India’s new transgender amendment doesn’t protect the community — it polices it
India’s transgender community is fighting back. Days after the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 was tabled in the Lok Sabha on March 13, activists, lawyers, and civil society members gathered to demand its immediate withdrawal and their anger is well-founded.
The bill, introduced by Union Minister Virendra Kumar, dangerously conflates transgender persons with intersex individuals, narrowing legal recognition to only specific identities Hijra, Kinnar, Aravani, and Jogti leaving countless others legally invisible.
Worse, it introduces suffocating medical gatekeeping. To simply be recognised as transgender, a person must undergo surgery, face a medical board, approach a district magistrate, and potentially repeat the entire process. As lawyer and transwoman Raghavi Shukla bluntly put it the government appears to be designing a bill from which nobody can actually benefit.
The bill also mandates hospitals to share surgical details directly with the government a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s landmark 2017 privacy judgement.
Perhaps most damning of all nobody from the community was consulted before the bill was introduced.
This isn’t protection. It’s surveillance dressed up as legislation
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