This paper examines A. Revathi's Our Lives, Our Words (2011), a collection of first-person hijra and aravani testimonies compiled by a hijra activist and translated from Tamil by A. Mangai, as a decolonial and feminist counter-archive that reclaims narrative authority from a society that has historically rendered hijras, in Gautam Bhan's phrase, “hypervisible and invisible”. Reading the collection through frameworks drawn from Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality, the paper traces four interlocking concerns across the narratives: the paradox of public hypervisibility alongside legal and familial invisibility; the systematic violence hijras encounter within the biological family and the alternative kinship structures—the Guru-chela system and the jamaat—that replace it; the body as a site of both violence and self-fashioning, particularly through the ritual of nirvanam; and the shift from narratives of victimhood toward organised collective activism in the volume's closing chapters. The paper argues that the text's formal insistence on multiple, individually attributed testimonies rather than a single composite narrative allows it to hold these tensions in productive, unresolved coexistence, thereby refusing both purely tragic and purely redemptive readings of hijra life.