The Pitt‘s Supriya Ganesh is speaking out about her challenging experience with gender dysphoria and how it has affected her career as an actor.
In an essay written for Vulture and published on Wednesday, April 15, Ganesh, 28, recalled “the strange dysphoria” she experienced “upon immigrating to this country in 2015 for college.”
“[It] would constantly remind me of my brownness and judge my womanhood by how far I could distance myself from it,” she wrote. “I’d never questioned my gender before I came to America. … I came to the U.S. thinking it would be where I would get to explore my queerness without cultural taboo or shame. In some ways, this was certainly true, but I also began to feel dysphoric.”
Ganesh continued: “I was starting to understand what I had been experiencing since immigrating, but the labels available to me (nonbinary, genderqueer) weren’t really right. I still felt like a woman, but I didn’t always feel comfortable performing womanhood in the way the West had deemed appropriate.”
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The actress specifically recalled their career playing a role in their discomfort.
“Existing in the American entertainment industry can feel like you’re experiencing discrimination less as a person and more as a concept. When people push back against the categories we’re slotted into, it can feel like the world is opening up a crack,” she wrote. “In 2023, Lily Gladstone, star of Killers of the Flower Moon, said in an interview that she uses rolling she/they pronouns in honor of their Blackfoot heritage and to decolonize gender for themselves. I’d seen people use she/they or they/them pronouns before, but this was the first time I’d felt so seen by it — as a reaction against a colonial apparatus that took something away from them.”
Ganesh expressed gratitude to Gladstone, adding, “It was the most accurate way I had found to reflect my experience moving through the world as a queer South Asian woman. 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 ‘f*** you’ to all the boxes I’d been placed in for so many years.”
The essay concluded with Ganesh wondering whether immigrating influenced her challenging relationship with gender.
“I sometimes wonder if returning to India would make me feel less dysphoric. Maybe, maybe not. I know it would be different from what I’ve experienced in the U.S., and womanhood always felt more within reach in a culture that was more familiar to me. But what I’ve learned in the process has also been creatively invigorating,” Ganesh wrote. “I am grateful to the queer artists and writers of color who’ve allowed me to understand my experience of the world and saved me from hermeneutical injustice, which they likely had to face on their own.”
The article concluded: “I want to tell stories that show us as full, three-dimensional human beings who live in the gray. I want to turn tropes on their head and tell uncomfortable truths. And I want us to evade any definition anyone could ever impose on us.”
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Ganesh’s candid commentary came as they continue to remain tight-lipped about their controversial exit from The Pitt. Variety reported earlier this month that the decision to write out Dr. Samira Mohan was “story-driven” due to the nature of a show set in a teaching hospital. Ayesha Harris‘ role as Dr. Parker Ellis, meanwhile, is being elevated.
Ganesh, for their part, dropped out of an event for the show but otherwise hasn’t offered more clarity about the situation. The Pitt star Noah Wyle, meanwhile, broke his silence on the drama.
“It’s an inevitability that’s going to happen every season with this show, because as writers we’re hard-pressed to figure out what a lapse of time we can have and keep most of the ensemble together realistically,” Wyle, 54, told Variety at PaleyFest’s screening of The Pitt on Sunday, April 12.
The actor defended the decision to write out Ganesh’s character, adding, “Emergency rooms have a high revolving door. As always, we try to bring in new characters or promote from within as we go through these cast changes and try to keep the story lines fresh, but obviously Supriya has been a huge part of our show since the beginning.”
He concluded: “Dr. Mohan is a beloved character, and I love playing with her and working with Supriya, and we wish her all the best in her next endeavors, and we’re going to miss her.”
