ON THE AFTERNOON of March 16, 2026, the Women’s Press Club hosted a crowd it was never built for. The high ceilings of the building, its thick walls, had the gravity of a structure that has watched the city change around, unchanging itself. By three o'clock, in a small room, queer and trans activists were pressed against students, students against lawyers, lawyers beside journalists who sat next to community organisers.
Three days earlier, Union Minister Virendra Kumar had introduced the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 in the Lok Sabha. Trans activists, lawyers and community organisers across India had read it within hours. Permeating that small room on Ashoka Road, was a certain energy, an agitation of those who understood, individually, collectively, conclusively of the threat this bill posed.
“From the first line to the last line of this Bill is completely arbitrary, nonsense, and it violates every kind of human right that is possible,” said Krishanu, a trans activist. The community’s demand was fairly straightforward – no negotiation, no amendment, but a singular ask for withdrawal of a discriminatory law.
After the Bill was tabled, gatherings and protests convened in cities across the country. In Kolkata, an emergency press conference at the Press Club, in Bengaluru, activists from eighteen districts of Karnataka mobilised toward Freedom Park, in Bhubaneswar, members of the Odisha Transgenders Association took to the streets, in Hyderabad, demonstrators gathered at Dharna Chowk.
The speed, the unanimity of the response was revealing – a people who had spent years learning to read laws that claim to protect them while doing the opposite recognised, with habitual precision, that a Bill introduced in their name had been designed to erase them.
A Bill that steps back on progress
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was the Parliament's legislative response to the Supreme Court’s landmark 2014 judgment in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India (‘NALSA’). The Act was imperfect, but it encoded the correct constitutional principles. Gender identity is self-perceived, that medical procedures cannot be a precondition for legal recognition and that trans persons have an enforceable right to a certificate of identity based on their own self-declaration.
The 2026 Bill goes back a regressive step on these principles. It deletes the statutory right to self-perceived gender identity. It replaces the existing definition of transgender person which was broad, constitutionally grounded, explicitly inclusive of trans men, trans women and genderqueer people with a narrow list of socio-cultural identities and medicalised categories. It inserts a ‘retrospective clause’ that attempts to go back in time and erase the legal recognition already granted to thousands of people. It introduces a multi-stage medical board process as a precondition for a transgender certificate. It requires hospitals that perform gender-affirming surgery to report the details of their patients to state authorities. And it creates a new set of criminal offences which carry sentences of up to life imprisonment, built on the premise that trans identities are coerced, while leaving unchanged the existing punishments for violence committed against trans persons.
“It goes against the previous version of the Act,” Raghavi, a lawyer practising in the Supreme Court and a transwoman observed at the Delhi conference, “and in doing that it also goes against Article 14, Article, Article 19 and Article 21 of the Constitution.”
Understanding the right to self determination
In 2014, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, drawing on constitutional principles, international human rights law and the philosophical foundations of personal liberty, held in NALSA that gender identity is self-determined.
At paragraph 74, Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan wrote, “Article 21 protects one's right of self-determination of the gender to which a person belongs. Determination of gender to which a person belongs is to be decided by the person concerned.” At paragraph 75, the Court explicitly rejected what it called the “Biological Test” for determining gender, the principle inherited from English law in Corbett v. Corbett (1970), that chromosomes or genitalia should determine legal sex. That principle had already attracted sustained criticism. In 1993, the Federal Court of Australia had observed that gender should not be regarded merely as a matter of chromosomes, that it was a psychological question, one of self-perception, and partly a social question of how society perceives the individual. The Full Court of the Australian Family Court in 2003 approved this reasoning, holding that the words “man” and “woman” should be given their ordinary contemporary meaning and that there was no reason to exclude the psyche as a relevant factor in determining sex and gender. Justice Chisholm held that there is no ‘formulaic solution’ to determine the sex of an individual for the purpose of the law of marriage. It was held that all relevant matters need to be considered, including the person’s life experiences and self-perception. In 2003, the European Court of Human Rights reached a similar conclusion, noting that the concept of private life covers the psychological integrity of a person and that gender identification falls within the personal sphere that the law exists to protect.
“From the first line to the last line of this Bill is completely arbitrary, nonsense, and it violates every kind of human right that is possible,” said Krishanu, a trans activist.
Aware of this evolutionary journey, the Supreme Court of India, in NALSA stated, “we cannot accept the Corbett principle of ‘Biological Test’, rather we prefer to follow the psyche of the person in determining sex and gender and prefer the ‘Psychological Test’ instead of ‘Biological Test’.” It went on to confirm that “gender identity as already indicated forms the core of one's personal self, based on self identification, not on surgical or medical procedure.”
Reading the Yogyakarta Principles (2007) into the constitutional provisions, it noted that “domestic courts are under an obligation to give due regard to the international conventions and norms for construing the domestic laws, more so, when there is no inconsistency between them and there is a void in domestic law.” Principle 3, which states that “no one shall be forced to undergo medical procedures as a requirement for legal recognition of their gender identity,” was imported as the precise international expression of Articles 14, 19 and 21. At Direction 5 in the operative portion of the judgment, the Court translated this into a formal direction to the State: “any insistence for SRS for declaring one's gender is immoral and illegal.” It directed the Central and State governments to grant legal recognition of self-identified gender.
The 2026 Bill seeks to delete the provision on ‘self-perceived gender identity’ under Section 4(2) of the 2019 Act. The section notes: “A person recognised as transgender under sub-section (1) shall have a right to self-perceived gender identity.”
The Statement of Objects and Reasons justifies this deletion by claiming that the Act was never intended to protect “persons with various gender identities, self-perceived sex/gender identities or gender fluidities,” and that “the legislative policy was and 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.”. This claim is historically false. Section 4(2) was inserted precisely to give legislative expression to NALSA’s paragraph 74 holding; it was a right that derives from the Constitution and not the statute.
Raghavi said. “Once this right [to self determination] is removed, the definition becomes very limited and only certain categories would be able to identify as transgender persons,” Raghavi noted.
A definition designed to exclude
The 2019 Act's definition of transgender person was deliberately broad. It included trans men, trans women, genderqueer people, intersex persons, and named socio-cultural identities including kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta. It explicitly decoupled recognition from surgery or medical intervention with the phrase “whether or not.” It also kept intersex persons as a distinct category under the definition in Section 2(i), recognising that intersex and trans identities, while both deserving protection, are not the same thing.
The 2026 Bill’s new definition only includes persons with named socio-cultural identities such as kinner, hijra, aravani, jogta or persons with specified congenital variations in primary sexual characteristics, external genitalia, gonadal development, chromosomal patterns or hormonal development. And, in a move that reveals the Bill’s foundational logic most nakedly, persons who have been “by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence, either with or without consent, compelled to assume, adopt, or outwardly present a transgender identity.”
Transmen, genderqueer and transwomen outside the named socio-cultural categories have vanished from the definition. The word ‘eunuch’ whose history in Indian law runs directly through the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, which defined eunuchs as persons who “on medical inspection clearly appear to be impotent” has been inserted into a 2026 protection statute as a legal category.
The separate intersex definition has been dissolved and folded into a medicalised framework under the label “congenital variation.”
“They want to go scientifically and tell doctors, ‘don't use the word intersex, call it congenital variation.’”, Daniella Mendonca, an intersex activist explained, “But tell me, when I am born, will you give me a certificate that says anything other than male or female? Because your birth certificate is still male and female only. Congenital variation means something that can be corrected. But what if I don't want to be corrected? Are you stopping me from doing that? Because you are gatekeeping me into saying I have to go to a doctor, show my body, get myself examined, treated like a research subject.”
The 2026 Bill seeks to delete the provision on ‘self-perceived gender identity’ under Section 4(2) of the 2019 Act.
Kanmani, who works as an advocate for trans and intersex persons and communities across India, noted what the Bill conspicuously does not do. “The most basic thing the government could have done is ban unnecessary sex reassignment surgeries on intersex infants and children,” she said. “The Madras High Court gave a judgment on this a long time back. Tamil Nadu issued a government order. What stops the central government from putting that in the amendment? Instead they have gone ahead and made the definition more body-centric and pathological for intersex people as well.”
For Daniella, the Bill’s gaping void on intersex persons is intended. “This is no longer a Protection Act,” she said. “It is a Control Act. Instead of addressing violence, discrimination, and lack of access to healthcare, education and employment, the government is choosing to police identities.”
Even the Bill’s coverage of socio-cultural identities is exclusionary. “The Bill talks about recognised socio-cultural identities like Kinner and Hijra,” Rituparna Neog, a transgender person and the National Council for Transgender Persons’ (‘NCTP’) representative from the north-east, said, “but I could not see the name of Nupa Maanba or Nupi Maanbi, which are traditional socio-cultural identities existing in Manipur. Does this mean that in the north-east, we are not found in the socio-cultural framework? Does it mean the entire north-east's trans people will be wiped out?”
The NCTP, where Neog is a representative, is mandated under Section 17(a) of the 2019 Act to advise the Central Government on “the formulation of policies, programmes, legislation and projects with respect to transgender persons.” The Hindu has reported that none of its members were consulted before the Bill was introduced. Queerbeat reports that at the informal meeting with the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, NCTP members were met with unyielding officials who told them, “there was no need to consult you all.”
Santa Khurai, a Meitei indigenous Nupi Maanbi writer, scholar and activist from Manipur, who has challenged the 2017 Guidelines for Blood Donor Selection and Blood Donor Referral, which classify transgender persons as permanently ‘at risk’ and impose a lifetime deferral from donation, in the Supreme Court asked, “How can you identify a Nupi Maanbi and a Nupi Maanba if you do not recognise that identity? Everything comes from this problem.”
Kanmani pointed out that definition also excludes the term Thirunangai. “Thirunangai evolved out of self-respect politics,” she said. “It is about self-respect, Tamil pride, the fact that we are Tamil trans people. A district collector who comes from the north is going to look at it and say, ‘what is Thirunangai? You are not there.’”
Gargi, a Kothi person and a Tamil Nadu based doctor who has filed a plea in the Supreme Court seeking transgender reservations in higher medical education, explained how Kothi people had navigated even the 2019 Act's broader definition. “Because the definition included words like genderqueer, Kothi people had to depend on that genderqueer word and the broader interpretation of the Act to get identity cards,” she said. “Even with such a broader definition, it was difficult. I had to approach the High Court to get my identity card.” Under the 2026 Bill, that route also no longer exists.
“Identities like Kothi, Mangalamukhi, Thirunangai, Thirunambi, Durrani, Khwaja Sira, all of these are cultural identities that are still left out,” Tan, a non-binary person who works with transgender communities in semi-urban localities in Varanasi, pointed out, “Gender diverse people have existed in India since time immemorial.”
Reaching back into time
The most constitutionally alarming clause in the Bill is also, at seven words, one of its shortest. The proviso to the new definition states that the category of transgender person “shall not include, nor shall ever have been so included” persons with different sexual orientations and self-perceived sexual identities.
This is a legislative attempt to reach backward in time and retrospectively delegitimize the legal identities of thousands of people who obtained recognition under the law that existed when they applied. Queerbeat reports that the government has issued more than 32,000 transgender certificates under the 2019 Act. About 2,000 applications are currently pending, of which around 800 have been waiting for seven to twelve months. The Bill contains no transitional provisions and does not say what happens to the certificates already issued. It simply declares that those people were never who they said they were.
This is internally contradictory in a way no amount of drafting can resolve. A statute cannot simultaneously claim to protect a class of persons and contain within itself a provision whose function is to shrink that class retrospectively. The rights flow from the status. Disturb the status and you disturb the rights as the direct consequence of what the proviso is designed to achieve. The Bill, in the most precise sense, undermines the 2019 Act.
“Are you going to review every transgender certificate?,” Kanmani asked, “People who have proceeded with their transition, who have changed their documents. What are you going to reverse now? The 2020 Rules, which came into force during the COVID pandemic, had a provision saying that any recognition obtained prior to the Act would not be affected. Until or unless you bring that in here as well, it's going to create a lot of panic.”
For Kabir Maan, a transman activist, the retrospective clause is not an abstract constitutional question, “After hearing about the amendment Bill, the first question that came to my mind was what will happen to my future and my career.”
Gargi, whose transgender certificate was issued following a Madras High Court direction to the district collector, was concerned that with the retrospective clause, her recognition may be now void, “The retrospective language goes back and tells us that even those already recognised can be questioned.”
Stages to prove you exist
The 2019 Act's Section 6(1) gave the District Magistrate the power to issue a certificate of identity following an application procedure. Medical evaluation was not a prerequisite. The process was imperfect, authorities were frequently unsensitised, the online portal was unreliable, delays were common but the principle was correct. The power, as Kanmani put it, “was in the hands of the trans person.”
The Bill now requires the DM to act “after examining the recommendation of the authority and, if he considers either necessary or desirable, after taking the assistance of other medical experts.”
The “authority” is defined in the new Section 2(aa) as “a medical board, headed by a Chief Medical Officer or a Deputy Chief Medical Officer, as may be appointed by the Central Government, State Government or Union territory Administration.”
“Does it mean the entire north-east's trans people will be wiped out?”
The result is a mandatory two-stage medical filter. First, the trans person must obtain a positive recommendation from a state-appointed medical board. Then the DM may, at their own discretion, seek further evaluation from “other medical experts.” Neither stage has defined criteria. No standard is specified for what the board is assessing. And there is no prescribed appellate mechanism.
Gargi, who is a practising doctor, explained that this process is practically unworkable. “Would these specialist doctors and surgeons go and save their patients on a day-to-day basis in emergencies, or will all these doctors convene together?” she said. “At maximum they will come together six months once, or yearly once and until then the trans person has to wait.”
She also questioned how the doctors would even determine anyone’s gender, “There is no medical test to prove anyone's gender. Additionally nobody on the board had to prove their gender to anyone. But we are asked to prove it before them.”
Don Hasar, a queer-trans rights defender and cultural worker, made the same point from a community perspective. “Medical supervision was already there in practice, even though the law said it wasn't needed. They were already facing so many difficulties while accessing proper healthcare. Now it will be mandated. Most importantly, people who are already under gender affirmative care might lose access to that. That is unfair.”
The insurance trap and an affront to privacy
The transgender certificate is also a gateway to State-funded welfare schemes, healthcare access, insurance coverage, reservations in education and employment, and gender-affirming surgeries at government hospitals. Without the certificate, none of these are accessible.
The 2026 Bill's effect, as Kanmani explained, is to create a chicken-and-egg trap. “You have to get hormones or surgery to get insurance. You cannot get insurance to actually get hormones and surgery. You have to get hormones or surgery to be recognised as trans. You cannot access government-funded surgery without being recognised as trans.”
The Bill also threatens the informational privacy of trans persons. The new Section 7(1A) requires every medical institution where gender-affirming surgery is performed to “furnish the details of such person to the concerned District Magistrate and the authority.” Hospitals become mandatory reporters to state medical boards about trans persons who have undergone surgery.
The Supreme Court in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) observed that informational privacy “reflects an interest in preventing information about the self from being disseminated and controlling the extent of access to information.” Any intrusion into informational privacy, it had noted, must satisfy a three-part test – it must be sanctioned by law, pursue a legitimate state aim, and satisfy proportionality, meaning a rational nexus must exist between the objective and the means chosen. The burden is on the State.
“Why would the state need to know that a person has had a surgery?,” Don asked.
There is no answer in the Bill. The provision states no purpose. It identifies no legitimate aim. It creates no limit on what the District Magistrate may do with the information, how long it may be retained, or who may access it.
‘Frames transgender identity as criminal identity’
Section 18 of the 2019 Act listed four offences committed against trans persons – bonded labour, denial of access to public places, forced removal from residence, and physical, sexual, verbal, emotional or economic abuse. The offences were punishable with six months to two years imprisonment.
The 2026 Bill adds four new offences, all framed around the premise that trans identity is coerced. Abducting someone and causing grievous hurt to force them into a trans identity will lead to ten years to life imprisonment for an adult, life imprisonment in case of a child. Compelling someone to present as trans and subjecting them to begging or servitude involves incarceration for five to ten years for an adult, ten to fourteen for a child.
While sexual abuse, physical violence, economic exploitation committed against trans persons can lead to six months to two years maximum, alleged coercion of others into trans identity allegedly committed by trans persons entail five years to life imprisonment.
“Section 18 is structured in a manner that portrays trans people and bodies as criminals,” Raghavi explained, “Any kind of support to a trans person, if we look at the vagueness of the provision, can also be covered as a crime.”
The Statement of Objects claims that the existing law fails to address “the conjunction of abduction, permanent bodily harm, and forced identity as a unified penal approach.” No evidence or data from the National Crime Records Bureau is referenced to support this assertion. Raghavi explained that the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 already covered offences such as kidnapping, “Now when you specially deal with it within this legislation, you are actually portraying trans people as criminals, as kidnappers, as habitual offenders. This is a sort of narrative that frames transgender identity as criminal identity and carries on from the legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act.”
“After hearing about the amendment Bill, the first question that came to my mind was what will happen to my future and my career.”
For queer and trans communities, the chosen family is a safety net. The friend who takes you in, the NGO worker who helps you change your documents, the lover who becomes your daily support system, the older transwoman who teaches you to navigate a city that does not want you, they exist because natal families so often do not.
Kanmani highlighted the potential consequences of chosen families being criminalised under the new law. “You are empowering every parent, every family that wants to put a trans person through violence, to also put the people supporting them through violence. Every NGO, every Hijra-Aravani jamaat is going to face this threat.”
Tan named the chilling effect on healthcare and social work directly. “In semi-urban contexts, people experience gender dysphoria but often lack the language to understand their own experience and have no access to community,” they said. “If a social worker or community organiser is helping a young person understand their lived experience, are they now liable to be jailed for life under the new Section 18 provisions?”
The Criminal Tribes Act presumed all registered eunuchs were suspected of kidnapping children, and penalised eunuchs for having a boy under sixteen in their household. The 2026 Bill builds the same presumption and criminalises chosen-family structures through the same logic, dressed in new language. The Supreme Court in NALSA called the Criminal Tribes Act a “brutal legislation with a vicious and savage mindset.”
“This government keeps talking about decolonisation,” said Kanmani. “Then why are you getting into a colonial mindset?”
India in a shrinking world
India's Amendment Bill could be visualised amidst a larger, global backlash against trans rights. The TGEU's 2025 Trans Rights Index recorded the first year in its thirteen-year history in which more rights were taken away globally than were gained. Hungary through the 15th amendment to the Fundamental Law, as the constitution is called, restricts the right of LGBT groups to hold public events while recognizing only two genders: male and female. The amendment was passed by a margin of 140 to 21, with deputies from the far-right ‘Our Homeland Movement’ voting alongside Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party and its Christian Democrat allies.
The United Kingdom's Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that for equality law purposes, sex means biological sex, a decision TGEU says has reinforced privacy risks and exclusion from essential services for trans people.
In the United States, the Trans Legislation Tracker recorded 740 anti-trans bills under consideration across 42 states in 2026 alone, with 22 already passed and 113 introduced at the federal level. 2025 was the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for total bills considered. TGEU also recorded 281 trans and gender diverse people murdered between October 2024 and September 2025, with Asia recording its highest ever number of cases with 51 murders, 18 percent of the global total.
“Section 18 is structured in a manner that portrays trans people and bodies as criminals,” Raghavi explained.
The backsliding ideological grammar consistently asserts that trans identity is acquired or imposed rather than intrinsic; substitutes state or medical verification for self-determination; invokes child protection to justify criminal restrictions on trans community life.
Reportedly, at the informal meeting with the Ministry, its senior economic advisor Yogita Swaroop had told NCTP members that she would not make this “an America.” To the community, the Bill already appeared like a Trump-regime law.
“If you look at this Bill, the way it is written, it is a Trump language Bill,” Daniella said, referencing India’s amendment bill. “There is a lot of religious ideology that has come into place to say that there are only two genders. But in India, you cannot say that. You cannot just come out and say these people never existed because our scriptures are full of examples of trans people.”
‘Complete withdrawal’
While proposals include referring the Bill to a Parliamentary Standing Committee, the community has been clear about what needs to happen – complete withdrawal. “If it at all passes, gets President's assent, becomes a law,” Raghavi said, “we will challenge it. We are challenging it. And it will be challenged further in court.”
Perhaps, in the time to come, this discriminatory law, if passed in the legislature, may be struck down by a constitutional court. But for the time it will remain operational, the harm will be immense – it would deny people identity certificates, medical boards would convene to examine bodies that need no examination, , transmen would be legally declared to have never existed, intersex persons would be reframed as medical variations requiring correction, and social workers will be afraid to support a young person who doesn't yet have language for what they feel.
The Supreme Court in NALSA said: “the moral failure lies in the society's unwillingness to contain or embrace different gender identities and expressions, a mindset which we have to change.” That mindset, far from being changed, is now being legislated.