Trans-sitting through Life

Trans-sitting through Life is a toolkit designed as a board game to support diversity and inclusion trainers and community workers with their transgender persons related sensitisation programmes and efforts. This game is designed to provide the players with an experience of the lived realities of transgender persons as they wade through different aspects of their life. While this game is built on the findings from research studies done in India, it is designed to be relevant for programmes even outside India. The game covers different moments experienced by transgender persons during school, college, at workplace and different public spaces.  

Why use this toolkit? 

This toolkit presents facilitators with a framework to elicit a number of examples enabling participants to relate and empathise with the lived realities of transgender persons. Using the experience of a board game, this toolkit enables players to actively participate in understanding the lived realities of transgender persons by walking through the board as a transgender person experiencing different choices and decisions throughout life. 

This toolkit is designed as a game with over 80 different situations that transgender persons face in their lives related to different aspects of their lives including school, college, workplace, health and personal relationships including family, friends, partner, among others. The intention is to support your sensitisation session with an interactive experience for the participants, enabling them to better understand the struggles, joy and lived realities of transgender persons. This toolkit has been designed in an open format to collate as many instances as possible from different cultures, contexts, countries and in different languages. 

You can download the PDF of the board and the cards in English. An open Canva link for the cards is available here to translate it into other languages.

English:

Board as downloadable PDF

Cards as downloadable PDF

Facilitator manual as PDF

Who can use this toolkit? Who are the audiences that you can use it with?

Diversity and inclusion trainers and community workers can use this toolkit to support their transgender persons related sensitisation programmes and efforts. This game is designed for audiences over 18 years of age. This toolkit can be used with different audiences including but not limited to NGOs, corporates, lawyers, healthcare professionals, colleges, LGBTIQA+ persons, government officials, teachers, professors, mental health professionals, among others. This game is not suitable for school students. However, this game may be used for sensitisation with school teachers.  

How do you play it?

Detailed instructions to play the game can be found in the downloadable PDF above. 

Please note that while this game is intended to support the facilitator as a toolkit for their session, the outcome of the session is also dependent on the manner in which the facilitator engages with the participants.

Acknowledgement & Credits:

This game has been developed based on the findings from two research studies by Brindaalakshmi K:

• Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary for the Centre for Internet & Society, India as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. See here.
• Gendering of Development Data in India: Post-Trans Act 2019 for the Association for Progressive Communications as part of the Our Voices, Our Futures project. See here.

This toolkit has been supported by the Association for Progressive Communications as part of the Our Voices, Our Futures Project.

Game/toolkit design - Brindaalakshmi K. (they/them)
Bengali translation - Naba (they/them)
Hindi translation - Satvik Sharma (he/they)
Layouting of cards in English, Bengali and Hindi - Koyel Ghosh (they/them)