Dr. Avnish Jolly,14 June:L.N. Tripathi is fighting for the rights and respect of the global transgender community during the ongoing United Nations meeting on AIDS. She is at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the HIV/ AIDS to fight for transgender community, who have been deprived of their basic rights and are not being treated as human being.
Born in an orthodox Brahmin family in 1979, Tripathi has the distinction of being the only eunuch in the UN’s Civil Society Task Force on HIV/AIDS. In fact a UN event on HIV/AIDS has included transgender persons in the work of civil society caucus for the first time: a development greeted with cheers among eunuchs worldwide. She is running an NGO called Astitva in Mumbai, India for the welfare of sexual minorities, She alleged that be it in the developed or the developing countries or the underdeveloped world, sexual minorities are not taken into consideration at all.
She said that she is raising the main issues of sex workers and sexual minorities who are treated with total disrespect. I am trying to bring the attention of the whole world to the issue of sexual minority and want that people should be more humane, they should consider each other as human being, and to respect them just to consider them as transgender. She shared observing that transgender people are very often threatened with stoning and death and transgender communities are often afraid to assert their rights because they know that authorities would not back them up. It is now up to the UN to wake people up so that we are recognised as human beings.
She shared that they have no human rights, no right to education and no right for employment of her community worldwide. If you do not have education, you do not have capacity to work or set up a business. ”Health services for people suffering from HIV AIDS are out of the question because doctors don’t want to touch transgender. This is not only in India, and under developed and developing countries but also in developed countries, she added.
”Governments have no interest for them, the politicians do not want to please them,” said Tripathi, who has made several passionate speeches during the UN meeting on the same lines.