Supriya Ganesh Questioned Gender After Immigrating To U.S.

Just the news of her departure from the hit medical drama at the end of Season 2 led to outcries and discourse all over social media.

But in her Vulture essay, Ganesh reflected on a very different period of her life. She wrote about the gender dysphoria she experienced when she moved from India to the US as an 18- year-old to attend Columbia University. In the essay, she details a specific moment at a New York bar when someone directly asked her if she was a man or a woman.

“It also wasn’t lost on me that the man was white, and at this table of nine, I was the only non-white woman,” Ganesh wrote. “I studied my peers, looking for clues about what I didn’t do ‘right.’”

“I’d never questioned my gender before I came to America; growing up in India, I’d always identified as a girl,” Ganesh wrote. “I grew up among Sikh women who didn’t tame their body hair, men who would hold hands platonically with their male friends, and children who cross-dressed for play (almost every boy had a photo of himself dressed up as a girl by his mother for fun).”

Though Ganesh didn’t have gender dysphoria growing up, she said that she knew she was queer as a young girl. She also thought that in college, she would be able to instantly explore that queerness freely. Instead, she felt this new need to conform to notions of Western, white beauty standards.

“I felt increasingly disconnected from my body, punishing it for something it could never be,” Ganesh wrote about her time in college. “I would chemically straighten my curls, contemplate a nose job, and get waxed on a schedule I took more seriously than some of my classes, so that I wouldn’t be the ungroomed, hairy brown girl.”

“And still, it felt like I was consistently dehumanized in a way white women were not, no matter how they presented,” she continued. “When I performed femininity appropriately, I was exotic; when I didn’t engage in hair removal for a summer because I wanted to spend that money on textbooks instead, I was repulsive and mannish.”

In her sophomore year of college, Ganesh did find her community, and along with women’s studies courses and books from Black queer authors like Audre Lorde, she felt a new kind of empowerment.

“Finding queer community also meant I was surrounded by bodies that encouraged gender fluidity and nonconformity,” Ganesh wrote. “We talked openly about experiencing gender dysphoria, how we perform our genders to the world around us, and where the performance fails. I grew more lax with my body hair, played around with my natural texture, dropped the barre classes for weight lifting, and started experimenting with menswear.”

In the essay, Ganesh also shares why she feels most comfortable using she/they pronouns.

“It was the most accurate way I had found to reflect my experience moving through the world as a queer South Asian woman,” she wrote. “In a way, it allows me to signal my queerness in moments that I may present as more femme or straight to other queer folks. It’s also a delicious ‘fuck you’ to all the boxes I’d been placed in for so many years.”

You can read Ganesh’s essay in its entirety here, and catch her on the season finale of “The Pitt” which airs on Thursday, April 16.