Documenting Transgenders: The Double-Edged Sword of Recognition

The transgender community in India has been witness to a fairly turbulent trajectory when it comes to their rights. It has been subjected to a dismissive response everywhere it has sought recognition, equal rights or inclusivity. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was a breath of fresh air for it brought forth a system to acquire a Certificate of Identity, which would allow a person to be recognised as a transgender. The recognition was the first step in assuring that transgender individuals could invoke their rights of residence, ensure non-discrimination in their places of employment and benefit from various proposed welfare schemes and programmes. Unfortunately, this also opened the trapdoor to a plethora of fissures in the administrative system, into which the community plummeted. The battle was now not about recognition but about putting the same on paper, and that invited one to navigate the labyrinth of the Indian Bureaucracy. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and the two-fold problem that arises from it with respect to documentation of transgenders. It places them at a fork in the road, to either maintain possession of documents which state their assigned gender so as to retain benefits conferred upon them based off it, while losing out on their preferred gender or to apply for entirely new identification documents which state their preferred gender, which though bestows upon them new benefits but robs them of their existing rights which are attached to their assigned gender.