Trans lives expand received notions of gender, sexuality, and technologies of the self. However, in many parts of the world, most recently in the United States, narrow understandings of gender and self-making are being entrenched. Trans existence is delegitimised through repressive legislation decreeing two genders, withdrawing medical provisions, and banning all instruction which refers to anything other than binary gender categories. In bulldozing the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill of 2026 through the parliament, amending the 2014 National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India decision, which led to the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, Indian politicians are taking lessons from these regressive trends. A recent account of the implications of the Bill states that it has narrowed definitions of transgender, straitjacketing it into medical, cultural, and legislative discourse, which is resulting in stigmatising trans lives in India just as they were becoming nominally accepted. In Part 1 of this two-part article, the focus is on Indian writing about self and sexuality within the broad context of recent legislation. Part 2 will be on South Africa.
In the early 2000s when I wrote about queer identities in the Global South, it was difficult to find accounts that represented lesbian, gay, queer and trans lives in their own words.1 Anthologies of lesbian and gay writing, sociological and anthropological studies, and some work in women’s and gender studies had started the conversation. There are many more representations available now than in the past. The early years of the twenty-first century saw progressive publishers (among them Penguin, Zubaan, and Yoda) bringing out anthologies, poetry, drama, fiction, memoir, and biographies about growing up gay, lesbian, and transgender in India. These publications helped counter misinformation by informing and educating readers, created local and global socio-sexual communities via print, and sometimes led to transnational activist and scholarly networks. Recent measures such as the Amendment Bill reverse decades of such representational efforts by tapping into historical and contemporary religious fundamentalism, global backlash against sexual minorities, and rampant transphobia.
Indian ethnographies or auto-ethnographies document many modes of trans existence. Whether in vernacular languages or in English, they contest the way in which the most recent Bill defines transgender identification when it states that protections “cannot be extended on the basis of any acquirable characteristics or personal choice or claimed self-perceived identity of an individual.” Such discriminatory definitions challenged in print and on the streets create a community of informed citizens, readers and allies to contest such restrictive definitions of (trans)gender.
Why trans/phobia, why now?
Trans identities recognised by the recently passed Bill include traditional categories such as hijra, kinner and aravani; they de-recognise gender by choice and outside the fold of these recognisable forms of what I have called “queer indigeneity.” Hence the 2026 Bill states, “a person having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta, or eunuch, or a person with intersex variations specified below or a person who, at birth, has a congenital variation” is transgender but not “persons with different sexual orientations and self-perceived sexual identities.” Besides erroneous conflation of gender and sexual identity, the Bill justifies the restrictive definition by mendaciously declaring: “The intent, object and purpose of the [2019] Act is and was to protect a specified class of persons socially and culturally known as transgender people who face societal discrimination of an extreme and oppressive nature. The purpose was and is not to protect each and every class of persons with various gender identities, self-perceived sex/gender identities or gender fluidities” (emphasis added). Isn’t that the very purpose of legislation premised on protection of vulnerable populations? People whose identities do not follow legislative specifications become doubly vulnerable by virtue of their chosen gender and by their exclusion from the protected class. The Bill’s counterintuitive definition is also contradictory. Persons “socially and culturally known as transgender” do not arrive at this category sui generis. In eliminating protections for all but traditional/indigenous socio-cultural categories, the Bill imagines these categories as unalterably and ahistorically persistent in 21st century India. In fact, though many trans people hold on to these categories and communities, just as many step away from them when they do not guarantee social respectability, gainful employment, or supportive communities.
Can we please think beyond medical and cultural discourses?
Contemporary iterations of ‘traditional’ identities such as hijras in South Asia and sangomas in South Africa demonstrate that trans lives are not always lived under the umbrella of socio-cultural identities deemed worthy of protection by the honourable Indian parliament members. Consider how even as trans activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathy’s life experiences as a hijra are cited in the 2014 NALSA judgement to grant rights to third gender people, the definition is expansive rather than restrictive: “the term ‘transgender’, in contemporary usage, has become an umbrella term that is used to describe a wide range of identities and experiences, including but not limited to pre-operative, post-operative and non-operative transsexual people, who strongly
identify with the gender opposite to their biological sex; male and female”. In this judgment, trans lives circulate at the intersection of legislative, social, medical, and policy discourse.
Trans lives are and should be understood consumed widely beyond these considerations, as evident in the popularity and broad reach of narratives such as Revathi’s The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2011) and A Life in Trans Activism (2016), Vidya’s I Am Vidya: A Transgender’s Journey (2014), Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015) and Red Lipstick: The Men in my Life (2016), and Manabi Bandyopadhyay’s A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi: A Candid Biography of India’s First Transgender Principal (2017), to name a few. These forms of self-writing demonstrate how public expression of and activism on gender expression and sexual identity has emerged locally and transnationally. They point to the complicated intersections between indigenous queer identities and global currents including the NGO industry.
Such complications of trans existence are erased by the 2026 Bill in one stroke of the pen, or, in this case, by a voice vote in the Indian parliament. Revathi’s The Truth About Me is about her transition from a biological man to a woman and a hijra. Despite a limited command of English, Revathi uses the vocabulary of sexual activism from her NGO work to analyse poverty and marginality within the hijra community. This is also the subject of Living Smile Vidya’s life, written in English, which appeared a few years after Revathi’s. These narratives of trans lives diagnose the limitations of the 2026 Bill’s static description of transgender. People enter traditional trans communities – hijras, kinners, aravanis or others – sometimes because of familial ostracism and lack of options for gender-affirming surgery. Though some continue their affiliation with these communities for life, others move on to different modes of social belonging. Further, these lives warn about the dangers of medical definitions of trans lives in a country where many gender-affirming procedures are undertaken outside formal structures of health care. Bureaucratic hurdles in the system and/or the cost of a proper surgical procedure performed under expert care may make it impossible for many trans folks to submit a medical certificate to prove their gender identity.
For Revathi, lack of a supportive family and community makes the expression of sexuality difficult. She earns the wrath of her family and constant abuse for her feminine behaviour and mannerisms. In search of acceptance and belonging, she joins hijra jamats where her chosen gender is acceptable, especially after nirvan or surgical transformation. As a member of the community, she experiences first-hand pauperisation, violence, and stigma associated with their traditional means of earning a living: begging and sex work. On more than one occasion she narrates that in her experiences with the Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru hijras she chose to abide by the “hierarchical and traditional” rules of the community. Unlike her guru, Revathi is lenient in enforcing rules for those who consider her their guru. She does not expect her chelas or disciples to reside in the group or to give up their independence and relationships as part of their discipleship.
Vidya too mentions familial pressures and lack of options for living in a gender of one’s choice which leads her to seek community among kothis, and after gender-affirming surgery, the tirunangais. Despite her university education and some family support, a major factor influencing her decision to join the community is lack of employment options. Her move to Pune and begging allows her to survive, though precariously. After a leader takes away permission for tirunangais to beg, by decreeing that the area is reserved for sex work, their situation becomes even more vulnerable. Should those who choose these socio-cultural identities continue to remain in their fold because our esteemed parliamentarians decided that these are the only ways in which India trans identities can be understood and ‘protected’? The promoters of the 2026 Amendment would do well to remember that “persons socially and culturally known as transgender people” exist within and beyond traditional categories as their life trajectories reveal.
Back to the past?
Revathi’s, Vidya’s and other trans people’s life trajectories indicate how traditional categories are questioned by a new generation of transgender people whether city-based or from rural locations, educated or not, savarna or dalit, pre or post-operative, who seek alternative, more respectable ways of earning a living. They also describe the potential for sexual violence as trans women in the communities they choose. Along with the looming spectre of violence, legalisation of their status via voter and ID registration for post-operatives is already a nightmare, likely to be exacerbated under the 2026 Amendment. The 2014 judgement clearly stated, “the recognition of ‘sex identity gender’ of persons, and ‘guarantee to equality and non-discrimination’ on the ground of gender identity or expression is increasing and gaining acceptance in international law and, therefore, [should] be applied in India as well.” There will always be challenges in the implementation of any judgement. When the Statement of Object and Reasons for the Amendment states that a “vague definition of the expression ‘transgender person’ not only makes it impossible to identify the genuine oppressed persons to whom the benefits of the Act are intended to reach, but also makes the operation and enforcement of several provisions under penal, civil and personal laws unworkable,” it shifts the grounds of the 2019 Act to vague notions of “genuine” oppression. For transgender individuals, daily survival in a patriarchal society with fixed ideas about gender is oppressive, whether understood as genuine or not. In rolling back any progress towards acceptance and equality of trans lives since 2014, the 2026 Amendment imitates the shameful anti-trans turn in the US.
Cover image by Salman Ahmad on Unsplash
