India’s giant step backwards on transgender rights

On 13 March 2026, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, with the promise of strengthening the country’s legal framework governing transgender rights. Less than two weeks later, despite protests and statements of alarm from LGBTQIA+ collectives, medical professionals, lawyers and political parties, it passed the lower house. The bill was then steamrolled through the upper house on 26 March, again despite sparse debate and strong opposition. 

The minister of social justice and empowerment Virendra Kumar and members of the Bharatiya Janata Party who moved in support of the bill insist that it will bring justice, equality and dignity to transgender persons. In reality, it dismantles the foundational principle of self-identification affirmed by the 2014 ruling of the Supreme Court of India in National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India – known as the NALSA case – and replaces it with a medicalised, bureaucratised regime of state gatekeeping. It narrows the legal definition of “transgender person” to exclude the vast majority of those it purports to protect, and introduces vaguely worded penal provisions that risk criminalising the very community structuresthat have sustained transgender persons in the absence of state support. These include hijra jamaats –traditional kinship-based networks led by a guru and organised around shared living and livelihood.

To understand the scale of this regression, it is necessary to trace the legal trajectory that precedes it. The 2014 NALSA judgement represented a watershed in Indian constitutional law. The supreme court, drawing on the Indian constitution’s provisions for the right to life, equality before the law, as well as freedom of expression, recognised that gender identity is an integral aspect of personal autonomy and identity. The verdict was unequivocal: the right to self-identified gender is a fundamental right, and no medical or surgical requirement could be imposed as a precondition for its legal recognition. The judgement was also remarkable for its engagement with the lived realities of hijra, kinnar and other gender-diverse communities, acknowledging the long history of social exclusion and state violence they had endured.

The 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act already represented a significant dilution of the NALSA verdict as it required transgender persons to apply to a district magistrate for a certificate of identity and mandated proof of surgery for recognition as either male or female. The act introduced bureaucratic and medical intermediaries into what the court had conceived as a process of self-declaration. Civil society organisations, transgender activists and legal scholars criticised the act extensively at the time, and multiple constitutional challenges to it remain pending. The 2026 Amendment Bill acts as a catalyst for further regression by replacing the district magistrate in the certification process with government-appointed medical boards – bodies to be composed of Chief Medical Officers or Deputy Chief Medical Officers and undefined “experts”, tasked with evaluating whether an applicant qualifies as a “transgender person”. 

The 2026 Transgender Persons Amendment Bill arrives framed in the language of protection, welfare and safeguarding. This framing must be refused. The bill does not protect transgender persons; it subjects them to a regime of classification, surveillance and potential criminalisation that is architecturally continuous with colonial instruments of control. It replaces self-determination with state determination. It narrows legal personhood to categories legible to bureaucratic and medical authority. It criminalises community bonds that have sustained marginalised populations for centuries. And it does all this without an evidentiary foundation, driven instead by manufactured moral panic about “allurement” that finds no support in data. 

The amendment transforms gender identity from a matter of subjective experience and self-knowledge into an object of external adjudication, legible only through the diagnostic categories of state-sanctioned medicine. The individual ceases to be the author of their own identity and becomes, instead, a supplicant before a committee empowered to validate or reject their selfhood. As a collective statement issued by transgender communities, their allies and civil liberties organisations observed, under the new framework “the act of self-identifying one’s gender identity is seen as an act of violence on one’s body, thereby stripping bodily autonomy from transgender persons.”