Manipur’s all-trans football team boots out stigma

Lady Gaga, Glenn Close, Ginny Fuch and others — the frame suddenly shifts to the hilly tracts of Manipur with a 30- year-old Sadam Hanjabam quietly piercing the narrative. The camera follows Hanjabam as he walks around a lane in Imphal recounting a rainy evening some years ago when he was out on a date with a man and was accosted by a police jeep.

“First they quizzed us, then made us kneel and then they beat us with lathis,” he said wondering aloud if this was society telling him where he should be — in the closet. Instead, in the years that followed, Hanjabam pulled himself out of the drug-induced downward spiral he was on and birthed a mini revolution in Northeast’s valleys with ‘Ya.

all’ — India’s first all-trans football team that he set up in 2020 to reclaim queer representation in sports. Meaning ‘you all’ in English, ‘revolution’ in Manipuri and ‘inclusive revolution’ when combined, Ya.

all symbolises the promise of precious refuge for the community. Every Saturday and Sunday, a chorus of cheering players — all transmen between 18 and 27 in spandex jerseys — stretch out on Imphal’s PCC parade ground.

But before they start kicking the ball into the net, the assortment of players — a security guard, a tuition teacher, a hairdresser and a bunch of school and college students — sit down in a circle and over a breakfast of milk, eggs and bananas, find release for all their hidden, pent-up feelings and everyday stress. The team comprising trans-men — born female and conditioned to have little control over their own life — have been jeered at by friends and neighbours for being “a wannabe” or “a tomboy”; instructed by family to “grow hair, wear dresses”; and rebuked for “risking their chances of finding a suitable groom.