Sonam Kapoor's upcoming movie was written by this stereotype crushing transwoman
The trailer for Anil-Sonam Kapoor starrer, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga came out earlier this week and from the looks of it, it will be the first Bolly film since Kapoor & Sons to put a homosexual character front and center of its story.
Unsurprisingly, the movie is written by a trailblazing transwoman, screenplay writer Gazal Dhaliwal. She's worked on many films like Lipstick Under My Burkha, Wazir and Agli Baar.
That said, she wasn't always Gazal.
Until 25, she fought an internal battle against gender dysphoria. Recalling her journey, she shared, "I was born in the wrong body. I never felt like a boy. Even the smaller things I liked were feminine. My friends were girls, I loved playing dollhouse with them. When my mother wasn’t home, I would wear her dupatta. All of this started as young as five. I remember, once when my mother wasn’t home, and I was dressed in her clothes, my aunt saw it. Finding my behaviour extremely strange, she slapped me hard."
“They would call me slurs like chakka (eunuch). I knew I had to control my feminine traits because if I expressed them, people would make fun. For a very big part of my life, I had lived suppressing my identity. I felt confined and caged in my own body. The gender that my body had was nowhere close to the gender my soul identified with.”
While her parents initially thought it was a phase, they eventually became her pillars of strength and support after she tried to run away from home once. In fact, when she's transitioned, they went to every house in their neighbourhood and spoke to people about her transition so that nobody treated her differently after she returned.
“I wanted to transition but it was difficult at the time. So I decided to pursue my next big dream, to write for the Hindi film industry," revealed Gazal. She relocated and started studied filmmaking at St Xavier’s in Mumbai. It was during the course that she made a documentary on gender identity. She started meeting more people, some who had transitioned and realised "that transition was difficult, but not impossible.”
Speaking about seeing her body for the first time after the operation, Gazal says, “I did not yell in excitement. I was just calm. It was peace that I felt after a long time. I told myself, ‘This is how it was supposed to be. My soul and body are now aligned. Everything feels right for the first time."
We can't wait to see what Gazal has in store for us with Eik Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga.
