THE RECENT Jane Kaushik v. Union of India (2025) verdict marks another transformative shift in India’s transgender rights jurisprudence, right before the duodecennial anniversary of the NALSA (2014) verdict. In the writ petition, Jane Kaushik, a transgender woman and qualified teacher, had challenged the trans-exclusionary hiring practices that implicitly require conforming to cisgender expectations. The verdict delivered. It addressed the structural barriers that transgender persons face in accessing employment, not merely as a matter of individual discrimination but as a systemic failure. It also directed the state to revise recruitment policies towards institutional recognition of transgender employability.
While the verdict was undoubtedly a significant moment, the conversation that has followed has failed to be critical of the way in which ‘trans-employability’ discourse is typically captured in a cis/homo normative middle-class respectability politics. When trans inclusion is articulated through these narrow frameworks, it effectively limits the horizon of rights. It evaluates trans lives not for their intrinsic dignity but for their capacity to perform roles that the State recognises as legitimate.
Despite its progressiveness, the Jane Kaushik verdict does not entirely escape this logic. By focusing on the issue of discrimination singularly as a procedural failing of recruitment systems, it obscures how respectability politics itself functions as the filter of employability. This allows structural violence to effectively mask the hierarchies that determine which lives are seen as deserving of dignified work.
When trans inclusion is articulated through these narrow frameworks, it effectively limits the horizon of rights.
When Respectability becomes the Gatekeeper
At this point, it is important to ask why ‘respectable employment’ is imagined to be so crucial for trans emancipation?
This is where sociologist Liz Mount’s analysis of middle-class respectability becomes precisely instructive. Mount argues that Indian middle-class politics operate through a double move: first, by policing the boundaries of who can be seen as ‘respectable’, and second, by creating institutional pathways for inclusion that require conformity to those norms. Thus, respectability, in this framework, is not just about morality or social status. It is an apparatus of governance. It functions through modalities that reward those who perform recognisable middle-class gendered selves (well-educated, professionally oriented, disciplined, apolitically aspirational, etc). It demands a compliant body that is economically productive, socially compliant, culturally assimilable and governable.
Furthermore, the architecture of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, frames social inclusion primarily through skilling, welfare schemes, and anti-discrimination in employment (Sections 9 and 14). The Act imagines ideal trans citizens as the ones who can be trained, integrated, and employed within existing economic structures. It problematically overlooks trans communities’ participation in informal and survival economies as valid forms of work or worthy of state protection. Instead, it sets up a hierarchy of labour where cis/hetero-normative middle-class professions become the pathway to full citizenship.
This framing reinforces a developmentalist fantasy. It imagines the lived consequences of intersectional marginalities, poverty, and everyday acts of violence as issues that can somehow be resolved through inclusion in the mainstream (read ‘respectable’) workforce. The pattern extends beyond the Jane Kaushik verdict and reveals how these victories are culturally framed.
In K. Prithika Yashini v. The Tamil Nadu Uniformed Services Recruitment Board (2015), the celebration of a transgender woman’s recruitment as a Sub-Inspector of Police hinged less on her right to employment irrespective of her gender identity. Instead, the focus was on valorising the entry of a trans person into a profession marked by State service and social respectability. This is reflective of the larger dichotomous pattern of recognition: inclusion of transgender persons is welcomed, only within respectable State-oriented roles, while invisibilising realities of livelihood in ‘less respected’ forms of work.
Dignity without hierarchies of labour
A more radical reading of the Jane Kaushik verdict situates these lived realities within the larger political economy of ‘respectability’. Seductive in nature, respectability offers legitimacy, promises safety, recognition, and belonging. But it also necessitates assimilation and normative compliance. It rewards identities/bodies only when they embody normative modes of productivity, professionalism, and propriety. Those who cannot or do not wish to align with these norms remain outside the sphere of socio-economic legibility.
This vision of citizenship is deeply classed. It presumes that the primary aspiration for all trans persons is entry into the ‘respectability’ model, rather than the right to exercise autonomy within their diverse socio-economic contexts. The tension becomes clear when placed in conversation with the Supreme Court’s most comprehensive observations in the NALSA verdict. The NALSA judgment recognised the historical position of diverse gender identities such as Hijra, Aravani, Kinnar, and Jogappa communities, among others, affirming their social and cultural roles. It had emphasised that dignity does not stem from conformity to normative frameworks but from the recognition of personhood. Yet in the duodecennial period since the NALSA verdict, the State’s transgender welfare approaches have moved toward the neoliberal logic of social justice that can be achieved only through assimilation in the cis/hetero middle class ‘respectable’ framework.
The Jane Kaushik verdict gives us an opening, but the conversation has to plunge further and deeper.
Moving forward
The Jane Kaushik verdict gives us an opening, but the conversation has to plunge further and deeper. The judgment affirms that trans persons have the right to be recognised in professional spaces. The next step is recognising that the imagination of these professional spaces themselves requires transformation. What they need is to be decolonised, de-casted, and de-respectabilised, so that dignity does not depend on certain assimilation models.
In Jane Kaushik, the Supreme Court directed the formation of an Advisory Committee to prepare a report on, among other things, the draft of an equal opportunity policy. This Committee must push beyond employability, and would need to look at the realities of caste/class-based marginalisation, family violence, homelessness, and criminalisation, among others, that persist as foundational barriers to livelihood.
Substantial rights, including structural redistribution, decent livability, recognition of informal labour, community-led welfare, and reparative justice for decades of institutional harm, have to be advanced as non-negotiable guarantees. The committee’s advisory scope would also be well served by folding into the conversation (once again) the plurality of trans expressions in India, and the fact that dignity cannot be conditional on passing as respectable.