#hijra

Where does the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act Amendment bill No. 79/2026 come from? What is the ideology that leads to it?

A careful examination of the history and present of anti-trans currents in India and globally can reveal parts of the answer. A friend from the Center for Policy and Legal Research mentions that while it has mostly been a shock to both the known progressive voices in the community and the known rabble-rousers, in terms of timing and phrasing and action plan, the overall intent of the amendment has been clear to him ever since a throwaway statement made by the Indian Government's Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta. Tushar Mehta, a significant voice in arguing that the Shaheen Bagh peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act were divisive acts of sedition, had mentioned this in 2023 court proceedings about social justice, welfare, and reservations: the primary reason why the Government had not yet taken serious steps to implement the reservation mandated for transgender persons is the vague and overly broad definition, in the government's view, that the word "transgender person" has in the current legislative framework set up by the 2019 TG Bill.

What is the problem? In my opinion, it is that the Central Government recognises the subject-making power of juridical processes and outcomes[1]. There has been a particular legal history and legislative follow-up to the transgender question in India - who are the transgender people, how do they become legible subjects under law and the state machinery, and how do we govern/develop/control/empower this class of citizen? The act of a government body issuing an identity card is a significant act in a democratic setup like ours - one identity card, when issued, can lead to a cascade of potential name, gender changes in other documents, and a gradual modification of every aspect that makes a trans woman like me a 'male' under the law.

This is significant because to name something is to give it the consideration of being discussed as a community, a denomination, a stakeholder. This is also significant because one of the potential welfare benefits to which the TG identity card is connected is reserved seats in educational institutions, government postings, and competitive exams. On the surface this is comparable to the 'caste certificate' - a document that is uniquely difficult to procure and serves as the basis for availing welfare schemes as genuine recipients. This comparison leads to one of the legible reasons why this amendment exists: it is another proposed acid rain in the erosion of what reservations mean in our country. In fact, this can be seen as a successor to the efficient and rapid implementation of the 'Economically Weaker Sections (EWS)' reservation, a move meant primarily to weaken the intent of reservations and provide fuel to the argument that it is a poverty alleviation scheme, and secondarily to bring dominant castes into the purview of reservations. The argument underpinning the EWS is the existence of a 'genuinely oppressed' class of people, those who are not in any scheduled or notified 'backward' class but can prove that their annual family income is below a particular threshold (egregiously a lower threshold than the limit for the 'creamy layer' of OBC reservations).

This argument carries on into the proposed Amendment: its officially stated intent is the perceived mismatch (no evidence provided) between the broad definition of a 'transgender person' under the 2019 TG Act and the existence of a smaller, genuinely oppressed subset of the transgender community. Arguments about who doesn't deserve reservations are a popular false flag in discussions like these, since caste is a fiercely contested system that is central to so many aspects of our everyday economic, social, family, and even personal lives. Most of these arugments are started by people who are ideologically invested but do not consider themselves as potential recipients of reservation. It is not that the upper caste opposer of reservations wants them for himself - what he wants is a cunning redrawing of boundaries so that only those he considers as genuinely oppressed are benefiting from them.

Thus there needs to be a narrative of a subset of the community to valourise as the most oppressed of the oppressed and it necessarily comes with the scapegoats (like the metaphorical iPhone-owning Dalit) who are undeservedly benefiting from the provisions of the TG Act. The chosen subsets for both of these ideological classes are significant: the communities chosen as 'genuinely oppressed' are the communities that have religio-cultural identities like Hijra, Kinnar, Jogti, and the intersex community (but only those people with intersex variations distinguishable at birth). The subtle sleight of hand at play here is that there is no accepted definition of a 'hijra': in fact most non-community people and cis people do not have any idea what makes a person a hijra. This has been the subject of much colonial and colonial-inspired ethnography and subject to the usual anthropological imperialism of understanding complex postcolonial subjects as "ancient third-gender communities," a discussion for another essay, but suffice it to say researchers balk at properly characterizing the hijra community out of respectful ignorance.

It is somewhat clear how one becomes transgender: at some point in life, a human being starts noticing a dissonance between the way they are treated as a gendered body and the way they would like to be treated. Gender is fundamental to how we move about the world, how we position ourselves in it, what kind of interactions we have with people, places, objects, and systems, and so eventually it becomes clear that there is an incongruence, that I do not want to be frisked by this security guard on this side of the metro station but by that security guard on that side, and this affects something as simple as which bathroom I use to something as profound as who gets to sign a consent for invasive surgery when I'm unconscious. Different people talk about this as being different levels of voluntary - in my personal experience, I thought it was a choice I made, but every day as I grow more comfortable in my transsexual body, I'm realising that it is a choice I'd been blocked from making and I should have had the courage to make this choice a lot earlier, because my body has known for a long time even though my rational mind took time to catch up and recognise that in this world, a tranny is what I am. Others grow supremely uncomfortable having a particular puberty - school life becomes difficult, it is hard to repress and suppress your gender feelings, and you eventually either get harassed out of school or find yourself at the receiving end of corrective violence from your family, and this leads to a large number of transgender individuals leaving home with no safety net. Most of us take some kind of action to dissociate ourselves from being perceived in the gender we were assigned at birth, and look and act and be perceived otherwise.

It is not clear to the outside world how one becomes a hijra. I will say this much frankly - I am not an ethnographer and am not bound to such ethics. The hijras are predominantly transfeminine, androphilic, matriarchal, and follow syncretic (Hindu and Muslim) religious and cultural practices. Anybody can become a hijra by paying a certain amount of money to a 'guru,' an influential house (gharana) mother in the community. This payment of money is in return for her protection and entry into her house of transfeminine individuals. It also comes with an obligation to earn money - often either through begging or through sex work - and give your guru the entirety of your earnings from the day, in exchange for food, shelter, beatings, and most importantly, the chance to one day get approved for 'nirvanam' or bottom surgery or castration. There is a price set for you, and if you want to leave this bondage or join another gharana, you or your sponsor from the other gharana have to pay. This is enforced by gang violence and semi-organised crime. These are strictly and fiercely hierarchical systems - the head of a gharana is a nayak, and under her are a few gurus, and under each guru is her jamaat of essentially bonded individuals.

Why does this exist? Although I have made a serious effort not to romanticise what is very clearly familial abuse within found/chosen family, the reason such a system exists and thrives is because nobody wants to employ transgender individuals. Trans folks are severely ostracised in education, housing, and employment, and the hijra gharana is often the only choice for many trans people who have not been able to finish their education, or find a job, or keep one. It is a community formed by bloody circumstances and keep together by blood, desperation, and hierarchy. It is time we stopped romanticising it. I write this at the risk of being targeted by gharanas near me, but they already despise me for not wanting bottom surgery, and worse, being attracted to women. It was going to be a matter of time, but somebody has to write something counter to academia's romanticisation and the center's distortion and name it for what it is.

This much is very very clear: a government identity card is free for anyone to obtain if they can prove that they satisfy the criteria. A community identity is not free for anyone to obtain, and is very much a way to gatekeep whether or not you are allowed to hold this identity. The jamaat are, to drop any pretense of wokeness, intensely regressive, violent, and hierarchical. I write this in the knowledge that younger, bleeding-heart individuals may consider me heartless and ever-compromising activists and NGO representatives may consider me divisive. The topmost layer of nayaks is incredibly wealthy and politically powerful. Political power in this context means that their assent is needed before welfare can trickle down to their chelas. And traditionally, they have been patriarchal, conservative, and violently opposed to transmasculinity, gender nonconformity, and any sexuality that doesn't center and worship men.

Trans men and transmasculine individuals are uniquely scapegoated in this amendment. It has long been "accepted knowledge" in trans activism circles that if you have to get anything done, you have to let go of and allow the extreme transphobia the jamaat has towards trans men. The 'invisibility' of trans men is often given much academic treatment, but this invisibility is not inevitable; it is manufactured hatred, it is the concerted power-grabbing effect of one trans community having been given certain recognitions and turning around and burning the bridge. Unless transmasculinity is proactively and wholesomely accounted for in any future definition of a transgender person, we cannot move forward.

Many people have written about what there is to be opposed in this amendment, and how to go about opposing it - these are very valuable resources and I'll be linking to them as I update this post. But having traveled with and been a part of hijra groups to a small extent, I know some aspects of hijra existence that have been done a brutal disservice by academic romanticisation. Now that a parliament bill has been proposed naming hijras as the real transgenders and the rest of us as self-mutilating freaks, it is time that we looked at a community whose violence seems inescapable. If it is a choice between letting go of my transmasculine brothers and saying the inconvenient truth about the jamaat despite knowing that cis people will use this to divide us further, I choose the latter. Push has come to shove. The jamaat must fight for the inclusion of our trans brothers, or where I morally stand is in the opposite side.

Addendum

It is not clear that this bill outright benefits the Hijra community, or even a set of its most powerful members that can be named. As it stands, the amendment has very devious double-bind: where it has reduced transgender identity to a few socio-religious communities, it also mentions "any person or child who has been by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence, either with or without consent, compelled to assume, adopt, or outwardly present a transgender identity, by mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure or otherwise." It leaves no provision for these procedures to be done voluntarily without inducement or deceit. In the clause meant for delineating punishments for crimes against transgender folks, also includes serious punishments including imprisonment for five to ten years for performing this coercion. As it stands, a coherent reading of this bill criminalizes every hijra guru and nayak.

While ideologically the figure of the hijra is used for moving the goalposts of trans identity, materially the hijra is criminalized for merely existing, and only children born intersex can be inducted into this community without someone falling foul of this law. In summary - only the hijra is the genuinely oppressed transgender person, and it is not possible to induct someone into the hijra community without performing a crime according to this bill. The attack is on self-perceived gender incongruence: this amendment inescapably mandates you to live life as your gender assigned at birth, and anyone who helps you transition is seriously criminalized alongside the gravest crimes in this country.

Practically speaking, this leads to the question of how we oppose this bill and how the Jamaat might. This is a moment where transmasculine people, gender non-conforming people, unaffiliated trans women, and the hijras can come together to define and understand transgender identity in a way that isn't tied to religion and the jamaat.

The material conditions of an average hijra is a far cry from the opulence of the average nayak, and there is no convenient moment to bring this up, and thus this inconvenient existential threat is when I choose to speak about it.

India is home to one of the world’s largest and most visible transgender communities who have shaped centuries of culture and resilience. In 2014, the India Supreme Court affirmed that gender identity in all its forms is a fundamental right. In 2019, that principle was written into law.

This is not just a trans issue. The proposed 2026 amendment bill threatens non-binary and gender-diverse people too.

At its core, it removes the right to self-identify. Replacing it with a system where a state-appointed medical board determines whether someone can be legally recognised as transgender. Identity, instead of being personal and self-defined, is proposed to become something that needs approval.

The definition of who qualifies is also narrowed. Many people who currently identify as trans or gender-diverse risk being excluded from legal recognition altogether: okaying trans women from traditional communities but not trans men.

Legal identity affects everything from access to healthcare, documentation, employment, housing, and personal safety. For those undergoing or seeking gender-affirming care, this disruption is worrying. For others, the risk is being erased from systems that govern daily life.

There are also provisions framed around “misuse” including penalising the act of “forcing someone to be transgender.” While positioned as protection, language like this, without clear evidence or safeguards, can be interpreted broadly. Historically, that ambiguity has not favoured marginalised communities.

Reversing a decade of progress, India’s highest court recognised self-identification as intrinsic to dignity and autonomy in 2014. This amendment challenges that foundation, shifting authority from the individual to the state.

Transfeminine Hijra have existed in South Asia since as far back as the 16th century. Some Hijra understand themselves as women, while others view Hijra as its own separate gender category.

For centuries, Hijra have formed households and communities, supporting each other and their wider family circles, and playing important performance roles at events like births and weddings.

In the 19th-century, under British colonial rule, Hijra were criminalised for their gender non-conforming behaviour. They fought back, resisting colonial efforts to erase their identities.

Despite bans on their feminine presentation and traditional performance, Hijra continued their cultural practices and their communities continue to thrive today.

Anyway, happy Lesbian Visibility Week to all lesbians/sapphics and those who present as such, especially those of colour, and those in challenging countries and/or situations, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, intersex and trans folks, fellow queer muslims, and mspec and aspec sapphics engaged in lesbian/wlw relationships and culture. If it’s hard for you to be visible, remember your lesbianism (which can be a part of your queer experience even if you don’t specifically identify as a lesbian) is being recognized and celebrated in these events too. (On the official website—“LVW is inclusive: our umbrella covers many identities, including lesbians, queer women, bi women, trans women, nonbinary folks, and those connected to lesbian culture. Visibility strengthens all of us.”) Whenever I see posts by exclusionists using this as an opportunity to rant about how folks are trying to hijack LVW or appropriate and steal from “real lesbians”, I feel like they have gravely lost touch with the historical roots of the LGBTQ+ community and movement, which was to secure liberation for us all, even when we’re not white/western allo monosexual cis feminine women. Your sapphism isn’t less “pure” than theirs. There isn’t a separate generalised sapphic/wlw week even though “lesbian” is less commonly used as an umbrella label nowadays, because we are all still equally and powerfully lesbian in our diverse visibility, especially when unified.

A note on the sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent

There is no realistic way for me to exhaustively examine the context of every South Asian transfeminized population (though believe me, I’d like to). As such, I’m going to limit my scope to India, but make a quick initial note about Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Pakistani transfeminized communities, according to my partner’s sisters who are in the community, do consider ‘hijra’ more derogatory than their Indian counterparts necessarily do and refer to themselves as part of the ‘khwaja sira’ community.

I have sadly not been able to speak to any transfeminine people from Bangladesh, but I have spoken to cis queers who have told me that they use ‘hijra’ in a manner similar to India.

If there are desi queers from those communities who would like to add their perspectives, please feel free to reblog. And for the South Asian communities I haven't mentioned (such as Sri Lanka), please feel free to add your perspectives too! I'm curious to hear from you all.

Etymology and Usage

‘Hijra’ in its meaning and usage amongst the cis is most similar to the word ‘naamard’ (NAH-murd). The ‘naa’ is prefixal, a negation akin to ‘non’, while ‘mard’ is the word for ‘man’. It is a way of unmanning a man, of calling him lacking in the essential quality of manhood, of labelling him, in spirit if not in body, impotent.

As such, you can see how it’s an implicitly third-sexing construction (even before you account for how these communities are explicitly third-sexed, denied the epistemic autonomy to be recognized as women and now third-sexed by law). When Nanda called them emasculated homosexuals, it was not far off from how Indian culture forcibly categorizes and marginalizes them.

Members of the community have told me about their frustration and anger at being referred to as such, even though the word has now become a term through which they organize the community and sometimes advocate for themselves, a political reality that does not inherently contradict their campaigns to be recognized as women, and allowed to self-ID as such. (Recall, the Indian government currently mandates legal third-sexing of the hijra: they must first obtain a “Trans Certificate” and be documented as a third sex before they initiate the process of being recognized as women—a process that is contingent on subjecting themselves to transmedicalist scrutiny and gatekeeping!)

Others, however, have pointed out to me that the term is undergoing a process of reclamation. The term ‘hijra’ has a certain degree of legibility in Indian society even as it is a pejorative with degendering and dehumanizing connotations. It is being reclaimed intracommunally, but also by allies who speak of them without the usual stigmatizing connotations that cis society has saddled the term with.

Even still, I have also been told that the manner in which cis and especially Western academics use the term in scholarship—and I’m quoting here—"makes me want to tear my skin out". The fictions of “recognized gender role in Indian society” and “oppressed only after colonialism” are further simplifications and fabrications that obfuscate the role South Asian ruling-class collaborators eagerly played in petitioning for those colonial-era laws, and ignore such easily available empirical evidence as the Manusmriti mandating punishments for anyone who sleeps with—ugh—“eunuchs”.

Conclusion

In sum, I’d liken the use of the word “hijra” as analogous to the usage of “queer” in the 90s, as a slur in the contentious, contextual process of being reclaimed. As Aruvi put it to me on Bluesky:

We cannot allow cis people to dictate the discursive and epistemic terms of transfeminine culture. At the same time, the term “hijra” still carries with it heavy baggage due to South Asian transmisogyny as well as the academic misrepresentations and epistemic extractivism that Western scholarship has subjected South Asian transfeminized demographics to.

If you want to know how best to use the term, try to do so without third-sexing, and without promulgating fictive ideas of South Asian cultures being “gender-expansive” and “recognizing more than two genders”. Erasing the marginalization of the hijra is endemic to the way the term is used in the West, and that must absolutely be combatted.

On a final, personal note, I also wish to clearly state that I do not reject the label ‘hijra’ because I consider myself essentially different from them. Many Indian (usually upper-caste) trans women wish to distance themselves from the hijra, as though reproducing our society’s disgust for them will spare them from the same fate. That is not an attitude I share, or wish to normalize. The hijra—both those who affirmatively identify with the term, and those who wish to distance themselves from it—are my sisters.

I don't think I actually posted the gatefold art I did for the Monkey Man vinyl!

Hijra: They are the transgender, eunuch, or intersex people in India who are officially recognized as the third sex throughout most countries in the Indian subcontinent. The trans community and history in India goes back a long way as being documented and officially recognized - far back as 12th century under the Delhi Sultanate in government records, and further back in our stories in Hinduism. The word itself is a Hindi word that's been roughly translated into English as "eunuch" commonly but it's not exactly accurate.

Hijras have been considered the third sex back in our ancient stories, and by 2014 got official recognition to identify as the third gender (neither male or female) legally. Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India have accepted: eunuch, trans, intersex people & granted them the proper identification options on passports and other government official documents.

But let's get into some of the history surrounding the Hijra community (which for the longest time has been nomadic, and a part of India's long, rich, and sometimes, sadly, troubled history of nomadic tribes/people who have suffered a lot over the ages. Hijras and intersex people are mentioned as far back as in the Kama Sutra, as well as in the early writings of Manu Smriti in the 1st century CE (Common Era), specifically said that a third sex can exist if possessing equal male and female seed.

This concept of balancing male/female energies, seed, and halves is seen in two places in South Asian mythos/culture and connected to the Hijra history.

First, we have Aravan/Iravan (romanized) - who is also the patron deity of the transgender community. He is most commonly seen as a minor/village deity and is depicted in the Indian epic Mahabharata. Aravan is portrayed as having a heroic in the story and his self-sacrifice to the goddess Kali earns him a boon.

He requests to be married before his death. But because he is doomed to die so shortly after marriage, no one wants to marry him.

No one except Krishna, who adopts his female form Mohini (one of the legendary temptresses in mythology I've written about before) and marries him. It is through this union of male, and male presenting as female in the female form of Mohini that the seed of the Hijras is said to begun, and why the transgender community often worships Aravan and, another name for the community is Aravani - of/from Aravan.

But that's not the only place where a gender non conforming divine representation can be seen. Ardhanarishvara is the half female form of lord Shiva, the destroyer god.

Shiva combines with his consort Parvarti and creates a form that represents the balancing/union between male/female energies and physically as a perfectly split down the middle half-male half-female being. This duality in nature has long been part of South Asian culture, spiritual and philosophical beliefs, and it must be noted the sexuality/gender has often been displayed as fluid in South Asian epics and the stories. It's nothing new.

Many celestial or cosmic level beings have expressed this, and defied modern western limiting beliefs on the ideas of these themes/possibilities/forms of existence.

Ardhanarishvara signifies "totality that lies beyond duality", "bi-unity of male and female in God" and "the bisexuality and therefore the non-duality" of the Supreme Being.

Back to the Hijra community.

They have a complex and long history. Throughout time, and as commented on in the movie, Monkey Man, the Hijra community has faced ostracization, but also been incorporated into mainstream society there. During the time of the Dehli Sultanate and then later the Mughal Empire, Hijras actually served in the military and as military commanders in some records, they were also servants for wealthy households, manual laborers, political guardians, and it was seen as wise to put women under the protection of Hijras -- they often specifically served as the bodyguards and overseers of harems. A princess might be appointed a Hijra warrior to guard her.

But by the time of British colonialism, anti-Hijra laws began to come in place folded into laws against the many nomadic tribes of India (also shown in part in Monkey Man with Kid (portrayed by Dev Patel) and his family, who are possibly

one of those nomadic tribes that participated in early theater - sadly by caste often treated horribly and relegated to only the performing arts to make money (this is a guess based on the village play they were performing as no other details were given about his family).

Hijras were criminalized in 1861 by the Indian Penal Code enforced by the British and were labeled specifically as "The Hijra Problem" -- leading to an anti-Hijra campaign across the subcontinent with following laws being enacted: punishing the practices of the Hijra community, and outlawing castration (something many Hijra did to themselves). Though, it should be noted many of the laws were rarely enforced by local Indian officials/officers. But, the British made a point to further the laws against them by later adding the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, which targeted the Hijra community along with the other nomadic Indian tribes - it subjected them to registration, tracking/monitoring, stripping them of children, and their ability to sequester themselves in their nomadic lifestyle away from the British Colonial Rule.

Today, things have changed and Hijras are being seen once again in a more positive light (though not always and this is something Monkey Man balances by what's happened to the community in a few scenes, and the heroic return/scene with Dev and his warriors). All-hijra communities exist and sort of mirror the western concept of "found families" where they are safe haven/welcoming place trans folks and those identifying as intersex.

These communities also have their own secret language known as Hijra Farsi, which is loosely based on Hindi, but consists of a unique vocabulary of at least 1,000 words.

As noted above, in 2014, the trans community received more legal rights.

Specifically: In April 2014, Justice K. S. Radhakrishnan declared transgender to be the third gender in Indian law in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India.

Hijras, Eunuchs, apart from binary gender, be treated as "third gender" for the purpose of safeguarding their rights under Part III of our Constitution and the laws made by the Parliament and the State Legislature. Transgender persons' right to decide their self-identified gender is also upheld and the Centre and State Governments are directed to grant legal recognition of their gender identity such as male, female or as third gender.

I've included some screenshots of (some, not all, and certainly not the only/definitive reads) books people can check out about SOME of the history. Not all again. This goes back ages and even our celestial beings/creatures have/do display gender non conforming ways.