Bell Hooks said, ‘Love is an action, a participatory emotion,’ but sadly, for transgender-queer folx, love remains a silenced feeling buried deep in the chambers of their hearts, for love as an action and in its momentum is thwarted by State and society. Love and family—in our collective imagination—like everything else, is seen through the lens of heteronormativity, biology and the gender binary, and any act of digression invites penalties. In a world where even rights are pathologised, transgender persons are restricted to discussions about their bodies, and rarely do the conversations transcend superficiality or attempt to understand transgender persons as bodies with emotions—capable of loving and being loved. The inherent desires to form intimate relationships, have children and establish families are systematically denied to transgender persons through various acts of commission and omission.
The naturalisation of trans persons’ non-existence as equal citizens is ensured by laws and policies that treat transgender, non-binary and intersex persons as less than equal, and by denying them the rights readily available to those that form the perceived normative. As Taylor Flynn aptly highlights, ‘We live in a highly gendered society where sex distinctions have significant legal consequences, particularly within the realm of family—these distinctions affect issues including whom you can marry, whether you can inherit your spouse’s estate, or whether you provide an “appropriate” role model for your children.’
The emotion of love extends to the various relationships that we form throughout our lives and is subject to the State’s architecture of control; the relationships that citizens forge around blood, community, cast and class are defined and certified by the majoritarian morality and the State. The interference of the State in our personal lives—love, marriage kinship, family, property and inheritance—passes unnoticed till we go against and challenge the system approved by it—a system that is patriarchal, casteist, endogamous and heteronormative.
The right to love becomes subversive when it does not align with the frameworks of caste, patriarchy and heteronormativity. As Arvind Narrain writes, ‘What links queer people to couples who love across caste and community lines is the fact that both are exercising their right to love at an enormous personal risk and in the process, disrupting existing lines of social authority.’
Love, marriage and family formation seem like ordinary tasks and rarely do cisgender-heteronormative people perceive them as a matter of rights—unless the exercise of those rights is obstructed and denied. However, for transgender and non-binary persons, the right to love, marry, have children or make families is denied legitimacy or legal recognition altogether. Family in our society is defined in structural terms, with patrilineal underpinnings. The members of one’s family must be related to each other through marriage, blood or adoption. This narrow understanding of family and kinship continues to get legitimacy across political corridors, the legislature, the judiciary, and society at large, thereby reinforcing structures that exclude non-normative relationships and deny legal recognition to diverse forms of care, companionship and kinship. On the one hand, the State recognises transgender persons as a distinct legal category—the ‘Third Gender’—and on the other, it denies them the very fundamental rights that the so-called ‘two genders’ enjoy, otherwise, or when they enter into a union of marriage with each other or form families.
Transgender persons have always existed in society. The question is not of their existence, but of how that existence is positioned—often at the margins, despite deep-rooted presence in the cultural consciousness of society. It is not their non-existence or invisibility that is naturalised, but rather the idea that they are undeserving of any dignity and rights. Hence, recognition alone cannot be mistaken for equity.
It is important to recognise that the chosen families and kinship networks of transgender persons are often functional in nature, and at times a blend of both structural and functional, but rarely do they align with the narrowly defined structural models legitimised by law. These familial bonds revolve around the core functions that a family performs, such as caring for each other and the sharing of resources. Marriage, being the foundation of the Indian family system, is reserved for unions that conform to a cisgender, binary, heterosexual framework. The law and language governing love, marriage, family and property continue to exclude transgender persons, reinforcing a patrilineal and cis-heteronormative structure.
The denial of love, marriage, kinship and family extends and permeates further into the right to reproduce and/or have children, and lead a healthy sexual and reproductive life. Law, language and healthcare coalesce to ensure the exclusion of transgender persons.
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Atypical Familial Relationships, Queer Kinships and Chosen Families
The idea of family in Indian law and society has long been confined to heteronormative, patrilineal and bio-legal constructions—predicated on marriage, blood or adoption. However, for queer and trans persons, these structures often become sites of violence, erasure and rejection. In response,
they forge chosen families—intimate, care-based relationships that exist outside the traditional legal frameworks but provide emotional, financial and physical support. These familial bonds are functional, not merely relational.
The hijra and kinnar communities in India offer some of the oldest and most resilient examples of chosen kinship structures, such as hijra gharanas. Members who are abandoned by or forced to leave their natal families find belonging in communal systems of care and ritual. As anthropologist Gayatri Reddy notes, these chosen ties are sustained not by biological lineage but by the ethic of ‘being there’—relationships founded in care, permanence and mutual responsibility. In doing so, they invert the dominant idea that biology guarantees permanence or legitimacy.
Yet, the law remains blind to these familial forms. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 for instance, reinforces the authority of bio-legal families over trans individuals, making no space for the recognition of chosen families—even though bio-legal families are often the first sites of violence, control or expulsion for trans persons.
In a significant shift, the Supreme Court has recently begun to respond to the reality of atypical familial arrangements. In Deepika Singh v Central Administrative Tribunal, the Supreme Court observed, ‘The black letter of the law must not be relied upon to disadvantage families which are different from traditional ones.’ The Court further observed that:
The predominant understanding of the concept of a ‘family’ both in the law and in society is that it consists of a single, unchanging unit with a mother and a father (who remain constant over time) and their children. This assumption ignores both, the many circumstances which may lead to a change in one’s familial structure, and the fact that many families do not conform to this expectation to begin with. Familial relationships may take the form of domestic, unmarried partnerships, or queer relationships. These manifestations of love and families may not be typical, but they are as real as their traditional counterparts. Such atypical manifestations of the family unit are equally deserving not only of protection under the law but also of the benefits available under social welfare legislation.
The judgment directly challenges the State’s tendency to privilege one model of family, calling for equal recognition of those that do not fit conventional templates but fulfil the same roles of support and interdependence. This judicial trend aligns with earlier constitutional decisions. In NALSA (2014), the court recognised the identity and dignity of transgender persons. Puttaswamy (2017) upheld the right to privacy and personal choice. Navtej Singh Johar (2018) decriminalised same-sex relationships and affirmed the right to love. Supriyo (2023) and Devu G. Nair (2024) recognised the right of queer persons to cohabit and emphasised the state’s responsibility to protect them from familial violence.
Together, these decisions represent a constitutional push to understand family not through the lens of reproduction or form but through the substance of care, companionship and autonomy. They demand that the law evolve to recognise the diverse kinships that queer persons form—not as exceptions but as equally valid forms of family deserving legal and social legitimacy.
However, these constitutional developments, while landmark in their recognition of atypical relationships and queer kinships, remain largely symbolic unless translated into concrete legislative, policy or administrative frameworks. Without actual guidelines, statutory amendments or tailored policies, the soul of this transformative jurisprudence fails to materialise in the lived realities of queer and transgender persons.
At the ground level, this disconnect between constitutional affirmation and legislative inaction reinforces systemic exclusion. Queer and trans persons in chosen families are routinely denied entitlements that are automatically extended to those in cis-heteronormative structures. Unless existing family laws, welfare statutes and civil codes are amended to reflect functional understandings of family, the recognition of chosen kinships will remain a hollow victory—affirmed in theory but denied in practice.
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Publisher: Queer Directions, Westland Books
Pages: 324
Price: 599
From Right to Love, Family and Parenthood by Dr Aqsa Shaikh and Raghavi Shukla, Transforming Rights: How Law Shapes Transgender Lives, Identity and Community in India.
This excerpt has not been edited by queerbeat.