From Himal Southasian
Behind the language of protection, India’s new transgender law advances a Hindu nationalist project that recasts gender variance through state classification while deepening exclusions along caste and religious lines
When India’s Minister for Social Justice, Virendra Kumar, introduced the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 (TPA) in the lower house of parliament on 13 March this year, trans communities were caught unawares. The Bill proposed to change earlier legislation from 2019 in order to restrict legal recognition of transgender persons to only those falling within three categories: individuals of specific socio-cultural identities, such as hijras, kinnars, aravanis and jogtas; medically diagnosed intersex persons; and persons who have been forced to present as transgender or adopt a transgender identity. Members of the National Council for Transgender Persons – a statutory board formed under the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 (TPA) – later stated that they had been neither consulted nor informed about the amendment. By the end of the month, the bill was rushed through both houses of parliament and received the president’s assent to become law – on the eve of International Transgender Day of Visibility, no less.
Within days of the bill being introduced, trans groups on WhatsApp and other social media platforms were buzzing with questions about the potential retrospective impacts of the new law. People who had obtained transgender identity cards under the earlier legislation now faced the possibility of those documents being invalidated. Many of us wondered whether doctors and psychiatrists would continue to offer gender-affirming care. Non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations were alarmed by the law’s punitive provisions, concerned that their support for queer and trans people in crisis could now be construed as coercion and penalised. To date, the government has offered no clarity on the future of legal gender-recognition frameworks, and India’s trans community continues to grapple with the new reality imposed upon it.
While all of us were caught off guard, there had been warning signs. During hearings on marriage equality in the Indian Supreme Court in 2023, the country’s solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, declared the government’s intention to narrow the legal definition of “transgender”. When Mehta argued that gender was biological and that genitals provided an absolute basis for determining it, many of us dismissed it as the usual transphobia that surfaces in Indian courts during cases involving queer rights. After all, even the prime minister, Narendra Modi, had earlier defended the 2019 legislation in parliament for providing “dignity” to transgender persons.
The 2026 legislation’s’s “Statement of Objects and Reasons” cites concerns about misuse of the existing certification process and the forced gender transitioning of adults and children. Yet how the government concluded that these are major problems remains unknown. Initial protests against the new TPA have since expanded into legal challenges in multiple high courts as well as the Supreme Court. NGOs and community-based organisations are documenting the new law’s effects through consultations and public hearings, focusing in particular on its immediate impact on gender-affirming healthcare.
As the trans community scrambles to respond to the legislation, one question lingers: “What led to this?”
Hritik Lalan is an anti-caste activist and a PhD scholar in anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in the United States.
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