Sri Lankan Tamil trans activist Thanuja Singam’s journey of transition and migration

Thanuja Singam has played many roles in 33 years of life. Sri Lankan Tamil refugee. German immigrant. Boy. Woman. Dental hygienist. Social-media star with over a million followers. LGBTQIA+ activist. Author. She’s now firmly in the spotlight with the English translation of her eponymous autobiography hitting the stands this November to mark Transgender Awareness Month.

Soon after her birth in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, which was wracked by civil war, Singam’s family fled her birthplace and lived as Tamil refugees in India for the next eight years. Thereafter, they were able to migrate to Germany where Singam began to face discrimination for her gender identity in school.

She transitioned from male to female in her late teens, battling not only physical changes and the reinvention of her identity, but also the disapproval of her parents and ostracism from her peers.

“No one can even imagine what happens in a transwoman’s life. You cannot understand us with mainstream norms, laws, culture, literature and principles. We have been betrayed by history,” she writes.

Currently working as a dental healthcare worker in Düsseldorf, Singam has built a massive online platform to voice the challenges of the LGBTQIA+ community. Her memoir Thanuja: A Memoir of Migration and Transition (Bloomsbury, INR 599) has been translated from Tamil by Kiran Keshavamurthy, assistant professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati, and scholar of modern Tamil literature.

Singam’s memoir weaves anecdotes from her family life, sexual awakening, work, travels around the globe, and navigation of state laws and regulations. In this excerpt from the book, she talks about her years as a 12-year-old boy in Germany struggling with gender dysphoria and the complexities of migration.

By Thanuja Singam

There were two bedrooms in our apartment in Germany. I was to sleep in my brother’s room in a separate bed. At first, I did not know what to do with my time. I could not understand the shows on television. My only solace was playing games on my brother’s computer when he was out. That was a time when I was addicted to computer games.

When Appa was not at home, I would dress up in my mother’s clothes, tie a towel around my head like a wig and sing and dance to Tamil movie songs. Amma would not say anything as she had seen me sing and dance from the time I was little.

After a few days, my brother took me to a school. ‘Willkommen’ was engraved at the entrance of this very large school. It meant ‘welcome’. I joined a German language course that was open to new immigrants who were under eighteen. There were students from many countries, including Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, China, Ghana and Kenya. There was no other Tamil student.

The senior students in our class spoke fluent German as they had joined the course some months earlier. Benny, an 11-year-old student from Kenya, had joined the course a day before me. He and I struggled with German.

Some of the students began to beat and tease us because we were younger and smaller. We languished because we were scared and lost. Besides Benny, no other student tried to befriend me. No one was loving or supportive. The only good thing was that the teachers there never beat us.

During breaks, the students would engage in fights. I cautiously withdrew. The senior students would call me ‘schwul’. I did not know what it meant. When I asked my brother what it meant, he was irritated. He replied, “That’s what you are.” 

The nickname spread like wildfire across the school. They called me schwul in my presence and behind my back. I later learnt that schwul was a vulgar word that referred to homosexuals. Schwul was like ‘kambi’ and ‘sappai’, vulgar words used by Sri Lankans to refer to male and female homosexuals. 

We had sports in school but I did not enjoy playing them. I had to change my clothes in front of the other boys. I felt what a woman who had to change her clothes in a room full of men would feel. When we played football, some of my fellow students would intentionally kick the ball at me. Despite all the beatings, abuses and teasing, I learnt to fluently speak and write German within six months. I was given permission to join the same school in the sixth grade after the summer vacation. 

There were roughly 40 Tamil families from Sri Lanka living in Aachen. If I saw Tamils on the road, I would not hesitate to speak to them in Tamil. They would say a few words and end the conversation. Everyone here was in a rush. I shrank in the cold and in loneliness as well. After all, I was a child who had once played in the scorching heat of Madurai and Chennai! 

My brother installed our first internet connection. He relented and agreed to teach me how to use the internet when I begged him. The internet opened up a new world for me at a time when I was so lonely. I learnt many new things. I made many friends through the internet. I did not know then that the virtual world would upset my entire life. I searched for the meaning of the English word ‘gay’. Many gay pornographic videos appeared on the screen. I discovered that it was not that rare for two men to have sex. 

During the summer vacations, my aunt Vasuki would take us to her home. Visiting her house made me happy. 

I liked playing with her children and Chithappa was not hard-hearted like Appa. Chithappa was very loving towards his children and would buy them anything they asked for. He loved his wife, too. But, more importantly for me, they always had many things to eat. 

I would compare them to my family, where Appa would come home drunk every night and beat me and Amma. Appa neither had a car nor a driving license. His drinking and gambling had left him in debt. 

I knew many things that I was not supposed to know from the time I was very young. But I only discovered caste for the first time after I moved to Germany. Whenever my relatives gathered, caste was an important topic of discussion. They were like flies floating in the sewage of their Vellala caste. My father knew the caste identities of the Tamil families that lived in Aachen like the back of his hand. The children in all our families were strictly forbidden from visiting the houses of those who were not Vellala and from eating their food. I violated this rule like I did all the other rules. My father beat me for it. 

We learnt about the Liberation Tigers from the Tamil television programmes that were broadcast by the Eezham Tamil diaspora. They were all sympathetic towards the Tigers. When I noticed that I was surrounded by people who loved and supported the Liberation Tigers, I too became a devotee. The inhumanities that were being meted out to the Sri Lankan Tamils made me think. 

I thought I should study well and become a doctor and go to Vanni to serve my people there. I wanted to learn my mother tongue. I studied the Tamil language every Saturday at classes held at a school in our city. This school had stricter rules than the school in India. The management was rife with corruption and family politics. Many of the diasporic Tamil organisations were marred by flaws and irregularities. From temples to schools, corruption was rampant.

Excerpt published with permission from Bloomsbury India