We live in a post-pronoun world. India's queer movement needs its Woke 2.0

It has been eight years since the Supreme Court ousted the State from queer people's bedrooms. I lived the ruling on my Samsung Galaxy J2, bursting with joy, but unable to say a word. When visuals of jubilant queers celebrating the verdict came up on TV, I wore a mask of careful indifference, as though I was watching the IPL. At the time, the next step was supposed to be marriage equality. When I went to university a year later, I learned that horizontal reservations and stronger protections for trans people were kind of a priority, though they had been made the younger siblings on the queer community's list of demands. With the unfortunate marriage equality verdict of 2023 came disappointment and calls from lawyers (once hailed as Indian homosexuals' biggest hope) to build movements from the ground up. Where are those movements now? Three years and one Trans Amendment Act later, what we have are nine petitions challenging the lethal legislation, and two others seeking civil union-adjacent rights for same-sex couples. 'It's a need-based system. A lot of people put in the labour, but there's no organic resistance,' said content creator and activist Katyayini Saksham. The long march to queer liberation must necessarily reach Parliament, but it is yet to leave the courtroom. Meanwhile, the cultural tide has turned against queer people. A chirpy remark by US Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has awakened us to the fact that we're currently in Woke 2.0. Gone are the diversity, equality and inclusion days that followed #MeToo and George Floyd's murder. Conservative ideology sits cosily on thrones worldwide, as the Left is forced to recalibrate. But what does this mean for the Indian queer community? Heterosexuals woke up to trans issues sometime around 2015, thanks to women such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox. In India, the 2014 NALSA judgment had recognised trans persons' right to self-identification. The White House had gender-neutral washrooms, and comedians would announce, from time to time, that gays were the new straight and trans people were the new gay. But desi LGBTQIA+ folks lived Woke 1 as the period of pronouns—not entirely by choice. The community was asking for the NALSA judgment to be implemented. They wanted horizontal reservations and stronger protections against violence and discrimination. But for the corporate machinery that was funding an NGO-ised queer movement, these weren't attractive causes. They required slow work that couldn't be sold as a 'diversity win' on LinkedIn. And so, pronouns became the big thing. Companies ran sensitisation workshops, published glossaries of trans-inclusive terms they would bravely adopt, and posted an infographic or two about how to use 'they'. Then again, words became the battlefield and the weapons across movements in Woke 1. When the market gives you little space to bring in actual change, the fight turns inward. It becomes about who is the purest, wokest, and most radical of us all. I imagine that queer politics in India must move beyond language. Some of it is already visible in queer spaces. While misgendering someone was nothing short of a sacrilege some years ago, it is viewed as more of a nuisance now. 'Oh, call me he/she/they, I'm everything and nothing,' many queer people say when asked about their pronouns. Katyayini giggled when she thought about how people on the Right misgender trans folks as a way to wound them. 'They think that people who use they/them pronouns will die if you call them she/her. Nothing happens,' she said. Woke 2.0 is a post-pronoun world—one where politics will have to move beyond conversation. We must build solidarities, and that requires shedding the 'correctness' instinct. Poet and translator Aditya Vikram Shrivastava, who teaches a course on critical thinking at Ashoka University, considers my view reductive. According to them, language cannot be dismissed in the pursuit of a 'real' fight. 'Is language not tied to material reality? Are we pretending that language exists in some kind of blob overhead, and the ground is full of material reality? Language is very much a part of queer politics, has always been,' they said. They don't mean that everyone must use the 'correct' language. 'But can we sever language from our call for transness? I don't think so.' Also Read: Anaya Bangar hasn't even played yet. Can we stop having a meltdown? 'Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class,' said the headline of an opinion article in The Economist. Indeed, anyone who has observed the rise of Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed will arrive at the same conclusion. It's funny that this development matches a reading circle I attended a couple of months ago. We were discussing Kadji Amin's article 'We Are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents'. In the article, Amin argues for the queer movement to go beyond identity labels, but falls short of offering an alternative. One of the moderators said that perhaps a movement could be built around resources. While the anti-queer brigade is busy mocking Woke 1, it's time for us to fashion new tools. I'm inclined to comedian Caleb Hearon's suggestion on his podcast, So True with Caleb Hearon. He argues that the Left must make its fight a party where everyone is welcome, and mistakes are allowed. It's a foolproof strategy. After all, who can beat queer people at throwing a party? Views are personal. (Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)