that a year later. I was still queer so I was not interested in this WDC model, I wanted it to be broader. There was a lot of fuss with the administration and then ultimately we were passing out and the juniors didn’t take it up, so the society did not get made.

When I came to Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai (TISS), the curriculum in the foundation course I would say was excellent when it came to gender and sexuality, and the teaching of it was also okay-okay, not bad. There was a queer collective in the campus which was tolerated, not supported but tolerated. Even then, queerphobic and transphobic talk was present, and if you were a DBA (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) trans person or queer person, you faced your own set of unique additional challenges. And that’s what it is, right? Intersectionality is a complex thing. So the way different people faced queerphobia and transphobia was very dependent on their location in the social hierarchy. But TISS was progressive, it was more progressive than DU. And then I went to Sydney for an exchange programme, and there it was alright. Everything that I said that a safe space should have, it was there. But that had its own issues, but they weren’t so much about queerness or transness, it was more general. Also I was in Sydney for only a few months so I could not figure out much about the space; from what I could figure out, I felt it was a very queer-accepting place. Was it a trans-accepting place? I don’t know. 

Then I moved on to Jadavpur University. Jadavpur is a very progressive leftist place. So it was alright there, but the curriculum was not inclusive. Curriculum not being inclusive is an issue everywhere. Gender-neutral washrooms were also not there. In TISS, we had managed to get a gender-neutral hostel but we were not successful in our demands to get gender-neutral washrooms. And even when the hostel was allotted, we were subject to a lot of surveillance. They kept an eagle eye on us, as if we were some weird show pieces. But those are the contradictions I think of a supposedly progressive space. Now that the institution is very right wing, even that facade of progressiveness has pretty much left so I would feel worried for people currently there. 

Now I am at the University of Maryland. It’s supposedly the most queer-positive campus in the country, according to some surveys. They are very happy to report it, and that they are happy to report it says a lot about neo-liberal politics and the politics of identity. I think a university is a very interesting space where students come and think about new ways of living life, and how society can be changed, but contradictorily the university also prepares them for the capitalist job market and conforming to society. So there is a lot of contradiction that happens. At UMD, the curriculum is super queer-inclusive, my professors are queer, but the problem here is that it’s not transnational. What does it even mean that you are talking about queer rights at an international campus, but you are looking at it from a very western lens? So the challenges of queer inclusion also change as you change geographies. And the way that you experience it is also very dependent on the positionality of the person. In the state of Maryland, we cannot make our union. Basically, we can’t unionise, and so we can’t present our demands. The university is not bound to recognise that union which we do have. As a queer grad student you have to put in a different kind of labour. Then how does the university expect that labour out of you without even giving you the right to form a union? But we had a union in TISS. So there are multiple ways of how things can be progressive and conservative and restraining at the same time. It’s a complex picture of how I have experienced queerness in all these different campuses and what I feel needs change. 

Akshita: Hearing about your perspectives and experiences was quite insightful and inspiring. On the same thread, we move on to our next question. The student body in universities keeps changing as students graduate. Moreover, queer students also have intersecting identities of privileges and marginalisations, which might lead to differing political ideologies and stands. So how do we sustain safe spaces in the face of this constant change, conflict and contestations?

Chand: As I mentioned before, safe spaces are not without conflict because when you are in such a space, conflict will arise automatically because you will have differences of opinion and, as you said, students of various identities come, they have their own marginalisation and privileges. It’s a good question – how do you bring people together, how do you create a safe space? And for me, also looking at the current political social environment that we have and the hate-filled atmosphere that is being created because of certain political and social forces in our country, right now we need spaces of dialogue which are grounded in hope, in faith and what Baba Saheb outlined in Navayana Buddhism as ‘Maitri’. It is only maitri which I believe that can save us in these current hateful times where the powers draw on these ancient forces of brahmanism to make us forget that we have also been living in harmony for a long time. It is maitri that is grounded in the values of self-compassion, amity, fellow feeling and loving kindness towards all humans which is my goal of what a safe space should be like. A space where we can engage with each other with compassion and an understanding that we are not coming at each other from a space of mistrust, but a space of understanding that okay there are some things that are not working out, what are those things that are not working out, what are the things that are working out, what values do we have in common? And I think that if we are able to actualise maitri in the form of praxis, then people across their ideologies and political leanings and identities can work together for building a safe space. However, I am also not somebody who’ll say that if you don’t believe in my right to exist we can have a conversation, I am not somebody who goes to that extreme in the talk of compassion and fellow feeling. But to a large extent there is so much infighting also within social justice groups, within queer collectives, which I think could be resolved if it comes from a place of trust, if it comes from a place of understanding, which is why I believe in Baba Saheb’s idea of maitri, and how he understands our social world. There is a lot of hate, there is a lot of distrust, and I think it is important to bridge that which is why I believe in the idea of maitri and that is how I believe that safe spaces or at least the journey to become safe begins. 

Akshita: On the topic of challenges, what do you think would be the challenges in the creation of a safe space in universities/college campuses in smaller cities? What role should bodies like the UGC play here?

Chand: UGC, i.e., the University Grants Commission, is a statutory body which plays a very important role in higher education. It awards grants to colleges and universities, recognises them, and is the link between the government and higher education. It has a crucial role in creating a queer and trans inclusive atmosphere for dalit, bahujan, adivasi and disabled queer and trans students, especially in small towns and cities, where the majority of students actually study, apart from just the metropolises like Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Chennai. However, while UGC can give all the directives it wants, the implementation of these schemes is still a matter of how open the administration in these colleges is to implementing all of this, and how sensitised they themselves are. Do they even think it is important? Do they think it is worthwhile, why is it worthwhile? I think these are a lot of basic questions of equity and equality that administrative institutes, especially educational institutes have to grapple with. They don’t understand why we need equity. I think it is important that the admin in these colleges see the need for this, and I believe that can happen a lot by UGC teacher trainings or UGC mandated sensitisation of faculty and administration staff. Administration staff are often left out when they do training. They only train faculty and they think that is enough, but that’s not really enough because the student does not just deal with the faculty, they deal a lot with the administration, especially at the Master’s and higher levels. I think they should also tie up with queer collectives or queer support groups or queer organisations and let’s not say that there are so few of those, they won’t be there. Every state has some group or the other so we should not use that as an excuse. You have to put in the effort to reach out to people within your state or the state next to yours and get some help from them, get some training from them. Many queer and trans organisations, collectives and community-based organisations are already doing this. I think disability justice, anti-caste perspectives and queer- and trans-positive perspectives – training should be done involving all three, so that universities are sensitive to the needs of students because I believe that if we follow a wider approach, then even specific queer and trans issues will come under it. If we are widely talking about the need for equity, it can lead to even these issues being recognised as important. I think preceding queer and trans sensitivity training with training on why equity and equality are important and how do you bring that into play, these types of training are also important, which I don’t see happening a lot. We just conduct that one training on POSH, one training on queer and trans rights, one training on disability, whereas these conversations should always be on-going. It doesn’t work out that you take one session on sexual harassment and the issue is resolved. It won’t happen so easily. You have to first understand why harassment in itself is a problem, and harassment of all people across identities. That is why I think equity, sensitivity training have to focus on this and focus on anti-caste perspectives, queer and trans perspectives, disability justice perspectives because I think all these three perspectives are very much lacking when we talk about the issue of safe spaces for queer and trans students.

Akshita: I truly believe in what you are saying Chand, and thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. This has been an enlightening discussion and we really appreciate the effort you have put in. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to share with us?

Chand: Nothing much, just jai bheem and satrangi salaam!  

Akshita: From our side as well!

This interview was originally in Hindi. It has been translated into English by Akshita and Pragya.
मूल साक्षात्कार हिंदी में पढ़ने के लिए यहां क्लिक करें।