Not Just Trans People, the 2026 Bill Expands State Control Over Everyone

Imagine this: you take your housemate to a doctor for a medical procedure. Your housemate consents to it, the doctor does it. But the next day, your neighbour hears about it and files a complaint to the police, alleging you forced your housemate to go to the doctor. Suddenly, you are being investigated for an offence that could lead to a minimum punishment of 10 years to life, and you could be put in jail for several months without a trial. While the Constitution protects these rights, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 could be misused in exactly this way.When it was first introduced two weeks back, the Bill came as a surprise to many in the transgender community because no one seemed to have been consulted. The statutory National Council for Transgender Persons appointed by the Union government says they were ignored, and a Supreme Court-appointed expert committee, too, expressed concern about the lack of consultation.Despite this, appeals to send the Bill to a Standing Committee were denied. It was pushed through Parliament with a few hours of discussion in each House, and passed on 25 March.Beyond this erosion of democratic process, the Bill poses a threat to the rights of all transgender, queer, and gender non-conforming people. What’s more, its provisions and logic also affect the rights of everyone else who values their own freedom and privacy, including persons with disability, all women, oppressed castes, the working class, and religious and geographical minorities.‘Right to Self-Identify is Our Only Hope’: Why the Trans Bill Is Sparking FearThe Bill introduces criminal provisions which draw directly from British-era laws based on Victorian morality that tried to impose strict gender norms on diverse Indians. The Bill uses the derogatory term ‘eunuch’, which was previously used in the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 (CTA) passed by the British administration.The CTA sought to ‘exterminate’ all hijras in the northern part of British India and criminalised any ‘eunuch’ who undertook any kind of ‘performance’ in feminine clothing, or who support bodily gender change procedures, even if the person consented to it. For over 40 years, this law resulted in several hijra people having to hide their identity in public, and live in fear of the police even if they had committed no other harm to anyone.The CTA was repealed by the Constituent Assembly (Provisional Parliament) in 1952, in recognition of how it violates the core values of equality, fraternity, and liberty behind the Indian freedom struggle. Despite this, some elements of the CTA continued in state laws, such as the Telangana Eunuchs Act. In 2023, the Telangana High Court held that the Telangana Eunuchs Act was blatantly unconstitutional for enabling police violence and furthering harmful stereotypes against the transgender community. The word ‘eunuch’ violates the dignity of transgender people to define their own gender and reduces them to their bodily parts. By creating specific crimes against being a eunuch, rather than relying on general criminal provisions, the law treated all transgender people with suspicion.The 2026 Bill follows this colonial mindset by creating new, vague crimes centred around "presenting as transgender".These include the crime of kidnapping and compelling someone to undergo some form of bodily change to "present as transgender". Another crime involves compelling someone to "present as transgender" and undertake begging, sex work, or forced labour.These new crimes include language—such as "inducement or undue influence" to present as transgender "with or without consent"—that leave open the potential for misuse against transgender households, doctors, NGOs, friends, parents, and anyone else who supports willing transgender people. Because of the harsh punishment, the police can hold someone in custody for several months without a trial for these new crimes, increasing police violence against transgender persons and their allies. This kind of vague legal drafting also results in a violation of the freedom of expression.In Shreya Singhal v Union of India, the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A of the IT Act 2000 because it was so vague that it had a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech. The 2026 Bill would restrict everyone’s right to express their gender, even if they are not transgender. Will the police find reasons to trouble cisgender men who wear earrings as part of their culture or cisgender women who choose to wear a suit to work? Several lesbian, gay, or bisexual people are also perceived as breaking gender norms. It is possible that any person who doesn’t like that can file an FIR to hinder such expression.The 2026 Bill sets a precedent for empowering the police to intrude in everyone’s lives, and without questioning it, such crimes might be drafted even beyond the scope of gender. Doctors’ Bias, Fixation on ‘Sex Life’ is Pushing Trans People to Self-MedicateCrucially, the Bill’s language and drafting borrow from other laws that restrict freedom. For example, several states, including Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, have introduced laws that criminalise religious conversion.Maharashtra’s New Conversion Law Doesn’t Regulate Faith. It Empowers the MobThose laws use very similar language—such as "coercion, deceit, undue influence or allurement". They also require notice of declaration to change religion. This bureaucratisation results in control and surveillance of the right to change one’s religion. The 2026 Bill also requires that any doctor who performs a gender-affirmative surgery must report it to the District Magistrate. This clear violation of the right to privacy sets a precedent for all kinds of medical data to be compulsorily obtained by the state. Beyond religion and gender, this control and surveillance also extends into other laws in different states—such as the Uniform Civil Codes in Uttarakhand and Gujarat, which compel live-in couples to register with the government.The question that then arises is what freedom will be controlled next?UCC in Gujarat Could Open a Pandora's Box by Pitting Muslims Against TribalsThe 2026 Bill narrows the definition of ‘transgender person’ to just intersex persons or ‘socio-cultural identities’ such as hijra, kinner, jogta, and aravani, which are associated with certain professions (badhai, nritya), religious roles, or kinship structures. This excludes several people included in the earlier definition such as trans men, women, genderqueer, and others who do not want to associate with these cultural identities. Even for those within this limited definition, the Bill empowers a medical board and ‘medical experts’ to examine whether someone can receive a transgender certificate, a provision which could create opportunities for harassment in the name of ‘verification’. Such changes violate a basic principle: you know who you are, known in the law as self-determination. Here, the state must tell you who you are. Why should the right to express gender require the state to verify it? Take the example of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016. Under that Act, people with disability have a right to ‘reasonable accommodation’, which means organisations must make attempts to include persons with disabilities. However, under the Act to receive a ‘benchmark’ disability certificate for the purpose of reservations, one must prove they have 40 percent disability. This complicated process of quantifying disability has been criticised by disability rights groups for failing to understand that disability cannot be a number. The Supreme Court in Vikash Kumar v Union of India had to clarify that the right to reasonable accommodation and non-discrimination covers everyone with a disability, even if you have less than 40 percent, such as someone with writer’s cramp in an exam. In Jane Kaushik v Union of India, the Supreme Court has held that transgender people also have a right to reasonable accommodation. There is no need for a certificate of ‘genuine oppression’ to exercise one’s identity.The Bill requires people to receive a ‘certificate’ for their basic rights, and this culture of suspicion and verification could proliferate to all groups—will Parliament overrule the rights of persons with disability held in Vikash Kumar? Will they require medical proof of being a woman for sexual harassment complaints? Will they demand a caste certificate before investigating cases of atrocities against Dalits?The Bill’s logic that separates out different kinds of transgender people and only recognises some of them irrationally divides communities. This kind of logic is often reflected in legal changes on the rights of oppressed castes to claim criminal protections, affirmative action, and the right against discrimination. Consider the exclusion of Christian and Muslim oppressed castes from legal protections, recently confirmed by the Supreme Court. Similarly, the recent push towards introducing a creamy layer exclusion for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes fails to account for the fact that reservations is not just for economical upliftment, but also to counter social, educational, and political exclusion. These legal processes create an internal hierarchy of rights. The Bill and these various laws lend legitimacy to each other in way that leads to an erosion of rights for more communities. Crucially, despite the introduction of new crimes that will hinder transgender people’s freedom of expression, the sentence for any sexual abuse against a transgender person is still limited to a maximum sentence of two years. This is far less than the equivalent provisions for women which punishes rape with a minimum of 10 years to life. In a recent meeting with members of the National Council for Transgender Persons, the highest ranking bureaucrat in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment claimed that this is because transgender persons and cisgender women have "different anatomy", and therefore, cannot be treated alike. This misunderstands the purpose of rape law. After the pivotal Nirbhaya protests, the feminist movement fought to redefine rape beyond the body parts involved. Rape is about the violation of bodily integrity of a person oppressed by a culture of sexual violence and oppression. Therefore, the rape law was amended to include the insertion of any object into a woman’s body without consent. By making ‘anatomical’ distinctions, when transgender persons are also victims of patriarchal norms of rape culture, the Bill betrays the feminist movement by reversing the concept of rape to a narrow one, where one had to prove that a cisgender man’s genitalia has entered a cisgender woman’s.The Bill is a severe rollback of rights that transgender people have fought for over decades. Indeed, transgender people existed before and after the British sought to exterminate them in 1871; they existed before and after 2014 when the Supreme Court finally recognised their rights under the Constitution; and they will continue to exist despite the outcome of the 2026 Bill.(Mihir Rajamane (he/they) is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford and works in the worlds of equality, identity, and legality. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Not Just Trans People, the 2026 Bill Expands State Control Over Everyone

The Trans Amendment Bill 2026 sets a precedent for empowering the police to intrude in everyone’s lives.

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Topics: Transgender Transgender Bill