'They knew that I was different so molestation was easy'

Daniella Mendonca, who has worked with the National Council of Churches in India, struggled to reconcile her identity with her faith until she found god in a new way

I had a very religious upbringing. I went to Sunday school, attended Mass and was an altar server. Although there was no acceptance, my parents pushed me to be religious. I think that stemmed from a belief [they had] that God would make things right, that doing God’s work would help a child like me become ‘normal’ or at least stay away from a ‘sinful’ life,” Daniella Mendonca, who is intersex (person born with a combination of male and female biological traits and sexual organs), tells mid-day. Born into a Roman Catholic family in Mumbai that followed everyday practices of saying the evening Rosary, Mendonca struggled to find approval. “I realised that there was truth to the saying that religion and science cannot go hand-in-hand. They just couldn’t understand what to do with a child like me.”

She was sent to Sacred Heart Boys’ High School in Santacruz and recalls that her feminine nature made her susceptible to abuse. “They knew that I was different. So, molestation was easy. Seniors would take down my pants. Using the washroom was difficult. Even my teachers used to make fun of me. It’s this that’s responsible for bringing suicidal thoughts at a very young age.” At home too, Mendonca was often hit by her father who, she says, didn’t accept her because she did not fit into the male-female binary. This forced her to ultimately leave home at the age of nine. As her father was the sole breadwinner, her mother, though supportive, could offer little by way of help at the time.

Mendonca says that like most members of the LGBTQiA+ community, she went through a wave of doubt; it was as if her identity was at odds with the faith she was brought up in. “It is a religion that teaches you to love, respect and forgive. And then suddenly you realise he’s the same God who’s also discriminatory. What kind of a God is this who says he created man in his own image and then calls you a sinner for the way you are?” she had wondered. “What kind of a God says he died on the cross for my sins and for my salvation and then says I’m going to hell and not heaven just for the way I am?”

While she is still religious, she says her relationship with faith has changed. After dropping out of school, she had to beg on the streets of Mumbai and also engaged in sex work. At Bandra station, she was gangraped and recalls that when the police arrived later to investigate, they made fun of her genitals. “After all that, you start finding peace, you start looking for solutions to your problems. That was the time I turned back to religion,” she says. “I spoke to the priest, listened to the word of God and prayed. I found comfort knowing that I could talk to a supernatural power.”

Mendonca has worked with the National Council of Churches in India to make churches more inclusive for the LGBTQiA+ community, and has met and worked with gay Christians. These experiences, she says, has taught her to re-read the Bible and see it in a new light. “I saw phrases and paragraphs which were comforting rather than discriminatory. I found my peace there at the darkest time. And that was because I saw God there but a different God—a ‘rainbow’ God, a queer one. The community may criticise me for saying this but he’s my God and I can call him whatever I want.”

She has since worked as a Sunday school teacher and become a member of the Parish Pastoral Council. Some of the children she taught have come out to her as gay and yet continue to be religious. “The only reason for that is that they saw Jesus in a very different way. They saw a God who’s more inclusive,” says Mendonca who has come to realise that there is much manipulation of the scriptures and that Jesus’s biggest commandment was to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.

Recently married, Mendonca says that her familial relationships too have repaired. “I realised that it took me more than 20 years to fully accept myself the way I am. How could I then expect somebody who had no exposure to education or the Internet to accept me?” she says of her father. “I realised that the fault was in the way people like myself are brought up, in religion, in the way they are manipulated and in the things that are said to them.” “They are still religious,” she says of her family members, “but they know that not everything can be taken as the word of God because god doesn’t teach you to discriminate against people. God belongs to everybody.”

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