Samyuktha Viyajan, an engineer and also an ex-Amazon employee, has taken an initiative to empower trans-women, and she has been doing it by setting up a boutique in Bengaluru. In India, talking about people from the LGBTQ+ community is still considered taboo. These people are looked at differently, making them feel worthless and not a part of society.
This story is about a girl who quit her well-paying job in the US just to empower the trans-women in India. The story of Santosh to Samyuktha Viyajan is an example of what a person can do with family support.
Samyuktha Viyajan – Founder’s Background
Born as Santosh in Pollachi, Coimbatore to a middle-class family, she never identified herself as a male person. Despite her father not going to school and her mother studying only until tenth grade, they created an atmosphere for their child, allowing her to be herself.
With her mother’s encouragement, she started learning Bharatanatyam at five, and as most of the students were girls; the boys were made to wear female costumes and perform. Until the age of 15, Samyuktha Viyajan dressed up as a girl for the performances.
In April 2019, she was hired as Principal Programme Manager at Swiggy. She was the first transgender employee with which they had launched the Swiggy Pride Network that is an affinity group for its LGBTQIA+ employees. She was overjoyed when she received the confirmation from Swiggy and all the procedures were completed in a matter of just 2 weeks. It was a big success for her in a short period.
Samyuktha Viyajan’s mother could not just stop her from doing what she loved. Her mother said that she could not ignore the gleam in her daughter’s eyes every time she stepped on the stage. Samyuktha Viyajan came across people who tried their best to bring her down, her friends called her names and her relatives called up her parents advising them to make her stop dancing. They pointed out that she was walking and talking like a girl, but her parents turned a deaf ear to them and supported her through it all.
From Santosh to Samyukhta – The transformation
In an interview, she shared that the word transgender is used as a noun, which is wrong. Instead, she said that this word should be used as an adjective. In the year 2016, she started her hormone replacement therapy, and in 2017; she underwent sex reassignment surgery. She recognized herself as a transgender woman and one day, she went into the operation theatre as Santosh and came out as Samyuktha. The name was given by her mother.
After her transformation, when she went to attend her brother’s marriage ceremony, her mother introduced her as their daughter and she couldn’t have asked for more. She also shared that after her mother introduced her, some men tried to hit on her.
TouteStudio – Samyuktha’s Boutique Empowering Trans-Women
She worked abroad for a decade at several software companies and returned to India in 2018. On returning she developed her fashion start-up, known as TouteStudio. She started this business with the hope to empower the trans-women of our country who could not do any other job because due to lack of formal degrees.
The idea of her business is based on the perspective that people spend a lot of money in buying outfits for special occasions and end up never wearing them or throwing them away after a few years. This is also an environmental hazard as the fabrics eventually go to landfills in the end.
In the US, people share clothing and reduce the use of fabric that fills landfills. She mentioned that this idea is not quite prevalent in India as people here find it uncomfortable to wear something that has already been worn by someone else. But she also hopes to change mindsets through her boutique, TouteStudio.
If you loved this story, read another story about how Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju became Karnataka’s first trans-doctor.
To know more about Samyuktha Viyajan, please check–Facebook and LinkedIn.
To know more about TouteStudio, please check – Facebook.
Featured image – Facebook
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