África, Occidente y la lucha contra el sida

From The Times Literary Supplement
March 5, 2008
AIDS and evangelists in Africa
There is no single answer to the problem of HIV/AIDS, but solutions cannot be imposed from the outside
Steven Epstein

Helen Epstein
THE INVISIBLE CURE
Africa, the West and the fight against AIDS
326pp. Viking. £16.99.

On one of her many trips to Africa in recent years to investigate the state of the AIDS epidemic, Helen Epstein (no relation) visited the main hospital in a district known for its tea plantations, about 200 miles from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There was one doctor at the facility, and on occasion some nurses. The X-ray machine could be powered up for an hour a day at best. Those patients not sleeping on the floor were sharing beds. The bathrooms had been gutted and served “as aviaries for the finches that made their nests in the porcelain scraps on the floor”. Some patients had AIDS; others, suffering from onchocerciasis, or “river blindness”, had long parasitic worms that formed wriggly lumps beneath the skin.

To write about AIDS in Africa for a Western audience is to confront a sharp narrative dilemma. How do you tell stories – often painful, sometimes overwhelming – without re-inforcing a sense of awful inevitability about Africa’s many problems? How do you convey the startlingly different logic by which life operates there, without trafficking in myths and stereotypes, and without solidifying a perception of Africa as radically “other”, and thus unknowable and unreachable? Epstein, a scientist turned essayist, has been piecing this account together for more than a decade in a series of lucid articles published in the New York Review of Books. Collecting that material between the covers of a single volume is a tremendous service – even if, as so often is the case for books with such origins, she has failed to eliminate distracting repetition across chapters or solve some basic problems of exposition. (Why are elementary facts about AIDS treatment and testing in Africa relegated to an appendix?) But her keen eye for detail, suspicion of conventional wisdom, and compelling prose carry the reader along. She does not shy away from telling horror stories about East and Southern Africa, home to about 40 per cent of the world’s cases of HIV infection. There are stories not just of deplorable conditions, tragic missteps and profound institutional failures, and sometimes of the hideous things that people do to one another – like the case of the South African teenage boys who stoned to death their neighbour, an HIV-positive AIDS counsellor, because she had brought “shame on the community”. But Epstein also juxtaposes failures with impressive accomplishments. Though her portraits are vividly painted, her desire is not to describe but to explain. And if she succeeds better than most in avoiding the standard portrayal of Africa as unfathomable and unchangeable, it is because she interweaves her storytelling with careful analysis. She shows how human efforts to control disease often fail but sometimes succeed, and by placing outcomes and actions squarely in their historical and cultural context – including, not incidentally, the long historical ripple effects of Western colonialism that continue to promote the spread of disease while hindering its containment – she shows us why people believe what they believe or do what they do. Finally, by linking what happens in Kampala and Pretoria to what goes on in Geneva, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, Epstein shows how the intractable dilemmas that come to seem quintessentially “African” are often caused, or compounded, by forces and agendas that originate elsewhere and over which Africans themselves exercise limited control.

Economía de la prostitución

Selling sex
Jan 17th 2008

Economists let some light in on the shady market for paid sex

IT IS all too easy to become a lost soul in New Orleans. The annual meeting of the American Economic Association this month was part of a huge gathering of social scientists sprawled across the city. Each venue itself was a warren of meeting rooms. Take a wrong turning and a delegate seeking an earnest symposium on minimum wages might innocently end up in the conference session devoted to the market for paid sex.

The star attraction there was Steven Levitt, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of “Freakonomics”, a best-selling book. Mr Levitt presented preliminary findings* from a study conducted with Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. Their research on the economics of street prostitution combines official arrest records with data on 2,200 “tricks” (transactions), collected by Mr Venkatesh in co-operation with sex workers in three Chicago districts.

The results are fascinating. Almost half of the city’s arrests for prostitution take place in just 0.3% of its street corners. The industry is concentrated in so few locations because prostitutes and their clients need to be able to find each other. Earnings are high compared with other jobs. Sex workers receive $25-30 per hour, roughly four times what they could expect outside prostitution. Yet this wage premium seems paltry considering the stigma and inherent risks. Sex without a condom is the norm, so the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) is high. Mr Levitt reckons that sex workers can expect to be violently assaulted once a month. The risk of legal action is low. Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.

Jóvenes puteros

November 7, 2006

Who pays for sex? You’d be surprised
More and more young men are choosing to visit prostitutes. One writer asks them why

“There are lots of whorehouses in Macau,” Tom confided to me under his breath in a crowded bar in Islington one Thursday night. “It was my first time in Hong Kong and I remember getting a ferry to one of the brothels where there was a madam and a security guard. On that occasion I didn’t have full sex with the girl, but all my friends did.”

Tom was 23 when he jetted out to Hong Kong to visit friends in 2001, but even then he was no stranger to brothels: it was the fourth time that he had sought the services of a prostitute. He is the sort of young man of whom most mothers would approve, a 29-year-old teacher who is good-looking, well educated and respectful. Yet on his worldwide travels he has paid for sex in several countries, including Australia, the Netherlands and Thailand.

The stereotypical “John” who uses prostitutes is a middle-aged, empty soul whom you might spot slinking around red-light districts in an outsized mac and stained trousers. The uncomfortable truth, though, is that most men who pay for sex are just “regular guys” — colleagues, brothers, fathers, sons and lovers.

Volumes of research have been published on trends among sex workers across the globe — studies on drug use, on the spread of STDs, on the impact of prostitution on society. Yet as a study published in the British Medical Journal in 2005 pointed out, “far less is known about the men who pay for sex”. That study found that the proportion of British men who reported paying for heterosexual sex had increased from 5.6 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2000. Of these, the largest group were in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, living in London and either single or divorced.

Sexo en el siglo XVIII

Sex in the 1700s
Prostitutes, perversions and public scandals – the stuff of the 21st century tabloids was familiar to readers three centuries earlier, according to new research from the University of Leeds.
The reading of erotic literature was already a social activity 300 years ago.

Jenny Skipp’s three-year PhD study examined, catalogued and categorised every known erotic text published in eighteenth-century Britain: “I tried to get a grip on just how many were published, detail the various types of sexual behaviour portrayed and find out who was doing what – and to whom.” It proved a surprisingly rich field: “Most people have heard of Fanny Hill, but there was a huge amount of erotic literature published in the 18th century.”

And despite earlier work suggesting that these texts were only for solitary consumption – at home, alone, and behind closed doors – Skipp’s work throws up a surprising image of how these works were used. “They would be read in public – everywhere from London’s rough-and-ready alehouses to the city’s thriving coffee houses, which weren’t quite the focus of polite society in the way we sometimes think,” she explained. “Some texts even came as questions and answers and were clearly intended for groups of men to read together, with one asking the questions and the others answering them.”

Much of the work is derogatory in its references to women. They are subordinates, courtesans, prostitutes, carriers of venereal disease and bearers of deformed children. “When men write this way, or read these texts, it gives them a context for asserting their authority over women,” Skipp added. Yet some texts portray women altogether differently, discussing the nature of female sexuality or describing lascivious aristocratic females.

Sacerdotisas en la antigua Grecia

October 3, 2007
How to be a modern goddess
Did sex and the sacred mix in Ancient Greece?

Joan Breton Connelly
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS
Women and ritual in ancient Greece
456pp. Princeton University Press. £26.95.
9780691127460
Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that funerals were viewed as dangerous opportunities for men with adulterous intent. They provided rare occasions for a man actually to get a look at another man’s women, and for a woman to see what might be on offer instead of her old man (who was often a cousin or an uncle and usually twenty years older than her – a man her father had arranged for her to marry when she was a little girl and without, of course, asking her opinion). At least, when the go-between arrived with a secret proposition, she might remember a handsome young face in the mournful crowd that smiled at her when nobody was looking, and might not be disappointed when on a subsequent night, her husband away, she held a lamp up to the face of the intruder the slave-girl had been asked to let in, hoping to see same face again.

Cómo parar el SIDA en África

Volume 54, Number 13 · August 16, 2007

Review
How, and How Not, to Stop AIDS in Africa
By William Easterly
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS
by Helen Epstein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 326 pp., $26.00

One of the classic works of journalism of the last couple of decades was Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On[1] about the sluggish response to AIDS in the 1980s in the United States, which indicted both the Reagan administration and the leaders of the gay community. I still remember the sense of outrage I felt when reading Shilts’s book; it struck just the right note, leaving one both horrified about the tragic incompetence of so many and yet also hopeful that someone, somewhere could do things better next time.

Yet after reading Helen Epstein’s masterful new book, the response to AIDS in America now looks in retrospect like a model of courage, speed, and efficiency by comparison with the response in Africa. In the US, the government publicized the threat and funded research, the gay community reduced its infection rates by encouraging less risky sexual behavior, the dreaded breakout into the heterosexual population never happened, and AIDS receded to become a disease that, while still tragic, could in most cases be kept under control with expensive new antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).

The opposite is true in every respect of AIDS in Africa, which was anticipated as a looming crisis already in the 1980s, yet governments, foreign aid agencies, and even activists reacted with denials and evasion. The disease rampaged through the heterosexual population and is still rampaging, ARVs were too late, too costly, and available to too few, and Africa is still in the midst of an epic disaster without a solution in sight. As of the latest figures in 2006, 25 million Africans are HIV-positive, 2.1 million die from AIDS every year, and 2.8 million are newly infected each year.[2]

Epstein’s book lays all this out in courageous and thought-provoking detail, describing the maddening complexity of the AIDS crisis in Africa, and the reprehensible and simplistic evasions of nearly everyone involved. It is not only a book that should be required reading for people concerned in the least with AIDS or with Africa; it is also compulsively readable.

Prostitución masculina en Madrid

El 20% de los hombres que ejerce la prostitución en Madrid son seropositivos, según un estudio

El primer informe de este tipo hecho en España revela que el riesgo de infección del VIH es 25 veces mayor que en las meretrices

AGENCIAS - Madrid
ELPAIS.com - España - 15-06-2007

El 19,8% de los hombres que ejercen la prostitución en Madrid y se hacen la prueba del VIH son seropositivos frente al 0,8 de las trabajadoras sexuales. Éste es uno de los datos “inaceptables” que arroja el estudio Trabajadores masculinos del sexo: aproximación a la prostitución masculina en Madrid 2006, la primera investigación de estas características que se desarrolla en España y que tiene como fin buscar soluciones sanitarias e informativas para evitar riesgos entre este colectivo. El pionero informe también revela que la prostitución masculina se ejerce principalmente en la zona centro y también en Internet, que ofrece un mayor anonimato. Son jóvenes de 25 años, inmigrantes en el 87% de los casos y el 100% vende su cuerpo porque quiere. Según ha explicado durante la presentación del estudio Iván Zaro, coordinador del programa de atención a los trabajadores del sexo de la Fundación Triángulo, el generalizado desconocimiento social y la “invisibilidad” de los chicos que ejercen la prostitución “que no son tan reconocibles ni localizables como las mujeres prostitutas” dificultan las labores de actuación y prevención tanto de las ONG como de los servicios sociales de la Comunidad de Madrid. Y el problema no es pequeño, ya que el riesgo de infección del VIH es 25 veces mayor en hombres que ejercen la prostitución que en mujeres.
El trabajo, que cuenta con la colaboración de la Consejería de Sanidad y el Ministerio de Sanidad, muestra que el perfil del trabajador masculino del sexo es el de un joven de unos 25 años, inmigrante en el 87% de los casos y que ejerce durante una media de 12 meses, normalmente con fines económicos puntuales como “obtener dinero para comprarse una casa o montar un negocio”, ha indicado Zaro. El ámbito de la Puerta del Sol y algunas calles localizadas del barrio de Chueca son las zonas de la capital que concentran la mayor parte de la prostitución masculina de calle.

Esposas temporales

¿Esposas temporales o prostitutas?

Los iraníes debaten si los matrimonios de un mes para poder tener relaciones sexuales encubren la prostitución

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA - Teherán
EL PAÍS - Sociedad - 01-07-2007

Mehdieh y Siavosh se han prometido amor… por un mes. Así se lo permite el matrimonio temporal (sigheh) que contempla el islam chií. Pero ni siquiera su incorporación a la ley tras la Revolución Islámica ha logrado vencer los recelos que suscita en la sociedad iraní, tal como ha probado la polémica desatada por las recientes declaraciones de un ministro partidario de promoverlo. Dado que en Irán las relaciones sexuales fuera del matrimonio están prohibidas y penadas, el sigheh ofrece una cobertura legal a jóvenes como Mehdieh y Siavosh que no pueden afrontar una boda. Sin embargo, muchos iraníes temen que sirva para promocionar la prostitución.
Maryam hace un gesto de desconfianza cuando la periodista le menciona el matrimonio temporal. “Sí, en el islam existe esa posibilidad, pero en nuestros días las mujeres lo rechazan”, explica. Más allá de cuestiones religiosas, el énfasis que la sociedad iraní pone en la virginidad de las novias (con chequeo ginecológico incluido) convierte la opción en una hipoteca de su futuro. Aunque nadie hace alarde de ello, el sigheh es aceptado para viudas y divorciadas, pero una virgen necesita el permiso de su padre, algo altamente improbable.

John De Cecco

S.F. State professor of sexuality class lived the life — and still does at 82

Edward Guthmann

Thursday, May 10, 2007

At the zenith of its popularity, a class called Variations in Human Sexuality drew 600 to 800 students per semester at San Francisco State University. In exchange for credits toward graduation, enrollees watched S&M bondage techniques, got the lowdown on sex reassignment surgery and crowded the aisle to watch well-rounded porn star Nina Hartley in the flesh.

A practitioner of bestiality might describe his relationship with his dogs. A heterosexual cross-dresser might take the stage in Size 10 heels and a sequined gown. Or, on occasion, Hartley would moon the classroom.

From 1980 to 2003, the class’ instructor, author and psychologist John De Cecco, sat Yoda-like while students considered the full spectrum of variant sexuality. Sexual acts were never performed in class, which was held in the McKenna Theatre to accommodate the huge enrollment. Nudity occurred just once, when an actor and actress performed a scene from a play about AIDS.

Derecho al placer

The Right to Pleasure

Russell Shuttleworth, guest editor of SRSP, examines sexual facilitation

By Bonnie Zylbergold

There’s nothing wrong with me. I want to do this, I’m choosing to do this, and I don’t mind doing this exchange, money for sex. I prefer to do that than have my situation therapized.

That was all Dr. Russell Shuttleworth needed to hear before taking his long-time friend and employer—a thirty-three-year old man living with Cerebral Palsy (CP), confined to a wheel chair and resigned to communicate via head pointer and alphabet board—to the strip club.

Out of the plethora of issues facing the physically and developmentally disabled, how a virile man with CP has sex doesn’t usually make the top ten. For the most part, discussions around disability and sexuality have remained off limits. Conversations regarding actual physical, sexual experiences and sexual expression are not typical of the genre; only recently has effort been made to acknowledge and investigate the complex nature of the subject.

Prostitución subvencionada para jubilados

SUBSIDIZED SEX FOR PENSIONERS

German Brothel Offers 50-Percent Discount to Senior Citizens

“Life begins at 66,” reads an advertisement aimed at old people in Germany. But it’s not promoting orthopedic shoes — it’s for a brothel which is offering a 50-percent discount to senior citizens.

If you have to get old, Germany isn’t a bad place to do so. As well as generous state pensions, German senior citizens enjoy a host of benefits during their twilight years. Now, in addition to discounted rail travel, cut-price cinema tickets and cheap museum entry, Germany’s old folk have a new perk to take advantage of: a 50- percent discount at Germany’s largest brothel.

Prostitución femenina

Annual Review of Sex Research; 1996, Vol. 7, p158, 23p

Bullough, Bonnie
Bullough, Vern L.

FEMALE PROSTITUTION: CURRENT RESEARCH AND CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS 

Until recently prostitution has been a subject which has engendered considerable emotion but little scholarly or scientific research. Much of the traditional writing on the topic has been moralistic and condemnatory while promising forgiveness to those prostitutes who changed their ways. An almost equal portion of the writing has been what might be called erotic or pornographic. In fact, the very word pornography comes from the Greek pornographos meaning writings of the prostitutes, or writing about prostitutes.

The lack of serious scholarly research has allowed misinformation to circulate about the extent, nature, and causes of prostitution. Occasionally, there were serious studies of prostitution, but only in the past 3 decades has there been a significant increase in the number of such studies. Unfortunately, many of these are still based more on rhetoric than fact (Bullough, Elcano, Elwood, & Bullough, 1985; Bullough & Sentz, 1992).

The emergence of more scholarly studies in recent decades can be linked to two factors: (a) the massive public information campaign about AIDS and (b) the renewed interest in the topic brought about by feminists. In terms of the kind of research of most interest to sexologists, feminist-oriented scholars, both female and male, have been far more important in bringing about a better understanding of prostitution than the AIDS campaign.

Discapacidad y prostitución

My lifelong desire

Nick Wallis is 22 and has a life-limiting condition. With no girlfriend on the horizon, he feared he would never enjoy a full relationship. Here, he tells why he decided that the only way to experience sex was to pay for it …

Nick Wallis
Monday January 15, 2007

Guardian

I have Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a progressive and life-limiting condition for which there is currently no treatment. Having been diagnosed when I was only a year old, this knowledge has always been part of my life and inevitably it has affected every aspect of my life. Since I was a small boy I have always been fascinated by nature and spent many hours in the garden trying to tempt butterflies from the buddleia into my poised fishing net so that I could examine them in detail and then let them fly free. Increasingly my disability meant that I relied on other small boys. One day when I spotted the perfect shiny prize-winning conker I had to ask one of them to collect it for me. He promptly pocketed it! Young children are not known for their selfless actions and perhaps this explains why they would never tell me where their den was or help me to get to it in my wheelchair; they seemed to be protecting it as if it was Bletchley Park.

Being excluded from normal things that my peers took for granted began to be part of my life - a pattern that got stronger as I got older. For a time, older siblings of my contemporaries filled the gap and helped me to enjoy activities such as fishing. I have always had a particular interest in fishy things, and an uncanny ability to spot an aquarium signpost in whichever town or country we were visiting on holiday. People have often been willing to talk to me and help and I feel that the kindness of strangers is often underestimated. A blond, blue-eyed boy in a wheelchair with a passionate interest in the world around him was lent a fishing fly by a stranger, given a lengthy talk on the lives of otters and allowed to touch an octopus. I have never been afraid to talk to people and ask questions, although on occasion I have felt that there was surprise that a child in a wheelchair could ask intelligent questions. Perhaps there are still too many preconceptions about wheelchair users.

Relaciones extramaritales de pago

Would you buy a love affair from this man?

Is it possible to have no-strings, extramarital sex without wrecking your relationship? Edward Marriott meets the man who makes it happen - and some of his satisfied customers

Edward Marriott
Sunday January 14, 2007

Observer

Katy Ford is 45, and has been married to Ben, a City banker, for 17 years. They have three daughters, aged 10, 12 and 14. They live in Hertfordshire and, from the outside, look like your stereotypical upper-middle-class family. The children go to boarding schools. During their holidays, they ride ponies. Katy, who works in publishing, plays tennis on Saturday mornings with her friends.

Scratch the surface, however, and a different picture emerges. Ben has been made redundant a number of times, and is now depressed. Katy works not because she wants to, but through necessity. She says: ‘My husband has retreated to the sofa. I’m a regular gym-goer, and like to keep fit. Ben hasn’t taken any exercise since we met. And he’s now depressed, and on medication.’

The last time they had sex was 10 years ago. Katy says she would have left a long time ago, but believes that ‘it’s best for children to have their parents together. Sounds a bit Victorian, I know, but there you go. The children should come first.’

For a long time, she was in a quandary. She wanted a sexual relationship, but, wishing to keep her family together, didn’t know where to turn. ‘I don’t go clubbing, and I don’t go out on the pull. I’ve got a busy job.’ Then a friend saw an ad in a magazine for a service that promised to bring together married people for ‘romance’. It took her six months before she called the number.

When she did, she found herself having coffee with David Miller, 52, a softly spoken, immaculately tailored businessman who runs lovinglinks.com, a London-based internet dating site for married people, which describes itself as ‘Europe’s leader in quality extramarital dating for thoughtful, attached men and women looking for romance. It is a genuine resource and not an escort service of any kind.’ Miller also offers a ‘bespoke’ one-to-one service. Katy opted to go for the latter, figuring that meeting men through Miller’s £85-a-go internet service would result in ‘kissing a lot of frogs’. So she parted with £350 and Miller gave her a list of mobile numbers.

Posfeminismo

DESPUÉS DEL FEMINISMO
Mujeres en los márgenes

BEATRIZ PRECIADO

BABELIA - 13-01-2007

En los últimos años han surgido una serie de autoras que sostienen que el objetivo del nuevo feminismo debe ir más allá de conseguir la igualdad legal de la mujer blanca, occidental, heterosexual y de clase media. Para ellas, se trata de atender a mujeres tradicionalmente dejadas al margen y de combatir las causas que producen las diferencias de clase, raza y género. Mientras la retórica de la violencia de género infiltra los medios de comunicación invitándonos a seguir imaginando el feminismo como un discurso político articulado en torno a la oposición dialéctica entre los hombres (del lado de la dominación) y las mujeres (del lado de las víctimas), el feminismo contemporáneo, sin duda uno de los dominios teóricos y prácticos sometidos a mayor transformación y crítica reflexiva desde los años setenta, no deja de inventar imaginarios políticos y de crear estrategias de acción que ponen en cuestión aquello que parece más obvio: que el sujeto político del feminismo sean las mujeres. Es decir, las mujeres entendidas como una realidad biológica predefinida, pero, sobre todo, las mujeres como deben ser, blancas, heterosexuales, sumisas y de clase media. Emergen de este cuestionamiento nuevos feminismos de multitudes, feminismos para los monstruos, proyectos de transformación colectiva para el siglo XXI.

Estos feminismos disidentes se hacen visibles a partir de los años ochenta cuando, en sucesivas oleadas críticas, los sujetos excluidos por el feminismo biempensante comienzan a criticar los procesos de purificación y la represión de sus proyectos revolucionarios que han conducido hasta un feminismo gris, normativo y puritano que ve en las diferencias culturales, sexuales o políticas amenazas a su ideal heterosexual y eurocéntrico de mujer. Se trata de lo que podríamos llamar con la lúcida expresión de Virginie Despentes el despertar crítico del “proletariado del feminismo”, cuyos malos sujetos son las putas, las lesbianas, las violadas, las marimachos, los y las transexuales, las mujeres que no son blancas, las musulmanas… en definitiva, casi todos nosotros.

El tercer sexo

TRANSEXUALES, EUNUCOS Y HERMAFRODITAS

El llamado ‘tercer sexo’ indio busca su espacio entre hombres y mujeres

• La sociedad los excluye y los hospitales les niegan asistencia sanitaria

22/12/2006

DIEGO A. AGÚNDEZ (EFE)

NUEVA DELHI.- El caso de Soundarajan Santhi, la atleta india que perdió su medalla en los recientes Juegos Asiáticos por dudas sobre su feminidad, ha reavivado el debate sobre la violenta exclusión social que sufre en el país el llamado “tercer sexo”.

“Santhi tiene toda nuestra solidaridad, y esto debería servir para que la gente detenga la discriminación que sufre la gente con ’sexo ambiguo’. Si las minorías sexuales quieren participar en una competición, ¿existe una categoría?”, se quejó Asha Barathi, presidente de la asociación de transexuales del estado sureño indio de Tamil Nadu.

Santhi, de 25 años, aún no ha alcanzado la pubertad pese a que su certificado de nacimiento reza que al nacer era “una niña”, de ahí que su caso haya atraído la atención de las organizaciones de un grupo estigmatizado en la India: los ‘hijra’.

Apenas un puñado son verdaderos hermafroditas entre los no más de cinco millones de “hijra” (literalmente, impotentes), en su mayoría varones de nacimiento que más tarde deciden operarse sus genitales y vestir “saris” y ropa de mujer.