The promise of queer freedom

As a queer teenager, freedom for me meant the ability to come out to the world and to lead an independent life on my own terms. It meant “being myself” in front of the whole world, with no care for what my family or relatives thought. This idea did not come out of nowhere. This is the dominant liberal narrative on queerness, heavily influenced by the West.

Being queer means coming out. It means colourful pride parades, nightlife, same-sex marriage (or the fight for it, in the Indian context), and queer and transgender representation in cinema, politics etc. If we pay attention, we’ll notice that visibility becomes the central measure of freedom. To be queer, in this framework, is to be seen.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that my life, and the lives of countless queer people in our country and around the world, does not neatly fit into this story. This version of freedom many of us are told to aspire to rests on certain assumptions – mobility, safety, and independence. However, for most of us, these conditions are not guaranteed. And without these conditions, visibility is not necessarily liberating. It is exposure.

Visibility and the Myth of Exit

The first obstacle in my journey to finding this ‘freedom’ came in the form of debilitating chronic back pain that I developed in my early twenties. Forget work and academics, I could not even perform basic self-care tasks like cooking and cleaning. This, combined with severe depression, forced me to move back in with my family. Who else would take care of me? Suddenly, all the things I associated with my freedom – spending time with fellow queer and trans people, dating, going to LGBT spaces/events – came to a halt. I begrudgingly accepted this new existence which almost felt like stepping back into the closet.

The visibility paradigm assumes that one can just leave the ‘toxic’ ‘conservative’ family. But in India, and elsewhere, since the 1990s, the state has systematically withdrawn public goods. There is little public housing, limited disability support and almost no social security. This has pushed care onto the private household. The family must fulfil material needs such as taking care of children, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. It is the only safety net the vast majority of us have.

So what does freedom mean when we cannot leave the structure that ensures our survival? To understand this, we have to look more closely at the role the family plays in our lives.

The Self Within the Confines of the Family

While the family is imagined as apolitical and private, it is anything but. It is deeply shaped by political and economic systems, and in turn it shapes us and our experiences. In the Indian context, this is very apparent. The family is where ‘traditional’ cultural rules and modern economic pressures collide.

Under capitalism, family functions as a sort of a social factory. Because the state has disinvested from care, the family must pick up its functions. It must do massive amounts of unpaid labour – cooking, cleaning, raising children, providing healthcare. In a place like India family is our social security. If I become sick/disabled or lose my job, I cannot look to the state. Family remains the only option. While this creates an unfair burden, it also gives the familial structure a lot of power and it makes it a site of economic bondage. You are forced to stay because there is no other way to survive.

When the family takes on the responsibilities of the state, it also takes on the role of regulation and control. Because family provides for our basic needs and survival, it can use that support to control you. Care becomes conditional. For queer and transgender people, this means that care is only given when we comply with certain rules – acting or dressing a certain way, following prescribed gender roles, etc. And in the modern Indian context of Hindu nationalism, where family is seen as playing an integral role in maintaining cultural purity, it is used to police behaviour, dress, and who we get to love, to ensure we fit into specific caste and religious boundaries.

I’d like to state here that it doesn’t matter what our families’ intentions are. What matters is the place that they occupy in a system that privatises care.

When Care Becomes Control

Within the confines of the family, care becomes a euphemism for discipline, surveillance and control. Non-compliance, perhaps in the form of expressing one’s gender or sexuality, is framed as a threat to familial harmony. Every deviation in speech, dress, and motion can have a penalty attached to it.

More often than not, this control is invisible. When I moved back in with my family, no one explicitly told me that I had to “go back into the closet” and act as the gender I was (coercively) assigned at birth. I just felt I had to do it in order to feel deserving of my parents’ love and care, and to keep the peace at home. Thus, control is not always an explicit, outwardly “no”. It is internalised. Or it becomes a “Can’t you wear this salwar suit just to make your mother happy?” You start anticipating what is acceptable and what isn’t and act accordingly. Over time, this anticipation becomes a way of life.

Around the same time as I was writing this article, a larger shift took place beyond my home. The recent 2026 amendment to the Transgender Persons Act has made the possibility of transition feel even more difficult and uncertain. As the state steps even further away from providing meaningful support to trans people, the role of the family becomes more central. The family is reinforced as the most legitimate and often unavoidable source of care when informal networks such as friends, collectives and community spaces – which many queer and trans people depend on for support – are increasingly weakened or made precarious. With fewer options available outside, I noticed that I was pushed further into the structure that constrains me.

Conversations at home are changing again – for the worse. Where slowly we were edging towards acceptance of my identity and eventual medical and legal transition, I have now been told to put my head down and focus on my career. My gender, I have been told, can wait.

Staying is not a failure

When what is framed as concern or practicality asks for postponement of my identity, my expression of myself, it becomes difficult to tell where care ends and control begins. And because my survival is contingent on these relationships, refusal does not seem like a viable option. In this context, staying with family is often quite misunderstood and read as immaturity, denial or lack of courage. But staying is not a failure of queer adulthood. It is a condition shaped by the world we live in. When there is no accessible housing, healthcare, or support outside the family, leaving is not freedom – it is exile.

The idea that freedom and liberation lie in exit is not neutral. It is reflective of a broader system that places responsibility for survival on individuals while withdrawing collective support. In this framework, the inability to leave is seen as a personal failure, rather than a natural consequence of how care and resources are organised.

To think seriously about the relationship between the self and sexuality, we must begin here. The ability to express oneself cannot be separated from the conditions that make that expression possible. Gender and sexuality cannot be affirming if they are negotiated through fear, dependence and delay. To imagine freedom differently, we must not see it as the ability to leave, but as the ability to live fully without risking one’s survival. This requires forms of care that are not tied to obedience, and systems of support that do not force us to choose between safety and selfhood. Until then, queer and trans freedom will remain out of reach for many.

Liberation must be imagined not only for those who can leave, but also for those who cannot.

This article was originally presented as a paper at The Naz Foundation (India) Trust’s Queer Mental Health Academic Conclave held on January 24, 2026 and later developed as an article for In Plainspeak.

Cover image by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash