Growing up as an intersex person, Momo inhabited a world that had almost no language for who they are. Belonging, they learned early, was not something intersex people are simply given. It is something to be fought for or quietly abandoned. They chose to fight.
In 2019, Momo co-founded Intersex Human Rights India (IHRI), a Bengaluru-based organisation that builds visibility and community for intersex people in a landscape that has historically erased them. In November 2025, they left IHRI to work as an independent activist. Over the years, their work has spanned several domains including HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive rights, community organising, and youth leadership. With each of these endeavours, Momo’s focus remains centered around fostering what they call “the collective survival of a statically erased intersex people.”
If you ask them what their advocacy and activism actually looks like in practice, they are likely to describe a pot of adrak chai [ginger tea] that has simmered longer than it should because an important conversation hadn’t reached its conclusion yet, or an afternoon in Cubbon Park where strangers sat on picnic mats talking about heartbreak, politics, and hope while the city bustled on all around them. For Momo, the most transformative community work has rarely happened in conference rooms. It has happened in the in-between moments, when someone finally felt safe enough to speak honestly.
Today, Momo is deeply worried about the implications of the recently passed Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 for intersex persons. They believe that their community and its needs have been ignored and overlooked, not only by the government, but also in queer-trans spaces.
In this conversation, they speak about the relationship between the intersex and trans movements, the violence of bio-essentialism, and what solidarity must look like to actually mean something.
You describe the intersex and trans communities as “cousins, not twins.” Can you explain the distinction?
I try to approach this question very carefully, because most often people assume that when we talk about the intersex community specifically, we are somehow rejecting the solidarity we are building with the trans community. It becomes a “you versus us” situation.
What I got to know from speaking to people at the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism in Bengaluru is that there is no documented history of intersex people coming out and visibly supporting the trans movement. That’s a significant marker of how thoroughly intersex history has been erased. [This] doesn’t mean [intersex] people didn’t exist. It means they didn’t have the vocabulary to express how they wanted to exist.
There is absolutely an overlap between intersex and trans struggles. Both communities experience the policing of bodies, gender expectations, documentation barriers, stigma, violence, and social exclusion. Many intersex people, in their early days, begin by identifying as transgender. And we know that both of these realities can [co-]exist. They can also not overlap — a person may be intersex and not identify as transgender at all.
So when I say cousins and not twins, I mean: the similarities are real and the solidarity is vital, but the specific, unique intersex experience cannot disappear inside the broader gender politics. Those are two different things.
A lot of governments today speak about gender using the language of biology and certainty. As an intersex person, how do you respond to those debates?
I’ll be honest, I used to think bio-essentialism was good. That was my early understanding, before I grasped how much harm it brings to bodies and to movements.
The biggest problem with bio-essentialism is that it reduces human beings and their existence to very rigid biological categories, and then assigns certain people dignity—or destiny—based on those categories. It assumes that bodies must fit into neat binaries to make sense socially, politically, and morally. The morality piece is especially important, because that’s where governments and private institutions both participate.
What intersex people do—just by existing—is disrupt that entire assumption. And because we disrupt it, there’s a gap in language. People don’t know how to describe us within their frameworks.
Here’s something I’ve been watching recently: many intersex people use the terms “intersex man” and “intersex woman.” When they do, conservatives use that to say, “But you just admitted you don’t fit the binary—so how can you call yourself a man or woman?” They think they’ve caught us in a contradiction. What they don’t understand is that when intersex people say “intersex man,” they mean something quite specific—that their biological characteristics are closer to what’s associated with a male/female body. They’re not collapsing into the binary; they’re describing layered realities. And that layering is too complicated for most people to sit with, let alone conservatives who want a simple answer.
Another thing that happens is that intersex people are brought into these conversations only as exceptions—to test whether the rule of biology itself holds. People point to us and say, see, even nature makes exceptions. But we are not exceptions that prove a rule. Our existence doesn’t validate anyone’s framework. It challenges it.
You’ve spoken about how intersex realities are statistically erased inside broader policy frameworks. Can you walk us through how that erasure actually works?
There are very specific historical and structural reasons why intersex people remain underdocumented in India. But the larger question is: how many doctors actually understand what an intersex variation is, and how do they measure it?
In most Indian hospitals when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia visible at birth, the doctor goes to the parents and says, “We can do surgery, the child will be okay.” In some cases, if the family can’t afford surgery, the child is given to a gharana. That’s the usual sequence.
For a very long time, intersex variations were treated through a logic of secrecy rather than understanding. Doctors advised families not to tell their children about their own bodies. I have an intersex friend who grew up believing they were a woman, only to discover in adulthood that they had always been chromosomally male—and their family had made that decision because they wanted a girl child. That is a violation. That is torture.
There are also the diagnostic limitations. Chromosomal testing in India is expensive. Ten years ago, it cost around eight to nine thousand rupees and took two to three weeks. Not every family can access that. And many intersex variations don’t manifest at birth—some appear only during puberty, some during fertility investigations in adulthood, some never. So people may live entire lives, get married, have or not have children, and only discover through an infertility test that they have a chromosomal variation—which still wouldn’t have been called “intersex.” It would have been named after whatever syndrome applies.
And in some cases, as I told you, the autopsy reveals it after death.
We have now documented over 66 intersex variations, and we’re still learning. But if people are fearful of even speaking about their biological reality—if parents hide it, if doctors pathologise it, if institutions don’t count it—then the data will never exist. And if there’s no data, it becomes very easy for policy makers to say there’s no community to address.
The Transgender Persons Act has brought renewed attention to gender identity in India. What specific fears does it raise for intersex people?
The act requires a person to appear before a District Magistrate( DM) and undergo a medical examination [for their gender identity to be officially recognised]. For an intersex person, my fear is that this leads to repeated medical examinations where one DM may understand an intersex variation very differently from another. You will never know what happens in that room, or who will be complicit in what.
And this isn’t only about older generations navigating a broken system. This could be an eighteen or nineteen-year-old standing in front of a DM, having to reveal and explain their body to someone who may not know what intersex means—who may expect to find what they imagine a “hermaphrodite” to look like, which, for the record, is a figure that does not exist in documented human biology.
When that DM doesn’t find what they expected, the response will likely be: come back for further examination, go to our clinic, undergo more testing. And as I’ve been reading in cases from other countries—chromosomal testing can feed into surveillance systems, affect welfare access, affect whether a passport is issued. That connection between biological data and state power is not distant fiction.
On forced medical scrutiny, specifically: this has already been a lived reality for intersex people. The new act threatens to amplify it significantly.
If policy makers genuinely consulted intersex communities, what would change immediately?
My honest answer is that they would not consult us meaningfully, even if they invited us to the room.
I have sat with policy makers. We talk, we negotiate, we submit written recommendations. What we find is that erasure happens at the level of vocabulary itself. They prefer broad umbrella language — “gender diverse people,” “people of different sexualities”—because it sounds progressive without committing to anything specific. When they do mention intersex people, the way they say it reveals everything.
In February, I was a subject-matter expert at a consultation organised by an institution under the Ministry of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj. The session was described as being for gender diverse, intersex, and trans people. Over three to four hours, I could not find a single moment to speak—the entire conversation was taken over by the trans narrative, not maliciously, but because that’s what the platform centered. Nobody listened. And when a young person tries to speak in English using technical language about intersex realities, people dismiss it as naivety.
There are concrete things that would change if there was real consultation… A ban on non-consensual surgeries on intersex children. Intersex-led oversight of any council or committee that claims to represent us—there is currently no intersex person on the National Transgender Council. Insurance coverage for intersex-related health needs, which currently doesn’t exist in meaningful ways. An acknowledgment in medical education that intersex variations are not chromosomal disorders.
Instead, what we get is a report that says inclusion exists. The inclusion is on paper. The exclusion is material.
Queer spaces are sometimes held up as safe spaces, but you describe the exclusion of intersex folks there too.
Yes. I’ve had very difficult moments in queer spaces. I once raised the question of 1 percent reservation for intersex and trans people in Karnataka. That conversation exploded. I was told to keep quiet. I was told I didn’t look intersex enough—a prominent trans guru in Karnataka asked me directly, if you’re intersex, why don’t you appear intersex?
So I stepped back. And the question I carry with me is: if I withdraw because the social exclusion is too much, because the internal power dynamics are too exhausting, then people suffer because my voice is absent. But if I push forward, I face repercussions from multiple directions. There’s no clean answer.
What I will say is that the fossils of the movement—the older activists—need to step down and create space. They say young people aren’t interested in politics anymore. But they’re not creating platforms for young people to rise. They’re not willing to give up the power chair. And the privileges that young people have today? Those came from the sacrifices of the previous generation. That should be recognized, not resented.
What does genuine solidarity between the intersex and trans movements actually require?
Solidarity should not be optional. It should not be an afterthought. It becomes strongest when it doesn’t erase the differences between communities.
One of the great risks in coalition politics is that smaller or less visible communities disappear into the larger narrative. In India, that has happened to intersex people repeatedly. Trans organisations don’t do it maliciously—they also haven’t had platforms for long, and they have their own urgencies. But the effect is the same.
Trans advocacy is largely centered on identity recognition and self-determination—incredibly important. Intersex advocacy is centered on bodily autonomy, on the right not to be surgically altered without consent, on medical intervention and surgical violence. These realities overlap, but they are not interchangeable. And that distinction matters.
Solidarity works best when communities can say: our struggles are connected, but they are not the same. Intersex people do not need to minimise trans struggles to speak about intersex oppression. Trans communities do not need to erase intersex people to fight for trans liberation. These things can coexist. Movements become healthier when we stop treating that nuance as division politics.
What I’ve rarely seen in India, and more often in Southeast Asia, is communities sitting together, putting their differences aside long enough to acknowledge what they’ve done for each other. We rarely just sit and share a cup of chai and say: look at what we’ve built together. That is a very South Asian problem, and it’s a sad reflection of how community politics functions across this region.