ON 3 APRIL 2026, when over two dozen transgender community leaders and queer activists from across India met at the upscale LaLit hotel in Delhi, the mood was sombre.
Just four days earlier, the President of India had given her assent to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026. The Bill was hastily introduced in Parliament, met with nationwide protests, and passed amid Opposition walkouts. Now enshrined in law, it casts a grave threat over India’s trans communities. The Amendment Act rolls back their right to self-identify their gender, introduces government medical boards to determine who legally qualifies as trans, and could criminalise community support structures.
The meeting in Delhi was meant to reckon with these high-stakes realities. It was a consultation to brainstorm strategies for legal recourse and collective action against the Amendment Act. Spearheaded by organisations that work for queer rights—Naz Foundation, Humsafar Trust, and Keshav Suri Foundation—the day-long event promised dialogue. Yet, it will likely now be remembered less for the discussions it fostered and more for a confrontation that took place just before lunch. The incident itself has since been documented in social media posts and critical essays. But if we are to grapple with the lessons it holds, it bears recounting.
The flashpoint erupted during the day’s third panel, “Challenging the Act: Community Perspectives.” One of the eight panellists, Grace Banu, a Dalit trans woman and activist from Tamil Nadu, situated queer resistance within an anti-caste framework. She began her speech with “Jai Bhim,” a salutation that invokes BR Ambedkar—the architect of the Indian Constitution—and the egalitarian political tradition he built. “We are all grandsons and granddaughters of Babasaheb Ambedkar and Ramabai,” she added, referring to Ambedkar and his wife. The Amendment Act, Grace argued, was rooted in Hindutva, Brahminism, and patriarchy.
When the session opened up for audience responses, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a trans woman and trans rights activist, stepped in. During an earlier panel, Laxmi, who is the head of the Kinnar Akhara, a Hindu monastic order of trans persons, had started with an invocation of her own: “Jai Shri Mahakal”—glory to Lord Shiva. “I am proud to be Brahmin,” she had said during the same address.
Now, Laxmi rebutted Grace’s remarks. Despite being Brahmin, she claimed, she was as much a victim of oppression as any Dalit. Aryan Pasha, a trans man and trans rights activist who is also Laxmi’s partner, joined the exchange. “Grace, come with me, we will do your DNA test to prove whether you are really Ambedkar’s granddaughter or not,” he said. Four people present at the consultation, including Grace, recounted the incident to me in detail.
What happens when a site of solidarity is transformed into a show of force? “I started shivering because I didn’t know how to react… I was not able to get up from [my] seat,” Danish,* a queer activist, told me. “My first instinct was to run away… it was not about figuring what is happening, who is right or wrong… but just to run away from the violence,” recalled Maya,* a Bahujan trans woman.
A flurry of responses followed—some condemnations, some reflections, and a few mea culpas. Aryan apologised for his remark about the DNA test in a social media post. “To the person it hurt, I am genuinely sorry,” he wrote.
The confrontation at the consultation was not an isolated moment of rupture. Although Laxmi and Aryan were the antagonists of this particular episode, their remarks reinforced a long-simmering fault line within India’s LGBTQIA+ movement. It tends to treat inequities of class, caste, or religion as peripheral rather than central to the quest for queer liberation. While there are exceptions, the movement’s most powerful leaders typically respond to questions around this struggle in the same manner: they become hostile or look the other way.
Naming these divisions might undermine our collective queer identity, dominant groups commonly argue. There is, of course, a real and urgent need for unity. As a relatively small community, we have to speak in one voice to be heard. But unity cannot be imposed. It must be built. When the queer movement papers over its cracks, it risks recreating the same oppression and violence that order cis-het society in India.
There is a second, related problem. We have lost sight of the queer movement’s promise of liberation. Instead, we seem to be settling for inclusion alone. This is not to say that inclusion is unimportant—it can help us shift the balance of power and bring about incremental change. But it is at best a stepping stone to liberation, not the destination. If inclusion is about earning a seat at the table, then liberation is about dismantling that table entirely.
When we define the terms of our inclusion based on what an oppressive society is willing to tolerate, we tether ourselves to the same structures that marginalise us. We make compromises, even with institutions and ideologies that don’t see us as equals. Within this frame, inclusion politics does not just slow liberation down. It takes the most visible figures from marginalised communities and uses them to contain a movement’s radical potential. And this is precisely why we must resist the Hindu right’s incursions into the LGBTQIA+ movement: it enacts queer liberation by letting a select few in while casting most people out.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde, the Black and queer poet, famously warned in a 1979 critique of the feminist movement. It is worth returning to the second part of that warning. These tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change,” she wrote.
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CASTEISM AND COMMUNALISM have always existed in queer spaces, as they do in Indian society.
Here are some stark reminders from the recent past. The Mumbai Queer Pride March of January 2024. When Ambedkarite queer participants carried posters of Ambedkar and chanted “Jai Bhim,” members of Humsafar Trust—one of the march’s organisers and among the organisers of the April 2026 consultation—reportedly asked them to stop. In 2023, a Dalit queer activist said that a member of the Delhi Pride Parade’s organising team told them to put down a poster that read, “No queer liberation without caste annihilation.” The member’s objection, according to the activist, was that they didn’t “want to associate themselves with any political party.”
At another Pride gathering in Mumbai in early 2020, some attendees chanted slogans in support of the Muslim scholar and activist Sharjeel Imam, who had been charged with sedition for his speeches against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Local police officials arrested 51 people—including a trans activist—over these slogans and charged them with sedition, too. Queer Azaadi Movement, a collective of queer persons and organisations that executed the parade, deemed the protestors “irresponsible,” according to news reports.
Blatant prejudice within online queer communities goes unchecked. Moderators beg off accountability by claiming they don’t want to encourage divisive discussions. On queer dating apps, Savarna users openly seek other Savarna matches.
A Pride march is, by definition, an act of political assertion. Rainbow flags and corporate sponsorship banners are political, as is a romantic preference for someone from a privileged caste. These choices reflect how we want to be seen by the world, which economic interests we are comfortable aligning with, and who we want to exclude from our lives. Yet, this idea that queerness is “apolitical” tends to be applied selectively—to anti-caste resistance, to Muslim solidarity, to anything that challenges settled hierarchies.
In November 2018, when Laxmi voiced her public support for the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, that was political too. The temple was built where the Babri Masjid once stood. In 1992, a Hindu right mob—led by leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)—demolished the sixteenth-century mosque. The destruction triggered a wave of communal violence across India. Nearly 2,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims. In this case, Laxmi did not go unopposed. About 183 trans and intersex individuals, 20 LGBTQIA+ groups, and 8 ally organisations endorsed a collective statement challenging her remarks. They warned that aligning trans rights with Hindutva would “deepen existing hierarchies of trans persons in dangerous ways.”
When it came to the Delhi consultation in April 2026, conversations were heated even before the event. Laxmi was listed as a keynote speaker in the agenda that the organisers circulated a day before the event. At first, Grace refused to attend; the two have had prior confrontations on their political differences, Grace told me. She alleged that Laxmi had verbally attacked her and a fellow activist while mobilisation efforts were underway against an earlier Transgender Bill in 2016. (When queerbeat contacted Laxmi for this story, she denied the attack. “I have never done so, I am not stupid,” she said )
Some other attendees also opposed the decision to have Laxmi as the keynote speaker. “Why does one need a keynote speech by anyone, let alone a highly divisive individual, whose close association with the fascist Hindu majoritarian BJP government is well-known and needs no elaboration,” they wrote to the organisers in an email, a copy of which I have reviewed. The email pointed out that the agenda of the consultation did little to address the concerns of transmasculine, non-binary, or intersex persons. It also demanded that the proposed programme be modified to include “community representation from the North East.”
The organisers scrambled to diversify the lineup. Several new speakers from socially marginalised backgrounds and under-represented regions were added. Laxmi’s keynote speech was cancelled. Instead, she was to participate in a plenary session, sharing the stage with five transgender and intersex people—some of whom were invited to attend just the night before.
A speaker included at the last minute told me they felt “zero sense of belongingness” at the consultation. They believed the organisers invited them for optics, because “each panel had to also have marginalised people.” Another speaker felt that the organisers’ hurried inclusion of representatives from marginalised castes and religious communities was simply a strategic ruse.
This incident typefies how the Indian queer movement performs inclusion within activism spaces, particularly in elite urban contexts. Process often informs outcomes. So it is hardly surprising that the movement’s most profound battles end up revealing the limits of this politics.
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WELL-INTENTIONED AS they may be, some of the queer movement’s most visible steps towards inclusion also risk reinforcing age-old hierarchies.
Take the petitions demanding the right to marriage for same-sex couples, which the Supreme Court ruled against. Part of this demand is premised on the assumption that existing institutions are fundamentally fair and only need to be made more inclusive. When these institutions are viewed through the lens of caste, however, it becomes clear that discrimination is an intrinsic part of their architecture.
A recent National Family Health Survey found that 86 percent of the respondents had married someone of a similar caste. As reporting and research on honour killings in India consistently show, when people marry outside their caste, social and state machinery routinely use violence and excommunication to enforce caste-based custom over individual constitutional rights.
It is not my argument that queer people who want to marry shouldn’t have the right to do so. I am arguing that unless we, as a community, confront the prejudices that underpin this structure, we will end up reproducing those prejudices, in rainbow packaging. This would make caste-oppressed queer persons vulnerable to a new kind of discrimination.
Detached from structural equality, such forms of inclusion are easily absorbed by Hindu nationalism. It can choose to accommodate queer people as long as they do not challenge caste hierarchies, Islamophobia, or state power. Follow the logic far enough, and you arrive at the Trans Amendment Act, which only recognises certain groups of trans people—those who can trace their roots back to Hindu mythology.
The Act’s narrow understanding of trans identities ignores their diverse histories in India. Hijra and Kinnar communities have historically been syncretic, belonging to both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This is a core part of who they are. In southern states, hijra gharanas, or households, have resisted Hindu-right leadership so far, Karnataka-based trans rights activist Akkai Padmashali told me. In northern and western India, however, over the last decade of interacting with hijra communities, I perceived a lurch towards the right.
Consider, for example, Hemangi Sakhi Guru, who heads the Vaishnav Kinnar Akhara. A strident supporter of the Trans Amendment Act, Hemangi has “been involved in a campaign against what she calls ‘Kinnar Jihad’, noted an essay in Himal magazine. During a television interview in July 2025, she complained about “a jihadi mindset flourishing among the kinnars,” the article recounted. “We should stop giving them badhai at the signals,” she said, referring to a ritual in which hijras accept cash or gifts in exchange for blessings. “This money is being used wrongly. It’s used to eat meat and consume intoxicants and to promote a jihadi mindset.”
In 2019, an article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Laxmi wanted “to create a faith-based space for transgender Hindus, where formerly Muslim trans people can return to the fold of Hinduism, and pre-empt conversion to Islam among the Hijra community.” This vision, the article noted, echoed the idea of ghar wapsi—a term that means homecoming, used by the Hindu right to advocate for religious conversion. “My community had become too Islamic,” the report quoted Laxmi saying, “I am bringing back Hinduism in such pomp and splendour.”
Speaking to queerbeat, Laxmi denied making any comments about converting trans persons to Hinduism. “I have not said this,” she added. “Whoever has joined us, they have joined us willingly. We have not forced anyone.” Aryan, who was with her, said that the media tended to selectively pick her comments to suit their framing. (The SCMP article does not note any clarifications or corrections.)
Ideological shifts that move away from pluralism betray the queer movement’s diverse legacy. And at the same time, entrenched hierarchies dictate how any political disagreements unfold. While reporting this essay, I spoke to Grace and three others who attended the April 2026 consultation. All of them were queer people from socially marginalised identities. Grace was the only one willing to be identified. Two people told me that they feared reprisal from Laxmi if they spoke out publicly.
How does a trans woman—herself on the margins of a cis-het social hierarchy—acquire the authority to censor other trans people into silence?
Part of Laxmi’s influence draws itself from her activism. In the early nineties, she was reportedly among the earliest voices to demand that the government’s AIDS programme include hijras as a separate category. She was also one of the petitioners in the landmark case that led to the Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA vs Union of India judgment, which guaranteed constitutional rights to trans persons. Her television appearances and widely-read autobiography expanded her public profile. It helped that she was an English-speaking, privileged trans person from Mumbai who was comfortable interacting with the media.
Over the years, Laxmi also acquired institutional authority. Her LinkedIn profile lists over a dozen current and past positions, including leadership roles in organisations focused on trans women; membership in government-appointed committees; and consulting roles for projects anchored by United Nations organisations. Taken in isolation, these positions say little. After all, several other trans activists, including Grace, have memberships in similar committees. But the many posts Laxmi has held do tell us this: more often than not, she is in the rooms that shape decisions about queer lives.
The Kinnar Akhara that Laxmi leads gave her religious stature. The group, which reportedly has around 1,000–2,500 members, is affiliated with one of India’s 13 official akharas. These religious orders play a central role in organising the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage festival held every 12 years that draws millions of visitors. Over the years, the RSS and its affiliates have cultivated a close relationship with these orders, said senior journalist Dhirendra K Jha, who authored Ascetic Games: Sadhus, Akharas, and the Making of the Hindu Vote. Since the Sangh is the BJP’s ideological fountainhead, this proximity has also worked to the akharas’ advantage, he explained. They can “expect all kinds of benefits from the government—from who’s connected to the government, from [the] RSS,” Dhirendra told me.
But access doesn’t translate to equal terms. “I face a lot of opposition from other akharas—all Hindus—my own people, at so many levels,” Laxmi told one interviewer. The Kinnar Akhara is not yet recognised as a fourteenth, distinct akhara. It “doesn’t enjoy the same kind of power and privileges that other akharas do,” Dhirendra told me. In early-2026, after the Trans Amendment Act was passed, Laxmi condemned it swiftly and clearly. For all her influence, this criticism appeared to have had no impact.
In Laxmi’s telling, she is politically neutral. “I am neither with Congress, nor SP [Samajwadi Party], nor TMC [Trinamool Congress Party], nor BJP,” she told queerbeat. Her allegiance was to trans rights, she said—she worked with whoever was in power to advance those goals. Her visibility, she insisted, was a reflection of her work. “I have worked very hard to earn my name,” Laxmi said. “I became Acharaya Mahamandleshwar in 2016. Have I done nothing before that?” She cited instances of her activism against Section 377, which criminalised same-sex relationships,and advocacy for the rights of bar dancers and cancer patients. “I haven’t become famous in one day… Today, if people recognise me, is it my fault?,” she asked.
Members of the RSS, Laxmi said, “don’t like me at all.” This, according to her, was because the Kinnar Akhara’s founders included Muslim gurus and it now has Dalit Mahamandelshwars, as well as because Laxmi is in a relationship with Aryan, who is Muslim. “Just because I am a Brahmin, I am not getting a red carpet,” she added.
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IN TODAY’S INDIA, where Hindutva is the dominant political ideology, Laxmi has positioned herself as a queer person who is acceptable to power. She is not unique, of course—there are many more like her. She is among the most visible and influential.
These “acceptable” queer subjects all share a few specific characteristics. They are patriotic, upper-caste, culturally Hindu, and politically compliant. They locate their queerness within Hindu culture and scripture—not as a challenge to the Brahminical social order, but as evidence of Hinduism’s ancient, generous tolerance. They rarely talk about caste. Barely invoke Ambedkar. They seldom make demands that would require redistributing social power. They are queer in their gender and sexuality, but Brahminical in their politics.
Their queer identity, combined with their political stance, makes them useful to the Hindu nationalist project. Proponents of the Hindu right can point to their existence as evidence of the ideology’s inclusiveness while ensuring that the possibility of actual structural transformation remains off the table.
Consider a defence Laxmi often offers. She claims that she cannot be casteist because she has granted priesthood to Dalit trans persons within the Kinnar Akhara. The catch: Laxmi gets to decide who gets in, because Dalits have historically been denied positions of power at temples. She is not challenging that order of exclusion. She is only deciding who gets in. This is charity dressed as equality.
We need to understand the conflict at the Delhi consultation within this context. Grace’s invocation of anti-caste rhetoric represented an insistence on liberation for all—liberation that rejects the terms set by a Brahminical order. Similarly, Aryan’s demand for a DNA test from Grace as proof that she is an Ambedkarite was not an empty taunt. It was an acceptable queer person’s attempt at discrediting an anti-caste challenge to the Hindutva order.
The moment was not without its irony. When Aryan subjected Grace’s political lineage to biological verification, he mirrored, whether consciously or not, the same medicalised logic that trans communities have long opposed in the state’s identification process.
What of the trans people who were frightened into silence after the consultation? They are part of the queer movement, but they are not safe within it. Their experiences testify to its hollow unity and internal hierarchy, by which the acceptable queer person has power over the unacceptable one.
The parallels are hard to miss. Hindutva, too, presents itself as a force of unity even as it seeks to preserve existing hierarchies under a consolidated, majoritarian Hindu identity. In both cases, the language of inclusion obscures unequal terms of belonging.
The social order of caste survives across generations through labour and social hierarchy, but also because of how it seeps into choices of marriage, kinship, and sexualities. It protects, in essence, the economic interests of the most privileged. Queer, hijra, and trans bodies fundamentally refuse these norms. The Hindu right domesticates them and defangs them of these radical possibilities.
This is why Ambedkar is not incidental to this conversation. Through his writings and political actions, he relentlessly attacked graded inequality. He did not simply argue for inclusion within unjust institutions. When those institutions proved resistant to structural change, he strove to build alternatives.
One of Ambedkar’s most far-reaching struggles to radically redistribute political power was for Scheduled Castes to be granted separate electorates. Separate electorates would have created reserved seats that those from marginalised caste communities could contest and vote for. This system would have given the community independent political representation. The demand was ultimately blocked in an act of political blackmail by MK Gandhi. Scheduled Caste communities were given reserved seats in a unified electorate instead. This meant that any candidate who truly threatened the caste hierarchy could always be rejected by a caste-Hindu voter base.
Despite this setback, Ambedkar championed a radical liberatory politics that continues to shape India. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, attempting to organise workers, peasants, and depressed classes around caste and class rather than religious unity. With journals such as Mooknayak, Bahishkrit Bharat, and Janata, he created an independent public sphere through which those who were marginalised could articulate political demands outside mainstream nationalist discourse. His conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was as political as it was religious: it rejected the social logic of caste and attempted to construct an alternative moral community.
Ambedkar’s life and politics offer the Indian queer movement a question that it has not yet adequately answered: what are the contours of a queer politics that does not merely seek inclusion within an unjust order, but reimagines the order itself? Part of the blueprint lies in his legacy.
The Indian queer movement must actively refuse leadership that aligns itself with Hindu nationalist politics. This is a matter of political necessity, not personal preference. Platforming those who uphold prejudicial structures is neither inclusion nor liberation. It is an endorsement. This alignment actively harms Dalit, Muslim, Adivasi, and working-class queer people by giving their oppressors legitimacy within shared organising spaces.
Queer liberation demands a political consciousness that goes beyond awareness or sensitivity. This consciousness will ask who is absent from the room and also why the room is organised the way it is. Why do the same organisations receive funding again and again? Why do the same leaders become the state’s preferred interlocutors? Why do queer people who are Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim, disabled, working-class, or employed as sex workers continue to appear as communities to be consulted rather than political actors who determine the movement’s agenda?
A conscious queer politics would interrogate power within the movement with the same rigour that it interrogates power outside it. This also requires rejecting respectability conferred by majoritarian communities as a measure of legitimacy.
Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, locates the queer community in Hindu scripture. Grace Banu traces her queer and political lineage back to Ambedkar instead. Those who argued in favour of the Transgender Amendment Bill in Parliament repeatedly invoked Hindu mythology to portray trans persons as divine beings. Queer persons who opposed the Bill on the streets repeatedly asked to be seen not as sacred but as equal.
These are two competing visions of queer India. One offers inclusion, with terms and conditions. The other is premised on the possibility of liberation. The Indian queer movement must reject the former, or the choice will be made for them—violently—as it was in that Delhi hotel room on 3 April, 2026.
For queer people to be free, Dalits have to be free, Muslims have to be free, workers have to be free, women have to be free. These aren’t separate oppressions running on separate tracks—they all emerge from the same machine. The fight has to be fought together, or it won’t be won at all.
*Name has been changed to protect privacy.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Vaishnav Kinnar Akhara as a group that formed after the Kinnar Akhara splintered over internal conflicts. queerbeat regrets the error.