Certified Selves

On 30th March 2026, the President of India gave her assent to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, passed by both houses of Parliament the previous week. The law governs how transgender persons are legally recognised and determines their access to identity documents, welfare schemes, and basic state services. Until now, the law allowed a person to be recognised as transgender based on self-identification, without requiring medical proof. The Amendment, in contrast, requires certification through a medical board and clinical examination. The underlying premise is that a transgender person's identity must be medically validated before the state will recognise it.

That premise has a name and a history. In 1975, the WHO classified "transsexualism" as a mental and behavioural disorder in the International Classification of Diseases. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association introduced "gender identity disorder" into the DSM. In these systems, gender variance, or any identity outside the heteronormative binary, was treated as  pathological. As a result, trans people seeking legal recognition were often required to undergo psychiatric evaluation and, in some cases, surgical intervention. It was only in 2019 that the WHO removed trans identity from its mental disorders chapter, recognising that requiring clinical ratification of gender is a form of institutional control rather than treatment. The Supreme Court of India had grappled with this conclusion five years earlier. In NALSA v. Union of India (2014), the court held that “gender identity forms the core of personhood”, and it can be “determined through self-identification rather than only surgical or medical procedures”. Crucially, it also stated that no trans person should be subjected to medical examination to verify who they are.

The 2019 Act did not fully depart from this earlier principle. While it formally recognised self-identification, this recognition was contingent on the District Magistrate’s certification. Slowly, legal identity began to hinge on institutional approval. The Amendment builds on this structure rather than rethinking it. It adds "eunuch," a colonial administrative category used to regulate hijra communities, to the definition of a transgender person, and introduces a medical board route that makes clinical assessment a compulsory stage of recognition.  It also defines transgender identity in terms that emphasise bodily alteration and intervention, including cases where a person is “forced to assume” such an identity through surgical or hormonal means. In doing so, the law shifts attention from a person’s understanding of themselves to what has been done to their body. A person’s identity must now be confirmed or denied by a medical board before the state will acknowledge it. 

The limits of this framework are already visible in how the 2019 Act has been implemented. Although the law formally recognised transgender persons based on self-identification, it made that recognition dependent on a government-issued certificate, introducing a bureaucratic process that many have struggled to navigate. In Delhi, between 2020 and 2023, of 745 applications for transgender identity certificates, only 385 were approved. These delays are seen as commonplace now. Reena, a trans woman from Surat saw progress on her application only after personally approaching a sub-collector, four months after applying. Suraj, a 26-year-old trans man from Sangam Vihar, waited six months, making repeated visits to government offices and being asked for documents the online portal did not list as required, before finally receiving his certificate. Across the country, nearly five thousand applicants received no response at all. Even under a system that did not formally require medical verification, access to recognition was uneven and often delayed.

We must recognise that these delays are not experienced equally. Caste and social position greatly influence who has access to legal recognition. Grace Banu, a Dalit transgender activist and founder of the Trans Rights Now Collective, has documented for over a decade how caste structures access to resources within transgender communities in Tamil Nadu, showing that discrimination operates both at the level of state institutions and also within trans spaces themselves. A system that relies solely on certification risks deepening these inequalities by treating transgender persons as a single undifferentiated legal category. Reservation for trans individuals works very differently depending on whether it is treated as vertical or horizontal. A vertical quota creates one separate category for all transgender persons, while a horizontal quota runs across caste categories and ensures that trans people are counted within SC, ST, OBC, and general groups instead of being subsumed under one blanket bracket. When all trans persons are placed within the same bracket without horizontal reservation, A Dalit trans woman may then still face caste-based exclusion even while formally belonging to a transgender quota, and those with greater social capital are more likely to benefit from the system. By making recognition harder to obtain within an already unequal system, the Amendment risks widening these disparities.

The government's welfare framework for transgender persons is, on paper, substantive. Under the SMILE scheme, transgender persons are entitled to scholarships from Class IX through post-graduation, free vocational training, shelter homes providing food, medical care and accommodation, and a health insurance package covering hormone therapy and gender reaffirmation surgery up to Rs. 5 lakh per year. The scheme represents a genuine legislative effort to address the material conditions of a community that has faced documented exclusion from education, employment and healthcare. Every one of these entitlements, however, is gated behind the transgender certificate. Without it, the scholarship applications cannot be filed, the shelter homes cannot be entered, the insurances cannot be activated. The Amendment raises the threshold for obtaining that certificate. What the government's welfare scheme promises with one hand, the Amendment makes harder to reach with the other.

The Amendment constructs a legal subject whose existence is permanently contingent on a power that does not recognise them. Before accessing documents, welfare, or legal protections, a person must first be approved through a process not everyone can navigate. The question is whether the law is prepared to recognise all its citizens, or only those who can prove themselves to it. (Edited by Avika Mantri and Madiha Tariq)