The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 13, is not just another amendment but a troubling shift in how the state understands gender identity. It has already triggered widespread outrage among transgender communities and civil society across India.
Stripping the right to self-determination
In the 2026 Bill, gender is assumed to be a “verifiable fact” rather than an embodied and affective expression of one’s identity. The amendment strips trans persons of autonomy over self-determination. By mandating surgery, it not only undermines their right over their bodies but also effectively excludes non-binary trans persons and gender fluid persons from its scope. For example, clause (k) of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, does not create definable criteria for being transgender. It does not mandate biomedical interventions (surgeries and therapies) and provides room for self-determination, while also conferring legitimacy to socio-cultural identifications. On the contrary, the 2026 Bill, which seeks to substitute this clause, not only biologises the transgender category but also reduces the diversity of gender expressions to narrower, definable characteristics.
The amendment claims that it is “intended to protect only those who face severe social exclusion due to biological reasons for no fault of their own and no choice of their own,” thereby discarding the felt sense and lived experience of the body and the agency individuals have over their bodies.
The colonial hangover
The amendment invokes tropes used by the colonial government to police hijra communities in colonial India. The British colonisers had put false charges of forcefully converting children to impose severe sanctions on the community. These colonial understandings are carried into the amendment by a state that preaches decolonisation. For instance, the clause “any person or child who has been, by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence, either with or without consent, compelled to assume or outwardly present a transgender identity, by mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure or otherwise” serves no purpose other than criminalising the chosen families and support systems that are in place for the transgender persons when they are ostracised by their natal families.
The framing of such a clause assumes that children are brought into the community against their will or consent. In doing so, the amendment ignores the years of work done by activists and academicians in documenting the violence faced by transgender persons from their own families, relatives, and acquaintances. Had the lawmakers engaged with the life histories and autobiographies written by transgender persons, they would have known that community networks play a huge role in delivering social entitlements and opportunities for them to navigate their lives.
Further, the amendment paves the way for registering unnecessary criminal charges against these support systems that might entangle them in legal battles and create further hurdles. While family acceptance may have increased in recent years, families continue to be a site of abuse for many transgender persons and pose significant challenges to CBOs and community networks trying to create conditions for them to live and thrive.
Preserving privilege
It is a sociological wisdom that in a cis-heteronormative society, gender, caste, and class are overlapping structures of power. Cis-heteronormativity is enforced through family, caste, marriage, and the state, violently policing those whose gender expression does not conform to such norms. To live in a gender one prefers is therefore to challenge the established social order and the intergenerational reproduction of privilege (and disadvantage) through institutions like heterosexual marriage. One can see why the Brahminical state might attempt to amend an existing act in ways that multiply the challenges faced by the community, even in a law meant to protect them. The clauses and objects of the amendment contradict the stated aim of protecting transgender rights and endanger the choice of gender expression. Queer theorists remind us that the state does not merely recognise identities; it actively produces the very identities it claims to only recognise.
Moreover, transgender citizenship should not be seen by the state merely as the extension of constitutional rights to gender minorities; it is central to the project of democracy itself. This amendment, if enacted, would undo the democratic struggles of transgender persons and undermine the full realisation of democratic citizenship itself.
The writer is a researcher in Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University
