I'm just reposting two videos in Malayalam that I'd already posted earlier in this thread but said I wanted to try translating later. This time, I've tried to make good on my promise and provided an attempted translation for each of them. The first video shows Malayalee trans women being interviewed and sharing a bit about the kind of discrimination they face and what their lives are like. I have attempted to translate this video in its entirety:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5kU0tvcavMDr. Gireesh: Is homosexuality illegal or legal? Even at a time when so many discussions are horribly tormenting our society, what is the personality of homosexuality? We have four friends here today who experience homosexuality, who have become homosexual individuals. Let's find out about their personality through this mutual discussion.
You have, uh, the body of a man but the mind of a woman. Are you at all happy to live this way? Do you feel sadness or difficulties in your mind?
Prem: Yes...
Dr: You have the body of a man, the mind of women.
P: Yes, we do. We're upset that we ended up being...being this way, being like men, so to speak.
Dr: You don't prefer to have the body of a man.
P: No, no. It's women's bodies that we prefer to have. I mean, if I can say this, I feel really angry whenever I see women walking around all dressed up, so to speak. Like "I can't do that; I can't walk around in a dress" - I have that worry in my mind.
Dr: What is (your) most important dream, the most important dream in (your) life?
P: It's to live with a good family, to live with a husband and a child adopted legally.
Dr: You're not interested in giving birth to a child.
P: That won't work for me. To adopt a child legally and live with a husband - that's a desire I really have. That is my only desire.
Dr: Are you a woman only for sex, or are you a woman in all the thoughts, experiences, and dreams you have had your whole life?
P: No, there's everything having to do with a family, that is, with a husband, kids...I have that sort of [desire].
Dr: No, but you're not interested in, like, getting married to a woman...
P: No, no.
Dr: ...married and living with her.
P: Oh no! I'm a woman, aren't I?
Dr: OK.
(turning to Unni) What's a dream of yours?
Unni: Well, my dream is...if I was a good man, I'd go find a wife, marry a woman, and live happily with a family...
Dr: Is it a wife or a husband that you want now?
U: No, at that point...I'm saying if I was a man!
Dr (
offscreen): Okay, (and) under the present circumstances?
U: Under the present circumstances, I want to marry a normal guy and live (with him).
Dr: One man is enough.
U: Yeah, one man is enough.
Dr: So do you want to bear his kids, and do you have dreams of trying to get pregnant by receiving his semen?
U: As far as that's concerned, all I can do is dream about it, isn't it? We can carry on with our lives through that sort of a thing, through dreams.
Dr: What's a dream of yours?
Akhilesh: For me now, whatever has happened, this is the way it's ended up. Now everybody asks, "Can't you get better?" When I was in sixth and seventh grade, everybody used to say, "Can't you get better?" I
want to get better; society isn't letting me!
Dr: What is society doing?
A: What society is doing - now I, now I'm better alone. Y'all found a medicine and made me a man. I became a man - I became a man. I could tell you, I could tell everyone over there, I could tell everyone that I was a man, but I could never walk through that road alone. They'd see me exactly the same way they saw me before. All they'd say is "go away."
Dr: Do you hurt other men more often than these men hurt you, or the other way around?
A: They usually hurt
me. Here's something that happened the day before yesterday: Somebody called me over saying, "Get over here, get over here." Then I realized he was a total fraud. I said, "I'm not coming. Let me go!" He said, "Hey, why aren't you coming?" while slapping me on the back. My body...my whole body was shaking.
Dr: Really?
A: Yes, my whole body was shaking! When I got halfway down that road junction and told a traffic policeman, this guy told him, "Sir, he's 'the other one'." Then the policeman said, "
(slapping on back) Get out of here!" So then where does that pickpocket stand, and where do I stand? We...
Dr: Even the justice that a pickpocket gets...
A: We don't even get that! So what I'm saying is you should get rid of this...this law that's come out now.
Dr: What's a dream of yours, specifically?
Shaji(?): Well, I've decided that I don't particularly want to get married right now. It's a decision that a lot of us have already made.
Dr: Do you want to go to a nunnery?
S: No, no, no! All of us were sure that we wanted to be women. Now, while we're walking around like this...like this, we cut pens(?), and we're thinking we want to walk around as women. Now, as we thought this way, when we went for project, uh, training, we [saw] a lot of people, and people who did that, those things themselves gave us many opinions, [saying] don't do it whether you're aware of it or not. There are even people who did do it among us. They told us about the things that they're experiencing, that they're not getting married and not to continue to do this(?). Oh, and sometimes now, now, Prem has her mom. Now, I neither have a mom nor have a dad. So now I have to walk alone. Now, Prem has her mom. So Prem's mom, when my mom passed away, he and I - so at the time my mom died, Prem was with me. When he was with me, my mom had specifically said, "Never get mad at each other. No matter what problems come along, Shaj..." yeah, I was just in love with Lazar. So, "Shaji," uh, "any prob-" I get mad all of a sudden. If I get mad, Prem gets mad, too! So no matter what I say or what Prem says, Prem just...so no matter how mad we get at each other, if not today, the next day, either she'll call me or I'll call her. We're like twins, right...
Dr: These faces and these voices, we may see as strange or different. Perhaps beyond their voices, we may make people experience how different their bodies(?) are. When so many souls and so many people with (their own) personalities live in our society, and as common society debates whether the Supreme Court decision commenting on the new law should be implemented or not, we can think and grasp the reality that the creating of these faces, these voices, and these bodies(?) and these collective creations becoming part of us are not their fault.
The second video is completely different (though still on topic for this thread). It's another interview but with a doctor, from my parents' hometown, possibly a former student of my grandmother's, where he talks about supposedly using a medical procedure to cure homosexuality (as he might put it). I did not translate this whole video; I got only up to about 5:50:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6sbYiiN5GYI'm actually going to leave this one surrounded by spoiler tags:
► Show Spoiler
Host: Hello and welcome, all viewers, to MediTalk. Our topic today is mental sexual problems; the doctor with us is Titus P. Varghese, Indian HRT Psychotherapy Centre, Thiruvalla. Let's welcome the doctor to this program. Doctor, welcome to the show. And doctor, even when talking about a psychiatric problem now, a lot of people consume medicines as they would for all other problems. So, is that a proper thing to do?
Titus P. Varghese: Well, it isn't a matter of proper or improper. That is to say, when we talk about mental problems, they're the learnings(?), they're the differences our feelings have. So, the reasons for those learnings(?) and the reasons for the emotional difficulties are our life experiences; they're events. We may say that mental illness is a reflection of those various events. So you see, what it comes down to is that most, almost all mental, uh, illnesses, and similarly, sexual problems like homosexuality - these are all things that the influences of life experiences cause.
H: OK. So similarly, is there any treatment for the problems you were mentioning earlier that come about, such as homosexuality? Like HRT, for instance...
V: Actually, what we call homosexuality isn't a disease. It's these experiences people have when they're young, and by "experiences," I mean in a life, the fundamental state of a child's life, that is, up to the age of 14 or 15, that age...it's at that age. So the experiences that they have within that age, that, uh, it's a problem that happens mainly in children whose fathers' influence is very limited, that is to say, it's a phenomenon that occurs when those who are influenced by other homosexuals try to attract children, uh, towards them(?) whose father's influence...whose father figure, whose father figure is very weak in their subconscious mind, so what they're doing is gradually falling into that. That is to say, now, they say that a child whose interaction of their father, with their father is very strong, uh, will never go into homosexuality. That is to say, if the father's figure is very strong in them, when those in league with homosexuality approach him, he'll react appropriately. It could be any way; it could be a bad one, [or] it could be a verbal reaction. No matter what, he'll be reacting. He won't end up being controlled, and precisely because he won't end up being controlled, even if homosexual phenomena occur, he isn't turning into a homosexual. So these things like homosexuality are really treatable. It's a problem that completely changes. It's not about whether it's a disease or not. It, there are a lot of people who want to be saved from it. Now, a problem, for example, there are a lot of people who are inclined to steal. So it's like stealing, a h- or a habit like lying, or like a deviation of fashion (???), that kind of habit, or a bad habit. That's the kind of thing homosexuality is. Like this HRT that we're practicing, it's a method of treatment called HRT, that is, it's a method of treatment called Homeostasis Reality Therapy that we're practicing. We treat problems like this, just like homosexuality, mental problems and such with this method. Once we have decoded away the influence of such experiences from the subconsciousness, what happens is that that problem goes away, whatever it was.
H: Okay, doctor, so even when we talk about HRT, it's a new concept. Not everyone may know about it.
V: Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
H: What is HRT?
V: We may say that HRT is a new kind of...psychological concept called Homeostasis Reality Therapy, or [ˈhoːmijostæːsɪs riˈjæːlɪti t̪ɛˈraːpi], so to speak. That is to say, a doctor who was in America named, uh, [Bergamasco? Berkman Scott? idk], uh, is the one who invented it. Uh, I'm a student of his, and there are many people who have studied it all over Kerala and the world, all around there and all around here. It's with a little more precision and exactitude that we make analyses as part of it; we have a mental problem, so if we have a mental problem or a sexual problem, we're going into the exact reasons, that is to say, life experiences. We don't do anything like, uh, just get a vague idea of it and then give them some advice, offer them counseling, or give them hypnotherapy, uh, or prescribe them medicine. There's nothing like relaxation techniques involved. When we analyze any life experience precisely and we say whether it's experiences that we saw, experiences that we heard, touched, smelled, or tasted, needless to say, the (kinds of?) sensory experiences are five in number. What we do is, once we analyze exactly each experience that they went through and which sense was the main one, we don't throw away the memory of the influence of things like that; when we decode that, uh, influence away from the subconscious mind, the problems they have now undergo changes or even go away.
H: Okay, so doctor, is it the case that this is something that doesn't even involve medication?
V: No, when we say "medication," actually, (laughs nervously) we have to say a few things about that. For example...uh, problems like mental disorders or mental diseases or homosexuality aren't things that we can ever prove at all through MRI tests, blood tests, or scanning because no mental issue is caused by a bacteria, virus, or microbes or any other microscopic phenomena(?) at all. Furthermore, even if we conduct a body test, take an individual who really has a mental disease, or a subconscious mental disease like schizophrenia, the most severe kind of mental disease, and conduct a physiological test on them, we can't prove it. We'll never get the evidence for it. No doctor can ever say that this person is the one with a disease or somebody else is the one with a mental disease. That's exactly why, uh, even the internationally famous, very famous Dr. Peter Abraham, Dr. Thomas Assissi(?), and also, uh, Dr. Rex fell out of that particular field. They fell out, and what we have now is a situation where the treatment is without medication because if you want to use medicine to treat a [medical] problem, we can only treat one that we can prove through physical science. You can only change it; anyone can treat it, but if you want to get to a point where it improves, uh, that point doesn't exist, uh, of course, the symptoms of the disease have to change.
Because I stopped trying to translate it when I saw that there was a similar video that already has subtitles in English! The interviewee is the same and says pretty much the same things in this video as he probably did in the other one (I haven't seen the whole video yet
):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Guxbnmyk2gc