Gender sensitization is an essential for today’s world. as we see the intolerance on basis of gender, sexuality and orientation growing high day by day. There is an earnest need to understand how we can tune in our youngsters to be more inclusive and aware. With an Analysis of understanding we see that Majority of people who identity outside the gender binaries are often been mocked, bullied, molested and abused. This start from the very young age by the fellow kids, who doesn’t have any idea about gender. Our education system never gave an opportunity to educate the young kids on gender. And to develop the inclusiveness as a society we need to start from the ground root level. From the schools, and from the Kids.
As a part of Hyderabad Literature festival 2020 Story telling program, performance artist and Drag queeing Patruni Chidananda Sastry with drag name S.A.S (Suffocated Art specimen ) started an initiative called as “Drag Tales”. An exclusive storytelling session for Kids, adults and bookaholics who came to the fest to get them tuned with gender and sexuality. In Drag Tales, Mohini explains the basis of Gender and Sexuality. she educates kids with words like “Male”, “Female” and “Trans” and decode the aspect of Orientation of such as “Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender”. The stories involved gender parity, sexuality and gender expressionism. Using Kajaris and Natkas of North India, S.A.S used folk songs as a way to impart stories of change. The first story he presented was titled “Sita was born, Just like a Man” where he brings the elements of celebration of girl child and how it was celebrated within the context of Marriages. How transgender community were given Important role within society and giving a status of demi gods and how they praised sita, on the day she was born. This story was an anecdote of gender equality.
Following the other story in a form of a Kajari, S.A.S talks about “Bingo-sexuality (Opposite of Sapiosexuality)” and “Sapiosexuality” a term often confused and misleads the heteronormative. The presentation was on story of how a women embraces her poor intelligence and understanding Sapiosexuality as a sexual orientation. The last piece was “Out of closet” where Patruni Presented a story of a young girl, how she identifies her sexual identity and how she takes one step at a time to come out to their parents., Gender bend rhymes were taught to kids and were sung together. Soon, S.A.S also educated the kids about Consent with an activity called “Touch me Not” and telling “your body is your own and anyone who need to touch you needs your permission first, without it she is not supposed to touch”. The event ended with a quick dance routine for all the participants where all the kids cheered and had fun. the event was hosted with a collaboration the nations rock beat as part of HLF 2020 At Vidhyaranya school Khairtabad. Patruni is looking forward to conduct more such events in schools and colleges and equivalently help in educating the youth with gender sensitization.