“My parents are narcissists and were never supportive, and caused many hindrances at various times. While their negative reactions made it clear that acceptance was not an option, they perpetuated a toxic environment by doing pujas and turning to witchcraft to find a "solution". She didn’t feel safe to express her gender until Class XII when she opened up to her parents. So, students and teachers held on to various subsets of views and misconceptions and were not sensitised,” Mani recalled. “There were no discussions about mental health, gender, LGBTQIA+ issues, or sexuality in schools. Resources about gender expression remained inaccessible to most, a way to control the narrative by controlling the access. But the available resources were not well-written or aimed at making you aware,” she said. “I understood femininity and had a vague idea about sexuality by the age of 10 by reading women’s magazines. But her conservative family and "gender-is-binary" school left her little choice regarding gender expression. Mani was assigned male at birth who knew she was a girl at the age of six. However, her journey in academia was accentuated by gender barriers, lack of mental health support, and exclusionary policies. Today, Dr Mani is a research scientist in algebra, logic, rough sets, AIML, and allied areas at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, and a senior member of the International Rough Set Society. “I learnt mostly from books and science magazines, and remember doing experiments with chemicals, performing electrolysis, and even making insecticides,” she said. Growing up in Kolkata, Mani was a curious, imaginative child wanting to understand all the hows and whys of the world through science. From creating her own world with science and mathematics while reading Pavlovian texts in high school to choosing not to be part of mainstream academia, she has asserted her place in a world that still upholds exclusion of non-conformists. Dr A Mani describes her career as atypical and rightly so.
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