Ask any trans person and they will tell you their version of what I call “document drama.” It is a brief, almost theatrical episode inside the state’s chokeholds: a bank, a railway counter, a government office. The stage might vary, but every time the documents that seek to represent us collide with our personhood—the dissonance remains the same.
As a polygendered trans* person whose chosen name does not reflect in government-issued documents, I have rehearsed this choreography well. My encounters often unfold at the airport. As I hand over my fraying voter card to a guard or a ticketing agent, it inevitably prompts a pause. They look at the photo: a young girl with long, bleached strands of hair, a tentative stance, an awkward smile. Their gaze turns to me: hair shorn to a buzz on one side, a steadier posture.
The awkward syllables of my given name tumble out of their mouth—aye-shwuh-riya? There is a slight inflection at the end—a question mark trying to square the record with reality.
As I look for an accurate response, a thousand contradictory thoughts flood my brain: should I launch into a conversation about gender and queer deconstruction theory? Would the person in front of me follow this West-imported English jargon? Would they care? Is it presumptuous of me–a dominant caste person with class privilege—to assume that they wouldn’t? Do I even care? Why is it my responsibility to out myself to every individual I meet?
Eventually, in what is a practised stance, I choose sanity over authenticity. I respond with a smirk, followed by a slow, deliberate nod—the kind I would otherwise reserve for the stage.
Across multiple checkpoints, when my government name “Aishwarya Guha” flashes in vivid green across different screens, it tugs at an enduring rupture—the chasm between my state-approved identity and embodied one. Most people use “deadname” to refer to the name that a trans person was assigned at birth; some prefer “birth name” or “given name.” I favour “government name,” that is, the name the state recognises me by.
Our names are our first paths of intimacy with ourselves. They bear the legacies of what we inherit and endure. In India, the seemingly innocuous—“what’s your good name”—is more calibration than courtesy. It is an accounting of our caste, religion, and gender; a shorthand for our perceived place in an unequal order.
Although changing names is not a practice exclusive to trans people—it is a significant part of our journey of becoming, or what is academically known as a “social transition.” Reductive narratives tend to fixate on a single moment of “coming out” to make queer lives graspable to pop culture, while social transition is (often) a long-drawn process of experiments. Does this flowy skirt make me feel more myself, or is it the square-shouldered jacket today? When I train my voice to speak at least three registers lower, or start to show up in loose shirts and trousers, how does the interaction with my employer go? How does it feel when I step out in a dress and my body meets the public gaze: does my spine shift, does my walk change? Is it unsafe? Euphoric? Erotic?
Social transition is the process through which many of us transfolk ask and answer many of these questions, and perhaps experience ourselves—as our chosen selves—for the first time.
Choosing a name is a part of the same milieu. It is a meandering journey of experimenting with meaning and perception, playing hide-and-seek with social memory, and sometimes, a wink to our own chosen selves, for having assimilated into or averted gendered expectations.
Over the last three months, I spoke to half a dozen trans people about their names—the ones they chose, the ones they discarded, and the journeys that propelled the process. Some picked theirs by instinct, others reached for names that offered empowerment, possibility, or familiarity. Those who opted to change their name legally found that the path was fraught with bureaucratic hurdles, which extracted time and labour. The state’s scrutiny depleted the very sense of self they were seeking to restore.
“The system in place disproportionately harms the most vulnerable—those without resources, those fleeing persecution, and those from marginalised communities,” said Sophia*, a Goa-based transfemme person in her mid-thirties, who works on queer rights as a policy and legislation consultant with an international organisation. “The mythical euphoria of ‘being yourself’ fades quickly when faced with the bureaucratic machinery of the state,” she added.
Some, like me, have chosen to side-step the legal name-change process entirely—primarily because we don’t recognise the state as the sole arbitrator of our identities.
The detours and paths we take may look different, but they are animated by the same, unruly longing: a simple need to be known by a name that lets us claim the agency of who we are, that lets us author our own becoming.
Making Meaning: Our meandering search for the self
Name changes are hardly exclusive to queer lives—cishet people have long adapted theirs too, whether in response to the worlds they moved through or as gestures of reinvention.
Before his debut in 1944, the legendary actor Dilip Kumar changed his name from Mohammad Yousouf Khan because a producer told him it would help his screen identity stand out and give him “secular appeal,” he recalled in his autobiography. Several other actors, men and women alike, felt compelled to rechristen themselves in a newly-partitioned India for similar reasons. Rajiv Hari Om Bhatia dropped his given name in the late eighties and became the film star Akshay Kumar, “aise hi”—just like that, he later told news publications. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was once Ajay Mohan Singh Bisht; he assumed his current name after he became a Hindu monk.
Renaming has also been an act of resistance. In the late 1920s, the Tamil social reformer EV Ramaswamy—popularly known as Periyar—advocated for the rejection of caste surnames to challenge their discriminatory hierarchies. The social scientist and writer Kancha Iliah Shepherd added “Shepherd” to his name in 2016 to assert the dignity of his family’s ancestral occupation.
For trans folks, the decision to change our names is a life-affirming assertion. It is how we honour the values we choose, not those handed down to us by family, religion, caste, or the state.
“It was like coming home to myself,” said Zena Sagar about choosing her name. She is a 29-year-old independent producer who focuses on impact-driven narratives and is among the first trans women to produce films in India. Zena, who recently moved to Goa, was instinctively drawn to the soft feminine lilt of the ‘ena’ at the end of her name. As a Dalit trans woman and artist, she wanted a name that held both her power and her softness. “The name evokes an image of strength and beauty—it feels like me,” she said.
For most of us, this flicker of self-recognition is something we’re continually seeking. I, for one, knew that I needed a new name long before I had articulated my identity as queer or nonbinary. It was 2016. I was 28 years old, had moved to Goa, and had started a small digital arts collective called Loose Women Collective—a hat-tip to the theatre artist Maya Rao’s eponymous solo performance. By then, I felt that I had committed enough nefariousness to give rigid, idealised upper-caste frameworks of femininity a bad name. A name epitomised by the quintessential brand of womanhood that the film star Aishwarya Rai symbolised no longer worked for me.
For Aryan Somaiya, a trans man in his late-thirties who grew up in Mumbai, on the other hand, it was a devotion to Bollywood that guided his choice. “Arre, Shah Rukh Khan ka beta hai, yaar” [He is Shah Rukh Khan’s son], Aryan guffawed, referring to his namesake and freshly-minted director Aryan Khan. He punctuated his point with Shah Rukh’s trademark pose, arms spread wide open, body tilted just so.
Aryan and I traced the itinerant life of his names one rainy evening in Goa. His partner and he had moved to the state a little over a year ago, which is when we became friends. His initial choices weren’t driven by a connection to the names as much as by a hunger for acceptance. Different friend groups from different eras of his life know him by different names. “Some call me Parth, some Pratham, some even call me Prithvi,” Aryan said. “I was so desperate to be seen as a man then—and if a male name made that possible, so be it.”
For many trans folks, choosing a name becomes the construction of safety—a way for one’s identity to be validated in a world that insists on a recognisable binary.
Sophia, another close friend, felt this pressure too, especially when she was younger. She grew up in the Middle East, where her Indian parents had migrated—surrounded by a social environment in which being trans invited extreme legal persecution and stigma. For decades, her only access to queerness came from highly redacted websites.
When Sophia had to pick a name for herself as a young adult, she gravitated towards the name of her first friend in pre-school. “The choice was not a calculated act of femme expression but an instinctual grasping for a safe reference point,” she told me. The name, she realised, had also accumulated complex layers of significance in the intervening years. It was easy to write in Arabic and it maintained her birth name initials, offering a small but significant thread of continuity. It also masked her Indian nationality online, protecting her from being discovered by her immediate community.
Sophia only made sense of these early survival strategies as she grew older and claimed her trans self with more intention. But this is also when she experienced a quiet dissonance. The name’s perceived femininity co-opted it into a palatable binary, she realised. This co-option represented a trend she did not subscribe to: that trans persons must “pass” according to the stringent presets of gender expression to have a shot at safety and value.
As for me, navigating the underpinnings of my own queerness meant that I was left squarely in no-woman’s land—misaligned with my birth name; not yet in possession of a new one. I latched, for sometime, onto the gender ambiguity of the original pronunciation of my birth name—Oishorjyo—which had morphed into Aishwarya in anglicised state records. It helped that I had once met a boy called Oishorjyo. But my evolving self was characterised by a quest for militant autonomy, and this name was a dead giveaway of my Bengali origins.
Thus began the trials. I was oisho for a year, pronounced Osho for convenience; oishorjyo in more formal environments, and oishee for a couple of months—although I was quickly repulsed by the feminine overtones of this version.
The internet, with its fluid possibilities and curated identities, became my playground. On Instagram, I could audition a new name every fortnight. Across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr, I could try different versions all at once—each conjuring a different version of Self, tried on for a “fit check.”
I know several young trans persons for whom the internet has been a similar site of experimentation. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, social media saw a mushrooming of queer trans identities—people experimenting with names, pronouns, versions of their ‘euphoric’ selves. Although these platforms repeatedly contradicted and discarded their promises of safety and visibility, they offered a more flexible alternative to the state’s architecture.
Within India, academic research on transgender persons and the ways in which they use the internet to explore their identities is sparse. But a 2023 study from Germany, published in the International Journal of Transgender Health, offers a glimpse of its potential. The researchers interviewed 114 transgender adolescents and found that 60 percent of them used the internet to experiment with their gender identity, 80 percent used it to socially transition, and about one-third came out online before they told their friends or parents.
For Siaan, a 24-year-old trans masc theatre artist and drag performer who grew up in Satna in Madhya Pradesh, the internet promised relative anonymity, away from family members to whom he was not out yet. His online presence also helped him build a queer community in and around Mumbai, where he has been based for the last five-and-a-half years.
Siaan’s journey began with a pen name, “Siya,” which they used for their writings online when they were 14 or 15 years old. A tweak on that became their social media handle: Unicorn Siya. Later, as they began looking for a gender-affirming name, they asked their social media audiences for ideas. Siaan was the suggestion that clicked. It built on who they had been while making space for who they were becoming. The fact that it seamlessly aligned with their amorphous gender identity and expression felt euphoric.
But with great euphoria comes great bureaucracy.
The bureaucratic burden of changing names
The rich and complex inner worlds that animate the process of a trans person’s becoming have little to no bearing on the state’s procedures.
The accounts of those who pursued an official name change suggest that the process is mired in obstacles. Although there has been a patchwork of progressive court rulings and policy shifts over the past decade, systemic overhaul remains elusive.
In 2014, the Supreme Court upheld the right of trans persons to express their self-identified gender. Six years later, however, the 2020 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Rules introduced a “certificate of identity” which trans individuals could obtain by applying online to the district magistrate of the area they reside in. In effect, the recognition of a person’s transgender identity became contingent on state approval. As several media reports note, this approval is infamously hard to get.
In theory, the transgender certificate entitles a trans person to amend their name and gender in official documents. In practice, the 2020 rules do not explicitly clarify how that change is meant to occur: must the applicant pursue this change with every government department themselves, or would the state update these records when it issues the certificate of identity?
“The whole point of the Trans Act and the subsequent procedures was to try and avoid physical interface, physical verification as much as possible, because those are sites of discrimination,” said Kanmani R, a transwoman lawyer who practises in the Supreme Court and Madras High Court. “The idea was that this [the transgender certificate] could be enough but it never became enough.”
Take the case of Zena. She obtained her transgender certificate in 2023, but only after jumping through several bureaucratic hoops. Under section 6 of the Transgender Rules, a person can apply for a certificate of identity with a Transgender—or “T”—marker by submitting a notarised affidavit, along with identity documents such as their Aadhaar or PAN card, or passport. Those seeking to revise their legal gender to binary markers—male or female—may do so under Section 7 of the rules, and include hospital-issued proof of medical intervention.
Zena first applied for her certificate under Section 7 to update her chosen name as well as change her gender to female. She included medical documentation about her gender affirming care, such as her Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) certificate. But her application was rejected. Officials from the Transgender Welfare Development Board in West Bengal—where Zena was studying— advised her to apply under Section 6 instead, which meant that her certificate carried the “T” marker. After she received this certificate, she applied under Section 7 to update her gender to female once again. This time, a district magistrate in Kolkata rejected the application on the grounds that she had not undergone surgery.
In December 2023, Zena filed an appeal against the rejection to the state’s Transgender Welfare Development Board, pointing out that her medical documents satisfied the requirements of the Transgender Rules. Months passed without a response. Exhausted by the silence, Zena filed a petition before the Calcutta High Court around June 2024. Meanwhile, the Transgender Welfare Board rejected her appeal in November 2024. It claimed that it lacked the authority to interpret the law. Her case before the Calcutta High Court is still pending.
Zena updated her Aadhaar and PAN cards on the basis of her transgender certificate—both of which now carry the “T” marker as well. “I had to get on with it, because I needed a job and this process had already taken up years of my life,” she told me. But the distress did not end there. In early 2024, the manager of her bank refused to amend her account details, claiming the bank had “no clear instructions” on accepting a transgender certificate as valid proof for name and gender change, Zena recalled. She drafted a formal letter to the bank’s grievance officers—one she was compelled to sign using her dead name—asserting her legal right to the revision. It was only after these negotiations that she could get her name changed.
But these hard-won victories feel momentary. “Given my case is still ongoing, I’m afraid that if I update my other documents, I’ll have to go through this emotionally distressing process all over again,” Zena said. Her passport still carries her dead name and assigned gender, creating yet another barrier to her livelihood and mobility.
Before the Transgender Rules came into place, trans people who wanted to change their names legally used the same method as everyone else. Under this process, the applicant drafts an affidavit declaring their intent to change their name as well as the reason for it, gets the affidavit notarised, publishes an announcement of the change in both a regional and a national newspaper, and finally, registers their name change in a state or national gazette.
But this process also meant that trans people were forced to publicly out themselves. “For trans people escaping abusive situations, these public disclosures came at a huge risk,” said Kanmani. “In any case, an instance of name and gender change is between the government and the applicant. Why should the applicant be forced to publish their private details in such a public way?”
The process can also change across different states. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the state government’s Thirunangai mobile application allows trans people to register their details and access essential documents. But since the app is valid only within Tamil Nadu, it cannot be used to change documents such as an Aadhaar or PAN card, or a passport.
In practice, different government offices adhere to different protocols because of a lack of clarity on how a trans person can update their other records once they have obtained a transgender certificate with their chosen name. “For example, many authorities continue to ask for gazette notifications for change of name,” Kanmani pointed out. “Further, for changing school educational documents, the certificate of identity seems to be never enough; but rather becomes dependent on the demands of the particular state office.” She knew of several cases in which trans people had been directed by officials to publish announcements about changing their names to update their Aadhar card or passports, even after they had obtained their transgender certificates.
Such procedural gaps often leave people caught between what the law promises and what government departments demand.
In April 2024, for instance, the union government told the Madras High court that India’s passport rules did not require a person to submit their surgical certificates if they wanted to revise their gender to male or female. Yet, in September that year, when Aryan applied to a Passport Seva Kendra in Mumbai to renew his passport with his updated name and gender, the officials asked him for proof of his surgery, he recalled. He was able to get his passport only after he wrote to various officials and advocated for himself.
Not everyone has the privilege, wherewithal, or access to repeatedly challenge official authorities, Kanmani pointed out. Trans persons from marginalised communities are often forced to “shell out money”—to get their affidavit notarised, to publish ads announcing their changed names, or to get legal assistance—unless they find lawyers and activists willing to provide pro-bono support, she added.
Most trans people face discrimination from the very officials meant to assist them. In late 2020, Nikunj Jain, a trans man from Indore, applied for his transgender certificate while he was medically transitioning. When his application was stalled for nearly three months, despite the 30-day deadline mandated by the Transgender Rules, he approached a staffer at the Madhya Pradesh Social Justice Department for assistance. The official’s gaze travelled slowly across his body, sizing him up. “How are you even transgender? You look like a man to me,” Nikunj recalled being told.
Such encounters are common, said Nikunj, who is also the co-director of Tapish Foundation, a trans rights organisation. “Most state officials conflate all trans identities with the Hijra community, or at best with intersex people, underscoring a dire need for sensitisation,” he added. Since 2020, his organisation has been working in several rural districts in Madhya Pradesh to help trans people access their basic documentation. Yet even his experience as an activist did not shield him from bureaucratic hostility. In 2021, when he applied to update his legal gender to male, and included his HRT documents, an official at the district collector’s office accused him of wrongdoing. “Yeh kya do-nambari kaam kar karhe ho,” (What is this fraud that you are trying to commit), Nikunj recounted the official telling him.
Nikunj then had to approach yet another authority—the National Institute of Social Defence, which comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs and works on the welfare of trans people. He obtained a letter from the institute, which affirmed the validity of his HRT reports, and applied for the certificate once again, he recalled. The process, Nikunj said, dragged on for about five or six months—under the Transgender Rules, the official timeline for the change of a person’s gender to male or female is 15 days. Through this time, Nikunj made repeated trips from his village to the state offices in Mandsaur district, over sixty kilometres away. “Do you know, at this point, I have destroyed six years of my life in chasing documentation?” he told one official. “What do you think that does to my career?”
“The ‘state gaze’ constantly scrutinises and questions the legitimacy of one’s identity, reinforcing the message that being trans is ‘abnormal,’” Aryan, who is a clinical psychotherapist, noted.
It is a gaze that compounds the precarity trans people navigate. “This bureaucratic battle happens alongside other trans-specific hardships: job discrimination, workplace harassment, outing by HR, public harassment, violence, difficulties in romantic relationships—creating a deep sense of loneliness,” Aryan added. “The process is designed to make individuals feel helpless and out of control, leading to anxiety, depression, and dread.” With such high social and emotional distress, substance use becomes a way for some trans folks to find release and control, he pointed out.
What about those who opt out entirely? For someone like me, who does not intend to pursue legal transition, it means a mandatory outing of myself to anyone I engage with in professional contexts. I now keep a few email templates ready, noting that the name on the invoice differs from the one on my bank account. The journey from feeling obligated to explain this inconsistency to simply stating it exists has taken a few years.
Every choice, however, has consequences. For those of us who step outside the legal process, the cost resurfaces at the final threshold. In recent years, we have witnessed multiple instances in which the lived identities of trans people who died were erased by the state’s institutions or their natal families. Their funeral rites were conducted under their dead names and genders assigned at birth. A stark reminder that opting out of legal transition does not shield us from harm. The system that fails us in life imposes its indignities on us, even in our deaths.
Choosing Self, Despite
Whether or not one alters their documents, choosing a name is a defiant act of agency. It is a declaration that the self is not a static, state-owned record but a constantly evolving narrative. As Aryan put it, we give birth to ourselves every day—“recreating how you see your body and what you feel about that body. The name is only the first word of that story.”
Within the state’s sprawling apparatus of control, the simple act of self-naming transforms into a radical socio-political statement, even if it is not intended as one. It becomes an inevitable disruption to the nation-state’s project of governability, neatly packed into legible categories of patriarchal binaries.
As I navigate the dissonance between the person the state assigned me to be and the person I chose to become, I often return to the American social activist Abbi Hoffman’s words from Steal This Book: “Become a phantom. A ghost in their machine. They can’t govern what they can’t find, can’t categorise, can’t understand.”
*Sophia’s chosen name has been altered in this story at her request to protect her privacy.
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This story is part of a queerbeat series supported by the Mariwala Health Initiative.