To understand why ‘being’ inclusive was harder than ‘doing’ DEI, I zoomed-out:

1. India had a history of women rulers, and had an elected head of state decades before the west
2. Transgenders were historically part of mainstream society, but today we see them only at traffic signals
3. Homosexuality was considered normal till it was criminalised for 150 years

What happened?

I realized that over the last 150 years, we’ve seen medicine viewing homosexuals as ‘unnatural’ and transgenders ‘abnormal’; movies showing them as evil brothel owners or as comic relief; colonial rulers criminalising same-sex love; the industrial revolution enabling the able-bodied thereby marginalising PWDs; families favouring men from the moment they were born; and so on.

‘Normal’, or what we consider as ‘the norm’ is nothing else but what we assume to be so. The good news? We can change it.