India’s well-known civil rights organization, People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), characterizing the transgender bill – currently pending before Parliament – “draconian”, has said that it “violates” transpersons’ freedom of association in intimate and personal relations by refusing to “recognize ‘families of choice’ among hijras as self-determined arrangements of care.”
The bill, says a PUDR statement, “upholds Brahmanical patriarchal family forms, which inflicts daily punishment and humiliation on transpersons”. It adds, under the guise of combating trafficking in persons, it “increases policing in trans-communities and of trans-bodies, who are already highly vulnerable, to police harassment and violence.”
Signed by Deepika Tandon and Shahana Bhattacharya, secretaries, PUDR, the statement demands immediate withdrawal of the bill, even as “upholding the right to self-determination of transpersons recognized by the Supreme Court”, decriminalizing begging and sex work, and guaranteeing reservations in employment and education.
Text of the statement:
PUDR stands in support of the trans, queer and LGBTQI+ movement in opposing the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill (the Bill) as an assault on the democratic rights of transpersons. The Bill violates the right of transpersons to self-determination and self-identification, recognized by the Supreme Court as a fundamental right under Art. 21 in the 2014 NALSA v. Union of India judgment. Under the guise of combating trafficking in persons, the Bill increases policing in trans communities and of trans bodies, who are already highly vulnerable to police harassment and violence, and disproportionately represented in the prison population of the country.