Last December, sitting in a room full of people talking about families and communities, I cried through stories of people coming out as gay, as trans, as queer, to their mothers and to other members of their birth families. We believe that family is the basic unit of human societies, and that it must be protected.

I am a trans woman born into and raised by a conservative family in a metropolitan city of south India, and in the two-odd years that I have been transitioning socially, I have encountered both prejudice and privilege, which has led me to wonder about the family—why do we offer it such protection? In July, the Union cabinet approved the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016, which sought to define a trans person and then went on to offer protection to them from bogeymen and beggars (but not police), following in the footsteps of a path-breaking 2014 Supreme Court judgement. Now, a standing committee on social justice and empowerment is inviting comments from stakeholders—already, trans groups have held consultations in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The 2016 Bill believes that a transgender person’s identity is a problem to be “diagnosed" by a medical professional. It believes a committee—an impersonal body of people—knows more about who I am than I do. It muddies the right of a transgender person to determine their own identity, granted by the Supreme Court in 2014. But above all, the Bill goes to great lengths to protect and preserve the rights of the birth family.

For transgender children, the natal family is where one first encounters resistance. The biological family imposes strict codes of behaviour that limit the child’s self-identity, often causing anxiety and depression that leave deep scars. It restricts all expressions that do not conform to the gender assigned at birth. It prevents young boys from expressing their emotions, and young girls from stepping out of conditioned behaviour.

Young trans girls are made to conform, often with the aid of abuse, to the male gender they were assigned at birth. Their every behaviour and action is monitored strictly to ensure that they do not display any of the traits associated with femininity. Young trans boys are subject to “corrective" rapes, physical violence and often married off.

The birth family also polices the body: fat, thin, tall, short, dark, curly-haired, trans, queer, campy, eccentric, whatever one’s body is, it is often in opposition to social norms, and the family cannot handle this.

Two years ago, I finally decided to stop trying to fit into the male gender I was assigned, and I came out to my friends. I came out to a friend I went to school with, and I came out to a colleague I had known all of three months, and I came out to people I have never met but have had the best connection with, online. My friends took a couple of beats to adjust their perceptions, change their way of addressing me, and have carried on being my friends.

They are my family of choice.

In India, Hijra families are a long-standing tradition. The very word Hijra comes from the Arabic root word hijr, meaning to leave one’s tribe. Young gender non-conforming children leave home, leave family, and are adopted into Jamaats or Hijra families, where they can express their gender and identity as they wish to.

This is the family by adoption.

These are families that transgender people painstakingly build over years, weighing each and every person for their words, actions and beliefs. And it is this family that endures, and becomes a place of refuge for us. The 2016 Bill does not recognize this reality. Instead, it criminalizes these families when it states:

“Whoever,—

(a) compels or entices a transgender person to indulge in the act of begging or other similar forms of forced or bonded labour other than any compulsory service for public purposes imposed by Government;...

(c) forces or causes a transgender person to leave house-hold, village or other place of residence;

(…) shall be punishable with imprisonment (...)"

I am by no means an ardent supporter of Hijra families, but I am all for a family that allows those seeking to break the gender binary the freedom to do so without imposing their own ideas of what constitutes gender. It is this choice that the Bill, in its current form, takes away.

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Why the bill needs to change

A compendium of demands from the trans community:

1. Self Determination of Gender Identity. Follow the spirit of the 2014 Supreme Court verdict in the Nalsa vs. Union of India case.

2. Bill confuses intersex variations with transgender identity. Separate clauses needed to address Intersex persons.

3. A Chief Medical Officer cannot determine one’s gender. Do not create a medical problem where none exists

4. Bill does not provide Other Backward Class (OBC) status to trans persons, ignoring social reality of trans lives, and disallowing reservation in education and employment

5. No adequate redressal in case of discrimination at workplace. Does not provide protection to unorganised sector workers

6. Other forms of discrimination, for instance, discrimination in access to health care services, or discrimination at the hands of police, have not been addressed in the bill.

7. The definition of “family" is limited to a person’s birth family, putting the hijra families at risk of criminal action. This is against lived reality of young trans persons

Nadika Nadja is the online identity of a non-binary trans woman and writer based in Bengaluru.

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