Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming — intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.
Rashmi Rocket, the lazy but effective Taapsee Pannu-starrer, takes a sledgehammer to the gender test. Both as a sports and a legal drama, the film rounds up its arguments against the validity of testosterone levels in defining who is and is not a woman.
While it is true that women on average have lower testosterone levels than men, a study of 2,000 Olympic athletes has shown that 4.7 percent of the female athletes had testosterone levels in the typical male range, and 16.5 percent of the male athletes had testosterone levels below the typical male range. So testosterone levels cannot be a definitive test for gender.
But the film, burnished by the kind of simplistic moral storytelling, falls short of asking the next logical question — of how one ought to define a woman, if one ought to define women at all.
The film begins as “a tribute to all female athletes world over who strive against all odds to achieve their hard-earned success.” It might seem like an innocent statement, like the other cluttering disclaimers before a film begins, hoping the production’s noble intention is gin clear. But if you read it closely, contextualised by the recent debates on transwomen’s participation in competitive sports — just last week, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill that bans transgender women and girls from participating in female school sports, the eighth state in the US to do so — it is a philosophical minefield. Who is a “female athlete”? What is “hard-earned” success?
Both are important questions, for the two arguments used to not include transwomen in the women’s category in sporting events are that transwomen are not women (ie not “female athletes”), and that it would be unfair to include transwomen in the women’s category (ie their victories would not be “hard-earned” or that their victory would take away the spotlight from a more deserving “female athlete”).
Rashmi Rocket takes one strand of this argument — of testosterone levels determining one’s gender and one’s strength, a claim that is complicated, at best — and builds the compelling premise of the film on it. The awkward, bucktoothed lawyer Eeshit Mehta (Abhishek Banerjee) notes, “Kuchh auraton mein testosterone levels zyada hote hain. Toh kya? Kya voh aurat nahin hai?” That a woman cannot be defined by their testosterone levels. And that testosterone levels do not correlate with better sporting performances. Both are relatively uncontroversial statements to make in 2021.
While we have certainly come a long way from the 1960s, when female athletes had to confirm their gender by showing sporting officials their genitalia, or when chromosome and testosterone tests were the lay of the athletic land, we have still not moved away from our impulse to neatly divide men and women into discrete categories. The problem of locating one’s sex in genitalia or one’s hormone levels or one’s chromosomal makeup is that you will always run into the walls of biology, which does not conform to the imposed binary logic. It will always throw up examples to unsteady the certainty of division. As the Court of Arbitration for Sport, based in Switzerland, noted with respect to Dutee Chand, “Nature is not neat.”
While Rashmi Rocket makes it clear that a woman is not defined by their testosterone score, I wish the film was more clear in its conception of what a woman is.
Instead, it opts for easy drama — people calling her launda as she disembarks from bikes wearing jackets and jeans — and we must glean from this rather bland quote at the end its politics of inclusion, “The most important freedom is the freedom to be who you really are.” But what if who you really are is a contested fact?
It is, however, on the question of fairness that Rashmi Rocket makes its strongest point, one that can be extended to the issue of trans inclusion in competitive sports. The lawyer in the film notes that Usain Bolt has a rare muscle found in only 2 percent of the human population, that Michael Phelps’ limbs are longer than the average human. So out of fairness, should they not be allowed to compete? Some countries spend a greater amount of their budget training their sportspeople. Should that be accounted for in the algebra of fairness? What about East Africans who have come to dominate long-distance running — in male and female categories — in part aided by, based on studies, their innate genetic advantages in bone structure and BMI? Should they be made into a separate category then? How finely do you want to slice and dice categories to account for “fairness”? Exceptions are often the rule when it comes to something as arbitrary as "ability," and it is a fool’s errand to look for a level playing field on a bumpy mountain.
Those arguing for fairness often employ it to mask their discomfort with transwomen complicating their received ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. If they really cared about fairness, the investigation on disparity would not stop with transwomen. Maybe there is a conflict between inclusion and fairness, however you want to define that word. Then it becomes a choice of what you stand for.
Why am I spending so much time discussing what a film is not as opposed to what it is? It is a fair question, for what is the point of critiquing a film for something it was not even attempting to do? But I find in Rashmi Rocket’s silence, a very convenient and thus disturbing thrust. For one, it takes Chand’s story and her legal fight against Athletics Federation of India — 2014, when Chand was dropped from the 2014 Commonwealth Games at the last minute, is the same year Rashmi Rocket takes place — and tames it. Chand came out as a lesbian in 2019, publicly speaking about being in a same-sex relationship. (Many residents of her village disavowed her remarks, calling it "humiliating," and her sister has threatened to send her to jail, expelling her from the family.) But Rashmi Rocket straight-washes the story, digging its heels deeper into a more comfortable feminism — that of a pregnant woman participating in competitive sports.
It is a cinematic liberty then or a fear of complicating a simple idea of female excellence, I guess, that makes the film take an issue for which transwomen have been hauled over the coals of public paranoia and judicial committees, and use the word ‘transgender’ casually in the film once. Just once.
Rashmi Rocket is streaming on ZEE5.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.
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