Transgender people are almost entirely absent from the teaching and non-teaching workforce of Indian higher educational institutions, according to provisional estimates by the All India Survey on Higher Education included in the University Grants Commission’s annual reports.
During the 2022-’23 academic year—the latest year for which this data is available—only 233 of the 16,07,839 teachers in higher education institutions were trans. This would mean that they made up less than 0.01 percent of 16 lakh teachers in total. By comparison, men accounted for nearly 56 percent of the teaching staff, while women made up roughly 44 percent.
Across both teaching and non-teaching jobs, the proportion of trans persons in the workforce stayed roughly the same across the three academic years for which data is available: 2020-’21, 2021-’22, and 2022-’23. They accounted for far less than 0.1 percent of those employed at higher education institutes through this period.
The number of transgender teachers registered a modest uptick across these three years: from 139 in 2020-’21, and 177 in 2021-’222, to 233 in 2022-’23. Non-teaching employment registered a decline across all genders. The number of trans people in non-teaching positions dipped from 463 in 2020-’21 to 326 in 2021-’22, and inched slightly to 395 in 2022-’23. According to the 2011 census, there are 4,87,803 trans persons in India—a number that is likely an undercount.
Across all three years, more women were employed in teaching roles than in non-teaching positions. The same was true for men in two of the three years. By contrast, more trans persons were employed in non-teaching positions throughout.
These low numbers are a reflection of the institutional barriers that trans persons have to battle even before they are recruited, pointed out Karthik Bittu Kondiah, a trans rights advocate and an associate professor at Ashoka University who is involved in institutional policy discussions.
“Exclusion of transgender persons often begins at the very point of entry into institutions,” said Bittu.“Because trans persons may have certificates and documents with different names or genders—admission or recruitment systems sometimes assume these are fraudulent applications and screen them out at an early stage.”
But the problem isn’t only bureaucratic. “In general, all things being equal, people don’t want to take a chance on having a trans employee because of ideas of social and professional respectability,” Bittu said. “Once entry has happened, trans persons often face a host of micro and macro aggressions, not just from institutions themselves but also from external pressures on them.”
The pattern reflects what researchers describe as a “leaky pipeline,” or the gradual loss of people from marginalised communities through advancing levels of academia. “Faculty positions involve a lot more discretion in hiring,” Bittu said. “We see a leaky pipeline even for cis women—the ratio shrinks as you move from students to faculty. For trans persons the starting numbers are already extremely low, so the drop-off becomes even more drastic.”
In 2015, for instance, Manabi Bandopadhyay was appointed the principal of a well-known women’s college in West Bengal. She was the first transgender person in India to hold the position. But she quit a year-and-a-half later, citing her frustration at the “non-cooperative” behaviour of her colleagues and students in her resignation letter.
A decade later, in June 2025, N Jency, a trans woman from Tamil Nadu, reportedly became the state’s first trans person to be appointed an assistant professor in a college. That same year, the Supreme Court of India held a government school in Gujarat guilty of discrimination because it withdrew a job offer from Jane Kaushik, a trans woman teacher, after learning her gender identity. While this ruling did not involve a higher education institution, it drew national attention to the widespread prejudices that affect the employment of trans persons across the sector.
On paper, legal safeguards protect trans persons from systemic exclusion. In its 2014 ruling in Nalsa vs Union of India, the Supreme Court of India directed central and state governments to recognise transgender persons as socially and economically backward classes, as well as extend reservations to them in educational institutions and public appointments.
Yet, these protections have not quite translated to reality. For instance, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, prohibits discrimination against trans persons in education and employment. It also mandates the establishment of institutional grievance redressal mechanisms to report such instances. Yet, the Act does not prescribe any specific quotas or targeted recruitment measures to ensure the inclusion of trans persons within higher educational institutions. Until affirmative action ensures not only equitable recruitment but also safe workspaces, the representation of trans persons in Indian higher education institutions in India will likely remain minuscule.
In these data bites, we are only presenting publicly available data about queer persons and communities in India. We will follow this up by investigating, analysing, and reporting on these figures.