In 2014, a landmark Supreme Court judgment affirmed that trans persons have an absolute right to self-identify their gender. The court deemed any insistence on medical interventions for declaring one’s gender “immoral and illegal.” Twelve years later, the central government is moving to dismantle this principle. If it is successful, it will imperil the rights of lakhs of trans persons across the country.
This shift is being led by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Union Cabinet Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, Virendra Kumar. On the afternoon of 13 March 2026, he introduced a Lok Sabha Bill proposing amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. A statement accompanying the Bill claims that a key provision of the 2019 Act—which recognises trans persons’ right to self-determine their gender—“makes it impossible to identify the genuine oppressed persons” it is meant to benefit. And so the Bill seeks to erase the autonomy of trans persons altogether.
The Bill recommends an altered, problem-riddled definition of trans persons that excludes trans men, many trans women, and genderqueer people. It also gives state-appointed medical experts the power to determine whether a trans person’s identity is legally valid. And it expands the 2019 Act’s existing list of punishable offences, adding provisions that reinforce stereotypes about trans persons and could likely be misused to criminalise them.
queerbeat interviewed nearly a dozen people about the proposed amendments, including trans and intersex activists, lawyers, and researchers. Across these conversations ran the same thread: shock at the Bill’s seemingly hasty introduction and a deep unease over its implications. The conclusion was hard to escape—the Bill turns the clock back. The proposed amendments make the rights of trans persons completely contingent on the state’s narrow vision of who counts as trans.
“I couldn’t believe it; I thought it was fake news,” Tripti Tandon, an advocate with the legal aid organisation Lawyers Collective, recalled thinking when she first saw a copy of the Bill.
“The overall feeling in the community is a mix of anxiety, confusion, and anger,” said Vihaan, an Ambedkarite queer feminist trans man and development sector professional. “For many of us, this moment feels deeply disappointing—it feels less like progress and more like a step backward,” echoed Daniella Mendonca, a person with intersex variations and co-founder of Intersex Human Rights India, a pan-Asian intersex collective.
The Bill was a missed opportunity for meaningful reform, lamented Kanmani Ray, a trans woman and lawyer who practises in the Supreme Court and Madras High Court. Grace Banu, a trans rights and anti-caste activist, pointed out some of these gaps, too. “They are not talking about our education, they are not talking about our employment rights. They are not talking about reservation rights,” she said.
Those appointed to government-run bodies for trans persons have also expressed their dissent. Kalki Subramaniam, a trans rights activist and a member of the National Council for Transgender Persons, released a statement in which she underlined that the Bill “gravely harms” the trans community in a “direct violation of constitutional guarantees.” She added that the Council—which was constituted to advise the governments on matters involving trans and intersex people—was neither informed nor consulted about the amendments. “The exclusion undermines the very purpose of the Council, which is to ensure that voices of the community are represented in policymaking,” she wrote. If the Bill were to become a law in its current form, Kalki declared, she would resign.
The Bill goes against the government’s own rhetoric, pointed out Anish Gawande, one of India’s few openly queer politicians and a national spokesperson for the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar faction). At a business summit in February 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi showcased the existing Transgender Persons Act as “a shield of living with dignity”. This Bill, Anish argued, “goes against the very principles of dignity and self-respect for the transgender community that the government has come to stand up for.”
(queerbeat reached out to the Social Justice and Empowerment Minister over multiple calls and emails to seek clarifications on the proposed amendments. This copy will be updated if he responds.)
Queer collectives across India are mobilising to push back against this erasure. “Many in the community are reminding themselves that trans people existed and survived long before legal recognition came in 2014,” Vihaan said. “The community has always shown resilience and will continue to survive regardless of legal setbacks.”
Momo, an intersex person and the co-founder of Intersex Human Rights India, agreed. “There is both a sense of solidarity and tension, but overall, people are trying to put in a lot of effort to bring communities together and respond collectively.”
Exclusionary definition of trans persons
The 2019 Trans Act defines transgender people as those “whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth.” It explicitly includes trans men, trans women, people with intersex variations, and genderqueer people within its ambit.
The 2026 Amendment Bill, however, defines a transgender person as one “having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta, or eunuch” or as someone born with intersex variations. Its definition also includes any person or child who has been forced to present as transgender. Unlike the 2019 Act, it makes no mention of trans men, trans women outside the ambit of the identities it has mentioned, and genderqueer people.
These omissions are “far-reaching,” as those excluded from this definition may no longer be able to legally identify as trans, said lawyer and Oxford University doctoral scholar Mihir Rajamane, who researches India’s transgender rights laws.
The Bill privileges the inclusion of socio-cultural identities that align with dominant-caste Hindu mythologies, said Grace. She pointed to the absence of terms that have evolved in the rest of the country, such as thirunangai and thirunambi for trans women and trans men, respectively, in Tamil Nadu.
Even those included within the Bill’s definition of “transgender person” disagree with its amendments. The All Odisha TG and Kinner Association reportedly termed the Bill “regressive” and called for its withdrawal.
The Bill also conflates intersex and trans identities by placing them under the same legal category. “The definitions and lived experiences of transgender and intersex individuals are different, and they should not be treated as interchangeable,” Daniella told queerbeat.
This effectively erases the distinct realities of intersex variations, added Momo. “Intersex refers to natural variations in sex characteristics, while transgender identities relate primarily to gender identity and gender expression,” they said. This conflation, Momo added, has been a longstanding issue that plagued the Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment as well as the 2019 Trans Act. “The result of continuing this approach is that policies designed primarily around gender identity recognition end up overlooking the specific rights and protections that intersex people need,” Momo told queerbeat. “In effect, intersex people become statistically and legally invisible within the system.”
The Bill’s accompanying statement defends its changes by calling the 2019 Act’s definition of trans persons “vague,” claiming that it makes it difficult to identify “genuine oppressed persons” and renders the implementation of provisions under various laws “unworkable.”
Although the accompanying statement argues that its definition of transgender persons is more “precise,” lawyers interviewed by queerbeat said that it is ambiguous, particularly in its inclusion of people or children who have been “compelled” to present as transgender. “If someone has been forced to ‘become’ a transgender person, then they don’t actually identify as transgender, right—how do you then justify putting them here?” said Kanmani. Tripti agreed. “Those who want to identify as transgender are being denied, and those compelled are [being] considered [transgender],” she said.
Then there is the Bill’s insistence that those outside its proposed definition of trans persons were never meant to be included under the ambit of the Trans Act. Essentially, it appears to be saying that “everyone who has self-determined their identity in the past, their identity should be invalid,” Mihir told queerbeat.
In the absence of clarity, trans masculine people across the country are grappling with uncertainty, Vihaan said. “There are many trans masculine individuals who have already changed their name and gender in official documents; some have also undergone medical procedures as part of their transitions,” he added. “People are asking whether those legal recognitions will remain valid under the existing framework… or whether they might be challenged or reversed.”
Medical gatekeeping of trans identities
The statement accompanying the Bill claims that the 2019 Trans Act was never meant to “protect each and every class of persons with various gender identities, self-perceived sex/gender identities or gender fluidities.”
This undermines the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling, which declares, “… no one shall be forced to undergo medical procedures… as a requirement for legal recognition of their gender identity.” It is in line with this judgment that the 2019 Act also guarantees trans persons the right to self-determination—a protection the Bill now seeks to erase.
This could fundamentally alter how trans persons in India are legally recognised. Under the 2019 Act, trans persons can obtain a “certificate of identity” by applying online to the district magistrate of the area where they reside. While this approval has been infamously hard to get, as documented by multiple news organisations, including queerbeat, it does not require any further evaluation—at least on paper.
However, under the Bill’s recommendations, trans persons seeking a certificate would have to secure authorisation from a government-appointed medical board in their region before approaching the district magistrate. The district magistrate could also invite further medical scrutiny “if he considers [it] either necessary or desirable,” the Bill adds. This could potentially mean that “we have to go through medical scrutiny not once but twice,” Kanmani told queerbeat.
Such provisions will likely compound the bureaucratic hurdles in an already imperfect system. Even under the existing Act, the government has issued only about 32,000 transgender certificates, according to the latest data published online by the National Portal for Transgender Persons. About 2,000 applications are pending with the Council, of which about 800 have been pending for 7–12 months.
The Bill doesn’t just pathologise transgender identities and discard their bodily autonomy; it also fails to clarify “what the medical board is going to be looking at,” said Mihir.
Daniella worried that the process would be fraught for intersex people too. “With the proposed role of authorities such as the district magistrate and the chief medical officer, decisions about who is considered intersex may end up being made by people who do not fully understand intersex bodies or lived experiences,” she said. “In practice, this can become a form of gatekeeping.”
Persecution over protection
The 2019 Trans Act criminalises discrimination, as well as physical, mental, and sexual violence against transgender people, with mandated punishments ranging from six months to two years of imprisonment, along with a fine.
The Bill adds several clauses—all of which concern the abduction of children and people forced to adopt trans identities or presentations—to the existing punishments. The proposed punishments for these offences include imprisonment ranging from five years to life, and hefty fines.
This emphasis on coercion—in both the proposed definition of trans persons and in the section relating to offences—has triggered alarm bells within the community.
These provisions revive pernicious myths that cast trans people as evil coercers. For example, in the 1991 Bollywood film Sadak, the actor Sadashiv Amrapurkar plays the role of Maharani, a transgender brothel owner who runs a sex-trafficking operation. In Sangharsh (1999), Ashutosh Rana portrays Lajja Shankar Pandey, a transgender religious fanatic who abducts and sacrifices children in her quest for immortality.
This stubborn trope is a relic of British colonial rule in India, according to experts. In 1871, the colonial administration introduced the Criminal Tribes Act, with the explicit intent to register, surveil, and control “certain criminal tribes and eunuchs.” Officers of the local government were required to maintain records of “all eunuchs residing in any town or place… who are reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children…” This Act was struck down in 1949.
The Bill resurrects similar ideas into the present. Most cases of alleged kidnapping by trans persons involve children or adults who either escaped natal family violence or have been thrown out of their homes and sought shelter in hijra households, community-based initiatives, or non-governmental organisations, said Mihir. “I do not know what data they consulted before assuming that a lot of children or adults are being kidnapped and forced to be trans,” Kanmani added.
Official data is unclear on the scale of such abductions. As of 2023, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) had registered 82,106 cases involving the abduction of children, according to its latest reports. Of these, almost 17,000 cases mention children—mostly girls—kidnapped for marriage. The NCRB records did not identify distinct cases in which children were kidnapped for coercion into adopting transgender identities.
If its sole purpose is to protect children or adults from abduction and coercion, then the Bill’s provisions on these aspects appear redundant, lawyers told queerbeat. Sections 137, 138, and 189 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) already criminalise the kidnapping and abduction of adults with imprisonment of seven years, and that of children with imprisonment of 10 years. For kidnapping children and trafficking them into begging by physical harm, the imprisonment extends to 20 years.
Given that abduction is already covered under existing laws, there seems to be no clear justification for these provisions in the Bill, said Kanmani. Instead, she added, it appeared to be sending one clear message: “a transgender or gender non-conforming person—minor or adult—dare not go and join a hijra or transgender household” since their decision could be framed as abduction by government authorities.
Therefore, the Bill’s provisions “could weaken or dismantle community support systems, including chosen families, community collectives, and traditional kinship structures that many trans people rely on,” Vihaan said. For transgender men, this is a double whammy. “Their identities may no longer be recognised within the legal definition of transgender persons, and the support systems that currently help them access services and protections could weaken or disappear,” Vihaan added.
Even as the Bill’s provisions may stigmatise trans people further, it appears to have done little to increase their protection from violence or harassment. Punishments for crimes against trans persons remain unchanged in the Bill.
The 2019 Act prescribes the same punishment for forcing transgender people into forced labour; denying them access to public spaces; forcing them to leave their places of residence; or subjecting them to physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and economic abuse—imprisonment from six months to two years, along with a possible fine. As queerbeat has previously reported, these punishments are lesser than those for similar crimes against cisgender and heterosexual people—the rape of a cisgender woman, for instance, carries a minimum penalty of imprisonment for up to 10 years.
In other words, the Bill appears to retain the 2019 Act’s implication that crimes against transgender persons are “petty crimes,” even as it introduces serious sentences in instances “where the government perceives that transgender people are committing offences,” said Tripti, the Lawyers Collective advocate. “This law can no longer be called [a] protection of transgender rights… it’s [a] violation,” she added.
What happens next
The amendment Bill will be presented to the Lok Sabha for its “second reading” in the next few days, when lawmakers will decide whether it will be reviewed by a standing committee or taken up for vote. If it is referred to a committee, its passage will be stalled, albeit temporarily. Otherwise, it will move to a “third reading,” where each of its clauses will be discussed and debated.
After this, if the Lok Sabha votes in favour of the Bill, it will move to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the parliament. If it passes after three similar readings there, it will be passed to the President of India for her assent, following which it will be formally instituted as an Act.
Notionally, this seems like a long process, but it often isn’t. In 2019, for instance, the government amended the Indian Constitution to mandate 10 percent reservations in education and employment for those from Economically Weaker Sections. The amendment was debated and approved by both houses of Parliament within a week.
At the time of publication, multiple queer rights organisations, as well as political parties such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist), had condemned the Bill and called for its withdrawal. Several protests were organised across the country, and more will take place over the next couple of days. #RejectTransBill2026 was trending on social media platforms.
The success or failure of these efforts could make or break how the nation treats its transgender citizens. “There will have to be some very serious mobilising by the community and by the civil society—what’s left of it,” Tripti said.
Vihaan summed it up thus: “This moment also reinforces the need to raise our voices and bring greater visibility to our stories, experiences, and realities.”