India’s third-gender ruling has few benefits, say trans activists

There are still many gaps in services for trans people, says Amitava Sarkar,

Kaitlin Bardswich | Dailyextra | November 5, 2015

On April 15, 2014, the Indian Supreme Court officially created a third gender status for the trans community, making it the seventh country in the world to do so.

Transgender people in India no longer have to identify as female or male, but can choose a third or “T” option, such as on identification documents.

The term “third gender” applies to both trans people and hijras, although most of the attention in the media and in Indian society focuses on hijras. In India, as well as in several other South Asian countries, hijras are people usually born with male genitalia (or sometimes ambiguous genitalia) who live as women in a hierarchical and culturally complex system of “families” headed by gurus. Generally speaking, hijras are trans women but not all trans women are hijras.

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India’s Supreme Court Restores an 1861 Law Banning Gay Sex

Altaf Qadri/Associated Press

Gay rights activists at a protest in New Delhi on Wednesday. A law that was reinstated on Wednesday had been ruled unconstitutional in 2009.

GARDINER HARRIS | New York Times | December 11, 2013

NEW DELHI — The Indian Supreme Court reinstated on Wednesday a colonial-era law banning gay sex, ruling that it had been struck down improperly by a lower court.

The 1861 law, which imposes a 10-year sentence for “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with man, woman or animal,” was ruled unconstitutional in a 2009 decision. But the Supreme Court held that only Parliament had the power to change that law.

There is almost no chance that Parliament will act where the Supreme Court did not, advocates and opponents of the law agreed. With the Bharatiya Janata Party, a conservative Hindu nationalist group, appearing in ascendancy before national elections in the spring, the prospect of any legislative change in the next few years is highly unlikely, analysts said.

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