Am I a Woman, or Am I Dead?: Notes from the Trans (After)Life of Digital Enclosure

MD

References

¹Os Keyes. 2018. The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 88 (November 2018), 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274357.
²Jessica Hinchy. 2021. Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

³Sonavane, Nikita and Jasmine. 2026. “Trans Amendment Bill 2026: How State Surveillance Can Deny Rights To The ‘Genuinely Oppressed.'” Outlook.

⁴Suchitra Vijayan. 2025. “Technologies of Genocide.” The Polis Project.

⁵Dan McQuillan. 2022. Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. 1st ed. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2rcnp21.

⁶Janet Mock. 2014. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so Much More. New York: Atria Books.

⁷Jasbir Puar. 2015. Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled. Social Text 124, Vol. 33, No. 3.

⁸Swetha Uthayasuriyan. 2018. Nipannam. Kovilpatti: Thirunangai Press.

Am I a woman, or am I dead? When I awoke on a bed in Bangkok gasping violently for air, paralyzed by anesthesia and jubilance, this was the first thought in my mind. The hospital’s brighter-than-life neon lights, paired with a throat so parched from two days of fasting that I could barely recognize it as mine, suggested that, perhaps, I was now in another realm of existence. The last thing I remember hearing before going under the needle was the nurse’s strong voice, as I lay limp in scrubs: “Your name is [redacted], you are 24 years old, and this is your gender-affirming skin graft vaginoplasty.”

Her words seemed less a confirmation of the procedure, and more a decree. She relayed a stoic truth; it was not quite prophetic nor divine, but a plainly inalterable fact of the universe. As if to say that, twenty-four-and-a-half years after my (first) birth, I had arrived at a deliverance years in the making. What else could my life have led to but this?

***

Three days before my surgery, my three roommates (all trans women) and I were held in the Bangkok airport’s high-security questioning room and interrogated about our bodies. At the borders of one of the world’s most trans-friendly countries, a digital scanner flagged our passports for an algorithmic mismatch between documented gender and embodied physicality. It remained the natural assumption of the Immigration staff that we had come to Thailand for “ladyboy sex work.” Yet at the Bangkok airport, while I could ward off most questions with proof of my upcoming surgery, the officer was truly stupefied when he asked my roommates why they had “F” markers on their passports. He stared in disbelief when they revealed their post-operative status, while assuring us that this line of questioning was necessary and standard immigration procedure. “I wouldn’t have known,” he chuckled.

***

To exist as a subject of modernity is to be interpellated within the naturalized confines of assigned gender. The marking of an “M” on a California birth certificate is not merely bureaucratic: it facilitates an algorithm of sorting, feeding what researcher Os Keyes calls a machine of misgendering. Over years of accumulated documents, hospital bills, tax statements, applications, and more, the border of sex is fortified. A residual paper trail is made into a permanent enclosure.

In November 2020, India launched a National Portal for Transgender Persons. It was ironically titled “SMILE”—likely linked with AI-powered facial recognition databases—and intended to “assist (with) applying for a Certificate and Identity card digitally.” The portal echoed the “Registers of Eunuchs,” the biometric folios that surveyed communities of trans-Hijra women after the passing of the casteist-colonial 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Today, six years later, we are confronting the draconian Transgender Amendment Act 2026, which has criminalized almost every aspect of trans life in India. Any semblance of “rights” have now been twisted into surveillance metrics, with the possible creation of a 360º profile of any trans person’s bio-data through interoperability frameworks and data sharing by the District Magistrate. Now, not only is digital registration with the SMILE portal required, but also medical proof of bottom surgery via a doctor’s letter and a potential strip search. In this particular enclosure, digital monitoring is the direct conduit for state-sponsored sexual violence.

Echoing the Register’s logic of bifurcating “castrated” and “virile” eunuchs, how archaic to have to offer up one’s vagina as some infallible proof of womanhood. Yet still, through the intricate enclosures of gendered identification, all of us dance to attain that coveted “F.”

***

When my medication wore off in the Recovery Room, and my previously intermittent spurts of wakefulness stretched longer, I started to experience a joy like nothing before. It was hot, molten, spreading through my body. I had really done it. My body—living, breathing, trembling, and plugged into more tubes than I could count—was here as living proof. When those first two hours—simultaneously an instant and an eternity—finally passed, I was wheeled to the elevator to be reunited with my friend and my mother. The smile plastered on my face was so stubbornly set, so stretched from cheek to cheek, that it felt like someone else had put it there. What was this relief? What was this elation? I had never known anything like it before.

***

Writer Suchitra Vijayan’s frames state surveillance as a set of “technologies of genocide.” In that vein, both 1871’s “registers” and 2026’s anti-trans databases constitute technologies of “gender-cide,” intended to control and ultimately annihilate trans and Hijra lifeworlds. The state works to foreclose the embodied infinitude of transness within regimes of legibility, systematizing moral panics about caste and colonial purity.

Increasingly, its primary method is the set of stochastic tools called “AI.” For scholar Dan McQuillan, the fundamental statistical logic of “AI” technologies is to reify categories by naturalizing historical divisions. Today, this logic finds a home in the facial identification algorithms that dot airports and biometric offices worldwide, digitally verifying a person’s existence and gender identity.

Cultures, traditions, and complexities are removed in one fell swoop by this machinic gaze. Eternities of lives and afterlives spent creating oneself are frozen, divided, and decimated all within one one static column: then an instant mismatch, a 99.7% accuracy rate espoused by the facial-recognition algorithm JARVIS, contracted by police forces across India.

***

In the afternoon of the first day after my surgery, the white packing that covered half of my lower body began to ache. It was dull and wide—a low pain, but one that persisted steadily, making itself known. The pain grew, along with my emotional and physical discomfort. I was given pills and morphine injections when I needed them. I vomited once, apparently a common side effect of the injections, but otherwise I spent my time sleeping, making very light conversation, and waiting for the days to pass. The drugs were powerful: after each one I felt suddenly cold and then warm. Each injection caused total numbness, then flight. As if my body was in the clouds, suspended ever so lightly, and my mind in a dream. In these post-morphine dazes, time stopped altogether—I lived in an afterlife of nothingness and everythingness, all at once. Christmas passed in a foggy flurry.

Amidst the steady drip of a glucose IV, the rhythmic compression of an anti-DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) knee pad, and the incessant beep of a heartbeat monitor, I was suddenly struck with the inconsolable urge to speak to my father for the first time in years. He answered the phone and listened to my drug-induced ramble for the next hour. Five days before my surgery, I had attended my first cousin’s wedding: it was grand, colorful, and replete with all the unsettling markings of a ‘proper’ South Indian brahmin matrimony. Though her big moment had preceded mine by just a few days, our lives could not be more divergent. In a dizzying array of emotions, I suddenly asked my father in Tamil if he thought I would be the next woman in our family to get married. He laughed with a sad knowingness that stayed in the air, even as my thoughts raced to the next subject.

I do not know what compelled me to speak to him that day, nor why I asked him what I did. Though marriage, with all its bloody rules and rites, is the most emblematic “tradition” of womanhood—and caste endogamy—in households like mine, it has never been important in the lives of women like me. Yet still, after years imagining the arc of my life bending towards true love with increasing desperation, I had needed to come to terms with the sacrifice that transition demanded from me. Transness sat squarely within an endless paradox: simultaneously the infinite deference of love’s dream, beyond the register of time itself, and also a sweet freedom from the constraining violence of the marriage machine.

My surgery sat in that same impossible space—at once the only way out of state bureaucracy, a movement through it, and the most meaningful experience of my life. The allowance to be born over.

***

Digital enclosures persist elastically, disrupting any clear partition between “online” and “offline” violence—whether in the security area of the Bangkok airport or the SMILE online portal. Together, these continuums negate the imaginative possibility that might exist otherwise, beyond the necropolitical momentum of “AI.”

This momentum has naturalized a certain cadence, an all-encompassing, enacted chronopolitics. That same cadence commands the bodies of gig workers for apps like Blinkit or Swiggy to rush dangerously across traffic routes of Indian metropoles; uses algorithms like that of Chicago’s ShotSpotter to predict an incident of gun violence in a predominantly Black neighborhood, preempting the sound of a bullet actually being fired; and stalls the bodies of trans women at an airport for hours, calling them “suspect” and “deviant,” yet perversely exciting.

Among the dominant-caste and affluent echelons of techno-fanatics in Silicon Valley, where I was raised, AI represents not merely a politic, a futurity, or a dream: it is the tempo of our times. This staccato chaos of speed and sorting is not just compatible with, but actually designed for, fascistic entrenchment. It beats according to the relentless rhythm of capital. It is echoed in the transhumanist wet dreams of Sam Altman and co.; it lives in the Hindu mythmaking around AI’s religiosity in Modi’s India.

On this perverse timescale of foreclosure and pre-emption, the right to imagine is sacrificed for the premium of optimization. When I called my father that day in a morphine haze, what I think I wanted to express most, three days into life in this new, foreign body, was grief. I knew that I had changed myself profoundly, brought forward a new embodiment that danced defiantly in the face of any easy dichotomy between birth and death. And yet the world’s timeline—his timeline—still had not changed.

***

When the dull, heavy ache in my upper legs subsided, I started to experience sharp, shooting pains, which continue to be an infrequent part of life, even now. These tiny flames seemed to burn up my insides, each a dagger causing me to scream out loud in seconds-long agony. Maybe it was only to assuage my discomfort, but in each pang, each holler, I started to find a perverse meaning. During my seven days of vaginal packing, I thought frequently of Janet Mock’s autobiography, which I had read religiously the month before. As she looks in the mirror at her new body, just days after her vaginoplasty, she writes, “I had been reshaped.” Despite not having yet seen mine at the time, I felt the same.

And I felt, deep in my bones, that I had been “enlightened.” It is inarticulable what this process and this pain have meant to me, have done to me. In them, I have found my way to a landing that feels as solid as it is shaky, as foreign as it is familiar. It sounds absurd, but I learn more about womanhood with each sharp pang. Each one has given me fodder and clay to carve this new self out of. Gritty and soft at the same time, my body has come to be a vehicle I learn from, a destiny ever in the making. In the theoretical terms of Jasbir Puar, this is the difference between trans becoming (linear, teleological, domesticated); and becoming trans (multiple, impossible, immanent).

Though something within me has been released and known, it may still take my mind days, months, or years to articulate this verbally. My body found its way to understanding before I did: a new sense of temporality altogether. It is “birth and death together,” at the same time—words written by my friend Swetha in her autobiography. In Tamil, she offers language for the inarticulable temporality of transition, something which perhaps only women like us might understand about, and for, each other.

***

Every day since, dilation has consumed my day. It has eaten my schedule inside out, chewed it, and spit it back out with just a few hours remaining. Each session is an overwhelming amalgam of pain, discomfort, and physiological ennui—yet I have done it dutifully each day, with equal parts devotion and dread.

I’ve already spent the last three years building my relationship with Estrogen, incorporating her fits of moodiness and affection and finding purpose, euphoria, and an internal clock marked by the waxing and waning rhythm of a 10-day half-life between injections. Dilation, now, is added to this pantheon. Together, these practices of physiology become “rituals,” replacing the ones that the family institution expects—an alternate imaginary carved of flesh and feeling, yet still sacrosanct and visceral.

I am yet to commence the grueling process of demanding recognition from the Indian and American governments as a now-biological female. Nor has anything changed in the strictures of the world, in its stochastic rhythms. Six months post-operation, one more gender-affirming surgery, and two complication follow-up appointments later, I still find myself double-taking as I glance at the mirror when showering, squinting and trying to understand if what is reflected back is really me. For now, I am waiting patiently, anxieties present as they may be. I see my life—this new one—coming into focus slowly. I am putting the full force of my faith into this body. I trust it will lead to enlightenment.