The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 pushes us to return to the first principles of citizenship. What is gender? And, what is the value of a citizen’s assertion in claiming their gender?
The State seems to have a clear idea of gender, as this bill suggests: It has defined transgender as a complex of four sociocultural identities and a set of congenital variations in chromosomes, which are scientifically called intersex variations and differences in sexual development, and
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 pushes us to return to the first principles of citizenship. What is gender? And, what is the value of a citizen’s assertion in claiming their gender?
The State seems to have a clear idea of gender, as this bill suggests: It has defined transgender as a complex of four sociocultural identities and a set of congenital variations in chromosomes, which are scientifically called intersex variations and differences in sexual development, and imagined it in a post-operative, medically authorised framework. Unfortunately, it leaves out identities such as Thirunangai, Thirunambi from Tamil Nadu, Shivashaktis from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, traditionally accepted identities from parts of the Northeast, such as Nupa Manba and Nupi Manbi, Sumanglik communities in Manipur, trans masculine, agender and gender queer identities, among others. The bill also confuses intersex identities with transgender identities. While the former is an umbrella term for sex characteristics (internal or external), the latter is an assertion of an individual’s gender identity, which does not match their assigned gender at birth. To presume that specific sex characteristics map onto a transgender identity is a scientifically incorrect and disproved idea.
If there is anything to learn from our own ground reality, it is that plurality and not binariness lies at the heart of gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. We need only see and hear the thousands of transpersons who have engaged with various iterations of the bill that have been brought up in Parliament since 2014, when MP Tiruchi Siva’s private member’s bill was passed in the Upper House. The 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act also upheld this understanding of gender, which the current bill has rolled back.
Unless we recognise that the very substantiveness of gender is based, before anything else, on self-determination, it will remain at the mercy of interpretation, whether of the State or courts of law. Opposition parties raised the concerns of the transgender community in Parliament, but the government, by refusing to send it to a standing committee for consultation with the community and passing it in both Houses, has chosen to ignore the concerns. If the word of a citizen is not enough when it comes to her identity, we run the risk of living under a State that will claim to know better about our identities than we do. This bill shows us what that looks like.
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