Samyuktha Vijayan reveals how love, courage and support can bring about a positive change

Pride month is over. At food tech Swiggy in Bengaluru, the employees, however, aren’t able to contain their pride at having Samyuktha Vijayan, a transgender woman joining as the company’s principal program manager.

“Many use the word transgender as a noun. It is wrong. Transgender should be used as an adjective. I chose to be recognised as a transgender woman, so on one Friday I went into the operation theatre as Santosh and came out of the hospital on Monday as Samyuktha Vijayan,” says Samyuktha, who is from Coimbatore.

Samyuktha started her hormone replacement therapy in 2016 and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 2017.

“After my transformation, when I first went home to attend my brother’s wedding, my biggest gift was my mother introducing me to the guests saying ‘meet my daughter Samyuktha’, ” she says.

Samyuktha worked abroad for more than a decade with various software companies and returned to India in 2018 to begin the fashion start-up TouteStudio. Recalling her various work experiences, she feels India is much more accepting than what it used to be when she began working. “I started working soon after I completed engineering. The work environment in India and HR policies were different back then. Since I worked in multi-national companies there was mutual respect, but everything else was either don’t tell or don’t discuss. When my colleagues cracked gay jokes upon noticing two guys sitting with their arms wrapped around each other, I couldn’t raise my voice. It was stifling but I was fortunate to not have faced any harassment,” she recalls.

Things changed when Samyuktha went to Europe in 2012 on work and had a gay manager. “He was married to his gay partner and had adopted children. It was an entirely new world for me. I started opening up, expressing myself and identifying with my sexuality. At Amazon where I was working, I got to see more and more members of the LGBTQI family. They were loved for who they were without being judged. Everyone was very warm and welcoming,” she recollects.

Confidence boost

These instances boosted Samyuktha’s confidence to speak about herself. She says she started to open up and stopped holding back her feelings. “I always knew I was a girl. After my stint in Europe (Luxembourg and London) I moved to Seattle. There I met transgender people who were in their transition period,” she adds.

Post this stint, Samyuktha’s confidence grew further. In all this, she also acknowledges Amazon’s Human Resource and insurance policies. “The HR policies were clear about how to deal and interact with transgender people. And how to address or behave with them once the transition was over. I was amazed to see that the company had a transition template. With my insurance taking care of most of the hormone cost and laser treatment (for facial hair), I couldn’t have asked for more,” says Samyuktha.

Patient and polite, Samyuktha is now planning to start an LGBTQI community for Swiggy. She is happy to see that Indian companies are becoming more inclusive and are not looking at transgender people as a third gender.

“On joining Swiggy I was made a part of the ‘Women in Tech’ group along with a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Council. I’m currently working with the team to have an in-house LGBTQI support group as well. We plan to start a pride network and actively work towards increasing LGBTQI visibility and diversity through hiring, within the company,” she stresses. She also believes that for companies to have an inclusive work environment they need to extend these policies to non-corporate employees as well.

“For transgender candidates who have the potential but do not have traditional qualifications (like a university degree or a certain skill), companies should put together an internship or a training programme to impart the right skills and then absorb them into the firm,” says Samyuktha.

She is worried about the stigma surrounding people from the transgender community who are either forced to leave or are abandoned by their families. “Some don’t get a fair chance to pursue academics so as adults they are deprived of mainstream jobs. Transpeople are subjected to discrimination and violence, and are shunned from society because they don’t fit rigid gender norms,” she says.

Circular fashion

Samyukta plans to make TouteStudio branch out into various verticals so that she can help members of LGBTQI without formal degrees to eke out a career for themselves. As for why she started TouteStudio, , she brings in an interesting perspective: “A lot of people spend their money buying clothes for special events, and end up either not using the outfits again, or simply throwing them away after wearing them a couple of times. What they don’t realise is that they are creating a huge environmental mess. I want people to start thinking about what happens to their clothes after they are done with them.”

In the US, brands like Rent The Runway are promoting the practice of circular fashion, where people share clothing and reduce the amount of fabric waste going to landfills every day. Samyukta says that the concept is quite unheard of in India, and that many Indians would be hesitant to wear something that someone else has worn before, but aims to change mindsets through TouteStudio.