India’s First 'Transgender' Principal Comes From 'Village'

After years of taunting and trauma over her true gender identity, Somnath Banerjee underwent a sex-change surgery and chose a name that would boldly declare who she really was: Manabi, simply meaning ‘woman’ in Bengali.

Manabi Bandopadhyay, 50, begins her new job as principal of Krishnagar Women’s College in West Bengal this week—the first transgender person to hold such a senior academic position in the country.

India has a population of 490,000 transgender people, according to census data from 2011, the first year the country began to record their numbers.