The story of Aryan Pasha - the first transman to become a bodybuilding champion in India

Aryan Pasha, India’s first transman to become a bodybuilding champion, is breaking stereotypes with passion and wants to create a safe shelter for other people struggling with identities.

Aryan Pasha was born a girl called Nyla in 1991. He has first hand experience of the struggle of living through somebody he was not. Now, 32 years of age, Pasha wants to build a safe haven and start a shelter home for transgenders in India. His journey has not been easy and that is exactly what motivates him to be a pillar of support for others.

“When a child is born he/she doesn’t know the difference between a girl and a boy. The realisation of me being different from other boys came after I hit puberty. As a kid I enjoyed everything that a boy does at that age.

“I was only six years old when I stopped going to a girls’ school in a girl's uniform. I joined a new school where I wore a boy’s uniform. For the first time in class 10, my teacher realised that I was not a boy as my documents still identified me as a girl,” he said.

It was his mother who first discovered that he was a boy trapped in a female body and even though his mother understood the situation, his father believed that it was just a phase in his life and he would eventually get over it.

His mother convinced him otherwise and when he was 16, Pasha’s mother informed him about sex-change surgery.

When Pasha was just 19 in 2011, he underwent sex change surgery in a hospital in NCR.  “After the transition, I became so comfortable in my body and it started showing in everything I did. I had always been an average student but after the transition I topped my school in Class 12,” he said. He then got himself identified as ‘male’ in all his documents and even got a new name for himself: Aryan.

He eventually ended up joining Mumbai University and studied law after he was refused admission to a premier university in Delhi for an undergraduate course. “It was tough as there was no law to help us then. The National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) versus Union of India judgment came in 2014. I never wanted to study law. I was interested in sociology. But now my law studies help in my LGBTQ activism,” Pasha said.

It was in 2014 when the Supreme Court introduced the the third gender status for transgenders.

Having worked for an NGO called Multiple Action Research Group (MARG), Pasha has the experience of imparting legal training to other social activists.

On December 1, Pasha became the first Indian transman to compete in Muscle Mania, a bodybuilding event, in the men’s category. He finished second on the podium.

“In India, everyone knows about trans women, lesbians and gays, but no one knows about trans men. When I became a transgender activist six years ago, I noticed that even those who used to raise slogans in support of the transgender community did not know anything about trans men. But society is gradually getting aware of them. Earlier, there used to talk about how the policy on the transgender community would be made but they are now being implemented. Now, things have changed drastically. There are many policies that benefit trans people.”