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/hetero 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.
