Shree Ghatak is an Indian transgender woman who now has a part in the streaming movie ‘Season’s Greetings’.



Being transgender has cost her a lot of potential jobs, she tells Manjusha Radhakrishnan:

“Why is there so much stigma in this society over my gender? My gender is my business. Why are you letting my trans identity dictate if I am suitable for a role in a movie or not?“



In “Season’s Greetings’, directed by Ram Kamal Mukherjee and starring Lillete Dubey and Celina Jaitly as a mother-daughter duo, Ghatak plays their transgender house-help Chapala.



“It was difficult to cast a male actor or a female actor to play the role of a transgender in the film. Most actors have certain inhabitation in portraying the role that’s not gender specific,” says director Ram Kamal Mukherjee to Times of India. Despite his strange choice of words (which probably reflects the Indian idea of trans women being a “third gender”) he decided to cast Shree Ghatak as Chapala. This makes Shree Bollywood’s first transgender actor.



Shree runs the Troyee foundation, a non-profit organisation working for poor women, street children and the LGBTQA community.

