Notes on the Transgender Persons Protection Act of 2026

26 Mar, 2026

(i wrote this on tumblr first, i am simply archiving it here, slightly edited for clarity, and to eliminate repetition)

The fact is, the trans bill passed today¹ was the second blow against the historic NALSA verdict of 2014. The first was struck in 2019, and quite contradictorily, in the period between ‘19 and '26, some trans people did, in fact, draw legal benefit from the bill.

As an example, i bring up the young couple and their child who were recognised as a family in Kerala last year². They were only able to win recognition as a family because they were in possession of the identity cards mandated for the recognition of transgender individuals by the bill of '19³. Now, parity between LGBT and heterosexual structures of family and conjugality must be hailed as progressive, but it can only be considered so because of the tragic state of juridical rights for LGBT subjects in the Indian nation state.

However, i must also point out that this particular judgement was one singular, ephemeral, instance of victory, and the wide coverage of the High Court decision was intentional. It served as publicity to highlight the progressiveness of a bill that was widely protested by the public in 2019 — we were out on the streets, 7000 strong in the pouring rain, and i’m only talking about Kolkata, by the way.

The precedent set by the verdict of '25 was undoubtedly employed to further restrict the rights of transgender individuals and communities that do not meet the (biopolitical, heterosexual) reproductive criteria coveted by the brahminical Indian state. And in the same period, we witnessed the widespread oppression, forced poverty, and murder (social and otherwise) of trans people, especially trans women and trans femmes from all walks of life, which largely escaped news coverage at the national, state, and local levels, because that, that’s just business as usual.

Notes

#politics #south asia