People in recovery have often burned bridges with their biological families. While some are able to reconnect and rebuild those relationships, that is not always possible or in the best interest of their recovery. The majority of us in recovery will require the affection and support that a chosen family can offer, particularly those who are cut off from our original families. Kath Weston coined the term “chosen family” in 1991 with her landmark book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. This origin isn’t surprising as people from the LGBTQ+ community most commonly use the term chosen family. Indeed, this study describes the chosen family as “a signature of the queer experience.” These families of choice are captured on screen through the development of New York’s ball culture. This community first developed in the 1970s as LGBTQ+ black and Latino people faced rejection from their biological families and the white gay community. They formed families, referred to as ‘houses’, who often lived and performed together adopting the same surname, led by a queer elder known as the house mother or father.
Chosen families like these became increasingly necessary with the advent of the HIV/AIDS crisis from the early 80s onwards. Many biological families refused to care for (or even acknowledge) their relatives who had contracted the virus. This cruelty meant people had to rely on their non-biological kinships for emotional, physical and financial support. For some, their logical family can be a loose-knit group of people spread worldwide whom they know they can call on when times are tough. For others, cohabiting or living close to their logical connections is necessary as they would find it impossible to go through daily life without them. These differing levels of entwinement reflect how fluid this idea of chosen family is.
Even as our society evolves and fewer queer and trans children face rejection from their families once they come out (although this still happens around the world), there is still a need for logical families. We form ever-changing, ever-growing constellations of loving, supportive connections.
In India, psychiatry and the mental health community have a history of offering mental health services that either concentrate on conversion therapies, are predicated on a model of pathologizing these people, or represent an approach that is typically ignorant or fails to consider the societal power structures and context in which queer people’s mental health issues arise. Prior to the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in 2018 regarding the repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Constitution, which made “unnatural sex” illegal, several prominent psychiatrists advocated for the mental health community to be more considerate of queer people’s needs. Preliminary recommendations for mental health professionals who work with queer people were outlined by several psychiatrists. Two mental
In India, queerness and transness is not the only thing that has a long history. Caste is also very much embedded in its culture. Being a casteist society people in India are also discriminated against based on their caste location. Hence, forming a chosen family becomes even more complex when one’s marginalised caste identity intersects with their queerness or transness or both. Many people can form these chosen families by accessing queer spaces that are safe and affirmative.
Hijra identities are seen as marginalized gendered identities and have been analysed in the framework of sex and gender, as their identity lies outside the binary paradigm. But, looking at the social organization, their identities are more complicatedly built around other intersections of caste, class, kinship, and hierarchy.
Hijras are believed to renounce sexual desires by undergoing a sacrificial emasculation, i.e., an excision of the genitalia which is dedicated to Bahuchara Mata. Only a few of them are born as ‘intersexed’. When one desires to be a part of the hijra community, a few willing hijras’ take part in an initiation rite called nirvan in which the scrotum, testicles, and penis are removed. While neither castration nor nirvan rites necessarily mean renouncement of sexuality or sexual desire. It merely means the renouncement of male penetrative sexual performance. It is believed that the act of nirvan socially bestows sacred powers to some hijras as a result of the transmutation of sexual energy.The importance of hijra kinship and bonds i.e. social arrangements and subsystems or gharanas that becomes a major part of hijra identity.