A trans person’s struggle for dignity doesn’t stop even when they die

It was 24 May 2024. Several queer and transgender people had gathered outside Kolkata’s Kantapukur Morgue, a blue-and-white building. They were waiting for the body of Tamoghno, a transgender woman who had died the previous day. Tamoghno’s natal family members were also present. 

Sourish Samanta, a journalist and filmmaker who was at the morgue, recalled Tamoghno’s family members mourning her as “their only son.” Tamoghno’s friends, along with some of the Kolkata-based LGBTQ+ activists, tried to remind them that Tamoghno was a woman. But the family members continued to misgender her. “For many of us,” Aritra, a close friend of Tamoghno’s, told queerbeat, “it was like seeing what would happen were we to die.”

According to Aritra, an elderly trans woman present there remarked, “Even when I become a skeleton, people would call me a man.”

Model and theatre actor Tamoghno was 25 years old when she died. Her domestic help discovered her body “under mysterious circumstances” in her Kolkata apartment, according to a Times of India report. 

In India, dead bodies have a legal right to dignity and fair treatment, as established in a 1989 Supreme Court ruling. A 2021 National Human Rights Council (NHRC) advisory built on the judgement by laying down guidelines for handling dead bodies. These guidelines require hospitals to hand over the bodies to natal families, who are required to register the death at the office of the local registrar, according to the 1969 births and deaths registration law. But most transgender people, facing discriminatory and violent treatment from their natal families who don’t approve of their gender, are forced to leave home, or are pushed out by their families. A 2018 NHRC study found that only 2 percent of the 900 transgender people surveyed lived with natal kin, while 93 percent lived with other transgender people in chosen families. Such chosen families, however, have no legal authority to claim dead bodies or perform last rites.

At one point while waiting at the morgue, Aritra overheard Tamoghno’s natal family members’ plans to drape her in dhuti-panjabi, a traditional outfit worn by Bengali men.  Aritra had been numbed by grief until then. But upon hearing the family members discuss these arrangements, she was flooded with memories of evenings spent with Tamoghno. “We used to talk about death a lot, and she used to tell me that if she dies, I should ensure that she is dressed [in a sari] on her way to the crematorium,” Aritra recalled.

Immediately, Aritra alerted other queer and transgender persons present at the funeral. A heated debate followed as Tamoghno’s friends tried to convince the natal family to let her be seen off in gender-affirming clothing. Eventually, the family members “were outnumbered,” Aritra said. Tamoghno was taken to the crematorium draped in a customary white sari with a red border.

Tamoghno’s untimely and suspicious demise wasn’t an isolated incident. Transgender people often die young—murder and suicide are common causes of their deaths. A 2021 study in the Netherlands found that transgender women were nearly seven times more likely to die by suicide than cisgender women, while transgender men faced higher risks of death from “non-natural causes.” Another 2023 UK study similarly reported that trans people were almost twice as likely as cisgender peers to die from external causes such as suicide, homicide, or poisoning. The underlying reasons, this study noted, were transphobic hate crimes and chronic stress that transgender people face due to repeated exposure to violence, discrimination, and economic and social marginalisation. 

Although queerbeat could not find such systematic data for India, multiple queer and transgender people we spoke to agreed that the situation is similar in the country. “Many of my friends or acquaintances have gotten murdered or died by suicide,” said Sintu Bagui, a transgender-rights activist from West Bengal’s Seoraphuli town, as she recalled the recent discovery of a transgender woman’s partially burnt remains in Kolkata. Reshmi*, who is a member of a hijra household in West Bengal, echoed Sintu: “I cannot count on my fingers the number of hijra people I have seen murdered or die by suicide in the last five years.” Reshmi wanted her real name withheld because, according to her, seniors in the hijra community often prohibit disciples like her from speaking with the media. (Hijras are a South Asian cultural group of transfeminine individuals assigned male at birth. Some hijras may be intersex.)

As transgender people remain vulnerable to untimely and violent deaths, queerbeat sought to understand what happens after: for people who fight for a lifetime simply to live their lives on their own terms, do they get dignity in death? 

***

Sourish always knew his friend Tamoghno as a woman “full of life.”  Tamoghno had moved to Kolkata in 2018 from Siliguri, a city at the Himalayan foothills in West Bengal. When Sourish stood next to her body in Kolkata’s MR Bangur Hospital, he felt disoriented. “It broke me into pieces,” Sourish told queerbeat.

Tamoghno’s life was a “troubled” one, Sourish recalled. Fighting a lifelong battle against her natal family to freely live as a woman, she had taken to alcohol and substance use to cope, Aritra added.

The circumstances surrounding Tamoghno’s death were murky. According to the Times of India, Tamoghno’s domestic help discovered her body on the floor of her Kolkata apartment in a “bloodied state” and alerted Tamoghno’s neighbours immediately. Given the state in which her body was found, several queer and transgender people who knew Tamoghno told queerbeat that they suspected she was murdered. “Her phone also went missing and was never recovered,” said Aritra. However, according to the media report, the police suspected that Tamoghno might have died accidentally or by suicide. 

Tamoghno’s body was taken to the MR Bangur Hospital, and then to the Kantapukur Morgue for a postmortem analysis. Bappaditya Mukherjee, a Kolkata-based activist told queerbeat that members of his youth organisation, Prantakatha, learnt from the police that they had registered Tamoghno’s death as a case of “unnatural death.” An unnatural death could include an accident, suicide, or murder, as per the NHRC. The police did not investigate the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death, alleged Bappaditya. 

queerbeat’s attempts to find out more about Tamoghno’s death ran into institutional indifference and bureaucratic hurdles at every turn. Sisir Naskar, Superintendent of MR Bangur Hospital, told queerbeat that “the hospital does not receive copies of autopsy reports or hold any such information in their records.” He redirected us to the Golf Green police station, stating that Tamoghno’s death fell under its jurisdiction so they may have the autopsy reports.  

Raja Dutta, the investigating officer who handled the case at the Golf Green Police Station, initially told us that the postmortem report concluded that she had died of a heart attack, and therefore, the case was not investigated further. He also claimed that all the documents related to the case were at a different police station in Haridevpur—a locality three kms away from Tamoghno’s house. 

The Haridevpur police station officials told queerbeat that they didn’t possess any files related to the case since the area in which Tamoghno lived did not fall under their jurisdiction. The relevant documents would be at Golf Green Police Station, they added. 

When we went back to Raja, he directed us to the Kolkata Police headquarters in Lalbazar saying that “all postmortem reports go to Lalbazar and can be accessed only by the natal family after a lengthy application process.” But this time, he claimed that he did not remember the details of Tamoghno’s case, since it occurred more than a year ago. When pressed further, he wavered on his earlier stance that the cause of Tamoghno’s death was a heart attack. He also changed his statement about the cause of why the death was not investigated, saying “either it was not a murder or because the [natal] family did not want to pursue the case.” 

queerbeat reached out to Tamoghno’s mother via her Facebook profile, which was active at the time of writing this report. She did not respond to our requests for an interview. We also tried contacting Arundhati Hari Das, a relative of Tamoghno’s whose name was listed in the morgue’s official records as having signed off on the release of Tamoghno’s body. Arundhati did not answer our phone calls or respond to our WhatsApp messages. 

Aritra, Sourish, and Bappaditya alleged that the police colluded with Tamoghno’s natal family to prevent an investigation. “The [natal] family kept mentioning [at the morgue and the crematorium] how cooperative the police is,” Bappaditya recalled to queerbeat. “They [the family] were in a rush to complete the last rites and head back home,” Aritra added. Raja, the investigating officer, denied any collusion with the family.  “Why would they want to cover this up?” he asked, adding, “[Tamoghno’s death] is, after all, the family’s loss.” 

The opacity of the official investigation into Tamoghno’s demise, coupled with the allegations of her family’s indifference, highlights a troubling reality: the systemic neglect of transgender people, in their deaths, as in their lives.

***

On 24 May, when Sourish and Aritra reached the hospital where Tamoghno’s body was taken, they found out that her gender was listed as “male” instead of “transgender” in the hospital forms. Tamoghno did not have a legal document certifying her transgender identity, and her friends’ efforts to negotiate with the hospital staff to correct her gender did not work. 

“We even showed the hospital staff Tamoghno’s photos,” Aritra said. Tamoghno’s Instagram profile clearly stated her identity as a ‘transwoman’ and was replete with photos of her in saris. But, the hospital refused to correct Tamoghno’s gender in their records.

The misgendering continued at the mortuary, where Tamoghno’s body was kept in the men’s section, Sourish and Aritra told queerbeat. 

Without a transgender certificate and ID card—legal documents from the Indian government’s Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment that certify a person’s transgender identity—Tamoghno’s friends had little grounds for negotiation. “This is the norm,” Aritra said, “Our legitimacy has been reduced to a set of documents.”

In 2014, the Supreme Court affirmed transgender persons’ right to “decide their self identified gender.” However, the 2020 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Rules introduced a “certificate of identity,” issued by a District Magistrate, making official ratification a condition for the recognition of one’s transgender identity.

According to multiple media reports, the procedure of obtaining a transgender certificate and identity card is sullied with bureaucratic red tape, unnecessary verification such as home visits to confirm addresses, and long waiting periods. As a result, most transgender people in the country have been unable to obtain these documents despite their persistent efforts to do so. 

In the absence of these documents, the deaths of transgender people are officially recorded according to the sex they have been assigned at birth (i.e., male or female), Kanmani Ray, a lawyer and a transgender woman, told Behanbox in 2022. As a result, the state and the society remain unaware of how many transgender people die each year—or of the circumstances of their deaths—added Hyderabad-based transgender-rights activist and transgender woman Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli in the same report.

(According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s latest report—the only official estimate queerbeat could find—13 transgender people were murdered in 2023. The report did not have separate data for transgender men and women.)

But sometimes even having a transgender certificate and ID card doesn’t ensure dignity after death. The case of Daina Dias, a 32-year-old Goa-based transgender activist, who died in January 2024, is an example. 

***

“How did this happen?” Harold, a Goa-based gender-nonconforming fashion designer, remembered thinking at the funeral of their friend Daina in January 2024. 

Daina was one of Goa’s few vocal transgender-rights activists. Harold had first met her in 2014 through Humsaath Trust Goa, a community-based organisation that, among other activities, provided free HIV testing to queer and transgender people. Daina was a field and outreach worker there. Daina and Harold soon became inseparable friends, Harold told queerbeat. 

Harold supported Daina when she decided to transition legally in 2014, following the Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment granting legal recognition to transgender persons.  That year, Harold said, Daina had her Aadhar card changed to reflect her identity as a transgender person. When Daina founded Wajood Goa, a transgender rights organisation, in 2018, the two celebrated together. In an interview published in the same year by MARG India, a legal rights NGO, Daina expressed that her aspiration for the next five years was to evolve into a social activist working for “all sections of the society.” 

But as those five years drew to a close, Daina found her dreams curtailed by a family she described as abusive, a debilitating illness, and, ultimately, her death. 

***

Daina grew up in a cramped house in a densely-packed informal settlement near Vasco Da Gama, Goa. In interviews, Daina said her family physically and sexually abused her after she came out as a transgender woman, and later threw her out of their home. Sashi*, a close relative of Daina, whose name has been withheld by queerbeat to protect their identity, denied the allegations of sexual abuse. But they confirmed that Daina’s father and brothers had beaten her several times.

Several of Daina’s friends accused one of her brothers of being more abusive towards Daina. queerbeat contacted the brother to seek his response. He denied all allegations of wrongdoing. He claimed that the relationship between Daina and him was cordial. “I accepted my brother,” he said. 

During our conversation, Sashi was overwhelmed with the grief of losing Daina. She believed that “a shaitan [demon] entered her [Daina’s] body,” while she was recovering from a terrible road accident she had when she was 16 or 17 years old. The demon, according to Sashi, was a hijra. That is how Daina started identifying as a woman, Sashi told queerbeat.

In Daina’s brother’s view, she started identifying as transgender because her friends—the queer and transgender people Daina spent time with—“performed black magic on [her].” “That is why he became shemale,” he said. During our conversations, both Sashi and the brother referred to Daina by her deadname. 

(A deadname is the name assigned to a transgender person at birth, which they no longer use after affirming their gender identity.)

After Daina left her home, she lived alone in different parts of Goa, making ends meet, sometimes as part of a restaurant’s staff and at other times as a social worker, according to Sashi. However, in 2021, when the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for Daina to live on her own, she moved back in with her natal family. When she returned, Sashi recalled Daina saying that she had missed her mother and sister a lot.

(Multiple studies and reports have highlighted how the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected transgender people, including forcing them to return to abusive natal families.)

Madhur*, a non-binary illustrator and educator who took care of Daina during her last days, told queerbeat that soon after Daina was back home, her mother chopped off her hair, clicked a picture of her, and told people in the local marketplace, “my son has now returned.” Daina did not resist, claimed Sashi, who was aware of these incidents and confirmed them. Back at home, according to Madhur and Sashi, Daina was battling hallucinations and seizures. She was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, added Madhur, who didn’t want to reveal their real name in the story to protect their identity. 

Madhur said that doctors at the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour (IPHB), Bambolim, Goa, where the schizophrenia diagnosis was allegedly made, had also asked the family to get Daina tested for encephalitis—a disease where the brain gets inflamed. However, Madhur added, the family didn’t get her tested because they were focused on detransitioning her. Detransitioning is the process of reversing one’s gender transition. IPHB declined to respond to our queries about Daina’s schizophrenia diagnosis citing patient confidentiality. And Sashi could not confirm the exact diagnosis. 

But Sashi did confirm that the family attempted to detransition Daina after she returned home. Sashi recounted how she and other family members took Daina to a temple in Maharashtra. There, they dunked her in water and subjected her to rituals to exorcise the spirit they thought she was possessed by. 

In November 2023, Daina’s sister—her only ally in the family, according to Madhur and Harold—alerted queer and transgender activists and allies in Goa to Daina’s failing health. Harold was one of them. They rescued Daina from her house and admitted her to the women’s ward at the IPHB, Bambolim, Goa. At home, Harold remembers being taken aback seeing Daina in short hair. “Daina was extremely proud of her hair,” they told queerbeat, adding, “this was not the Daina I knew; this was Daina before her [gender] transition.” 

The group that rescued Daina also circulated a message through a local queer group on WhatsApp seeking volunteers to take care of Daina, Madhur recalled. Madhur was  one of the people who responded. They and their friends started visiting and caring for her regularly.

Daina’s admission to the women’s ward at IPHB was possible only because a hospital worker recognised her from a gender-affirming care workshop she had conducted at the institute in the past, Madhur told queerbeat. Even then, they recalled that Daina was kept separate from other women, and that the nursing staff refused to tend to her. “In the women’s ward, there were two rooms. One had all the other women patients, and the other had only Daina,” Madhur said. The hospital declined to respond to requests for comment citing patient confidentiality.

At the hospital, Daina underwent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a treatment using controlled electric pulses, Madhur said. Several studies have reported that ECT can be effective for persons living with schizophrenia, although some studies suggest that cognitive impairment, such as memory loss, is a potential risk for some patients. Other studies dispute that ECT can cause cognitive impairment. 

In Daina’s case, Madhur said that they observed signs of cognitive impairment: When Madhur saw Daina for the first time in November 2023, “she was present and responsive,” they recollected. But a few weeks later, she stopped being in the present, they added. 

When Madhur and their friends visited Daina in the first week of January 2024—about two months after she was first admitted—they were shocked to learn that her natal family had gotten her discharged from the hospital. Sashi, Daina’s relative, told queerbeat that the attending doctor had deemed her fit for discharge. However, a couple days later, Daina’s condition worsened. Daina’s sister informed Madhur that she was being admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of the Goa Medical College. When Madhur went there, they recollect seeing Daina “completely unconscious and on tubes.” 

A week later, Daina passed away.

***

Madhur was teaching a class when Daina’s sister informed them of her death. On the way to the hospital, one thought lingered on their mind: “We did not want Daina to be sent off in shorts and T-shirt, but in a gown.” Harold also told queerbeat that Daina had wanted “to be seen off in a bridal gown when she dies.” Madhur stopped at a store to buy one. At the hospital, Daina’s sister told Madhur that she had been admitted under her deadname. Given that Daina’s Aadhaar card stated her gender as “transgender,” Madhur and their friends could compel the hospital to correct the records. (queerbeat has seen a copy of Daina’s Aadhaar card.)

But this victory did little to reduce the ordeal that followed. 

When Daina’s body was taken to a crematorium—after a day in the morgue so that all her family members could attend the funeral—she was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. “We had no control over what was happening,” Madhur recollected. “The family got to run the show.” The only intervention Madhur and their friends could make was to put a bindi on Daina’s forehead: a small mark of her womanhood. 

The misgendering continued even as the body lay burning on the pyre: Daina’s brothers continued to deadname her and refer to her as a man, Madhur and Harold recalled. “It was very disturbing to watch,” Madhur said, adding, “I realised how cheap transgender lives are.” 

For Harold, witnessing Daina’s funeral was a moment of reckoning: “I realised that even when I die, my family will conduct my last rites as if I was a man.”

***

Tamoghno’s and Daina’s stories, and interviews with multiple transgender people reveal how the interference of the natal family often strips transgender people of their dignity after death. “Many transgender women have told me that they want to be cremated or buried in saris,” Sintu, the Seoraphuli-based transgender-rights activist, told queerbeat. “But after their death, their natal families conduct all the rituals as if they were men. The battle to assert one’s gender continues.” Sintu has witnessed the deaths of several underprivileged transgender people, hijras, and kothis. (Kothis, like the hijras, are a South Asian cultural group of transfeminine individuals assigned male at birth.)

Clothing and rituals are not the only aspects transgender people wonder about when they think of their death. Fateh*, a Delhi-based researcher and non-binary transman, said that he has also planned to divide his savings between his natal family, his partner, and some queer and transgender collectives. He had thought about how his body might be discovered, what stories might follow, and how he would be remembered. 

Tan, a non-binary transmasculine person, told queerbeat that until our conversation, they had not thought about how their body would be treated after their death, despite “thinking about death often.” Tan works with Prismatic Foundation, a Varanasi-based queer and transgender-rights NGO. Like Fateh, Tan’s deliberations on their death focused more on their finances and their legacy. “I am more worried about what will happen to the projects I am leaving unfinished, and to the friend who needed my care and who I told, ‘I am tired today’,” they told queerbeat. 

“Aaj mai jo jee raha hoon, tab mereko dignity nahi mil raha. [These indignities are happening when I am alive],” Tan said, adding, “When I go to a shop to buy a bottle of soft drink, I do not find dignity; when I was house-hunting in Varanasi, I did not find dignity; when I went to study at a university, I did not find dignity. How can I care about indignities after death?”

***

In India, the hijra community has been able to surmount some of these challenges to a certain extent. Hijra persons form familial bonds with each other in the guru-chela kinship system, a hierarchy consisting of gurus [leaders], chelas [disciples], and nati-chelas [disciples of a disciple]. Anthropologist Ina Goel notes in a 2022 study that hijras often list a guru as a parent or a spouse on official documentation, such as voter ID cards, which gives the guru the right to claim their body. Yet, as Reshmi, a member of a hijra household, told queerbeat, natal families still intervene upon a hijra’s death, overriding these ties.

Reshmi also observed that several burial grounds in Kolkata routinely deny service to the hijra community. A similar occurrence in Madhya Pradesh recently made it to the news. In such cases, one reported from Hyderabad, hijras and transgender people had to bribe caretakers of crematoriums and burial grounds to access them so that their community members were laid to rest peacefully. 

According to Sintu, part of the reason these issues persist is that death remains underdiscussed in transgender movements. “We are constantly fighting about the right to live and the right to livelihood,” she told queerbeat. “But we don’t realise that after life and livelihood comes death.” Queer and transgender rights activist Bappaditya also stressed the need for stronger community mobilisation after a transgender person’s death, particularly in suspicious cases. Speaking of Tamoghno, he noted that “people were quick to commemorate the death instead of coming together and mounting pressure on the police to ensure a fair investigation.” 

The big leap forward that can solve many problems in one go would be official recognition of chosen families. On 2 February 2023, a group of queer feminist activists and young couples petitioned the Supreme Court to “declare and recognise the constitutional right of members of the LGBTI community to have a ‘chosen family’ in lieu of next of kin under all laws.” The petition was among thirty that were grouped together into what came to be known as the marriage equality case. On 17 October 2023, the Court dismissed all the petitions. 

A little less than a month later, on 13 November that year, news broke that Nanded, Maharashtra, was set to get a separate crematorium for transgender people—the second in the state. Commenting on this development, Farida, a transgender woman from the city, told The Times of India that “now, at least, there will be no social resistance to the last rites of our community members after their death.” 

Only time will tell whether Farida’s expectations are met. But, like Sintu pointed out, the time to think about death is now.

***

Nikita Saxena and Visvak contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a part of a queerbeat series supported by the Mariwala Health Initiative.