Plea in Supreme Court challenges transgender law amendments as breach of right to self-determined gender identity

Activists, one of whom spearheaded a historic legal battle to recognise transgender persons as a third gender, have moved the Supreme Court against the Centre’s new law, which dismantles the fundamental right to self-identification of gender, a basic imperative of personal autonomy and dignity.

Editorial | On the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026

Laxminarayan Tripathi, who became the first transgender person from the Asia-Pacific region to address the United Nations General Assembly, besides leading the first transgender participation in the Kumbh Mela, has challenged the constitutional validity of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, for disregarding transgender identity as an “authentic human identity, freely chosen”.

The other petitioner, Zainab Javid Patel, a recognised figure in transgender rights advocacy, agrees that the 2026 Act veers away from the Supreme Court’s own 2014 NALSA judgment that identity is determined by the person, not by biology, birth assignment or through state verification.

The petitioners, represented by advocates Nipun Katyal, Surya Pratap Singh Rana, Aishwary Mishra and Manan Sharma, said the 2026 Act throws up a singularly fundamental constitutional question of law, that is, whether the state, through the instrument of legislation, may define who a person is and, in so doing, “substitute its own biological or sociomedical classification for the lived, autonomous, and self-perceived identity of a human being”.

Points of concern

The petitioners, who may request the court, likely through senior advocate Kapil Sibal, for an early hearing, said the Amendment Act, which came into force on March 30, dangerously allowed the state unfettered authority to determine gender identity despite the 2014 NALSA principle.

The NALSA judgment, which upheld transgender persons’ right to self-determined gender identity and protected them from discrimination and social stigma, had led to the enactment of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. The 2019 Act had largely captured the essence of gender non-conformity and embodied the self-identification principle. However, the petitioners said, the new amendment law has taken to pieces the reforms made over the years.

For one, Section 3 of the 2026 Act has simply omitted the right to self-perceived gender Identity. The petitioners argue that this recognition, which was the most explicit statutory recognition of the NALSA principle, “is now gone. Parliament has, by the stroke of a legislative pen, repealed the statutory right that this court held to be a fundamental right under Article 21”. The petition asked how a provision that codified a fundamental right could be deleted through ordinary legislation.

The petition said the new definition of ‘transgender persons’ included those who had been coerced into transgender identity by mutilation or surgical procedures. The conflation of victims of trafficking with persons of authentic transgender identity created a “stigmatising and arbitrary classification”.

The petition said the requirement under the 2026 Act for medical certification as a condition for legal gender recognition violated the rights of transgender persons and amounted to “medical gatekeeping”. The 2014 judgment had made it mandatory for the state to to legally recognise transgender persons’ self-identification of their gender and issue identity documents. The amended law required a government-appointed medical board’s favourable recommendation for a District Magistrate to give an identity certificate to a transgender person.

The petition referred to Section 5 of the 2026 Act, which has made it mandatory for persons undergoing gender-change surgery to apply for a revised identity certificate, thus transforming a permissive right into a mandatory obligation. Besides, the new law required hospitals and surgical centres performing gender-affirming surgery to report the patients’ details to the government. The petitioners said the law was nothing less than a “medical surveillance regime”.

The petition pointed out that the amendments have made the “outwardly presentation of transgender identity” the object of a crime. This meant that the very assumption of a transgender identity — the act of dressing, presenting, or conducting oneself as a transgender person — a criminal harm. The plea further flagged the new law’s failure to increase the maximum punishment for sexual and physical abuse of transgender persons, reflecting a continuing undervaluation of their bodily integrity.