Civil society must realise that while laws help, the plight of transgenders will remain unchanged as long as our attitude towards them does not change
According to a report in The Pioneer of May 28, a mob attacked on the night of May 26, four transgender beggars in Hyderabad city, following the circulation of false stories and fake video recordings of abduction and murder of children. Savagely beaten and stoned, one of them died while the others were admitted to hospitals, one of them in a critical condition.
The gruesome incident once again underlined the damage that false propaganda can do in the age of the video. Recordings on the latter can be particularly dangerous because they can lend credibility to false narratives by appearing to provide corroboration through images seemingly of real life events. The incident also underlined the deep prejudice that people harbour against transgenders — a term that includes several categories of people who identify themselves with a different gender than the one assigned to them at birth and who physically and psychologically do not fall within conventional and legal definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female’.
This prejudice against them lends credence to any allegation, however false, levelled against them. Significantly, the Hyderabad incident occurred though the police had formally denied the presence of any inter-state gang of kidnappers and child lifters in Hyderabad, warned people against taking the law into their own hands, and intensified street patrolling. In fact, they claimed that all the four persons would have been killed had they not arrived in the spot in less than five minutes.
The other consequences of the prejudice include the discrimination and violence — often sexual and utterly savage — they have to suffer. The claim by transgender rights activists that only a small fraction of these get reported to the police or in the media, is hardly surprising. A study by the National Institute of Epidemiology covering 60,000 transgenders across 17 States showed that the biggest perpetrators of violence against transgenders were police and law-enforcing authorities. Examples of their criminal acts include assault and gangrapes in police stations.
The silver lining is that the judiciary and the administration have made perceptible efforts to demarginalise transgenders. The most outstanding contribution has been made by a landmark judgement by the division bench of justices KS Radhakrishnan and AK Sikri on April 15, 2014, in a writ petition filed by the National legal Services Authority against the Union of India and others. It recognised the transgender as the third gender along with the male and female. Stating that “Recognition of Transgenders as a third gender is not a social or medical issue but a human rights issue,” Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan, who handed down the ruling, said that the right of transgender persons to decide their self-identified gender was also to be upheld. He further directed the Central and State Governments to legally recognise their gender identity as male, female or as third gender, howsoever they may choose. The judgement, which eloquently recalled the discrimination and suffering transgenders underwent, called for affirmative action favouring them in education, primary healthcare, employment and a wide range of social welfare schemes.
Unfortunately, instead of incorporating the judgement's seminal recommendations, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016, pending in the Parliament, contains several regressive features. While the judgement upheld the right of transgenders to identify their own gender, the Bill states that they had to submit themselves to examination by a District Screening Committee for being recognised as such. The Bill's position also goes against the Supreme Court's view in another case in 2007 that self-determination of gender is an integral part of personal autonomy and self-expression, and falls within the realm of personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution.
The second objection is to the beginning of its definition of a transgender as “(A) neither wholly female nor wholly male; or (B) a combination of female or male; or (C) neither female nor male.” It is founded on a hetero-sexual worldview which is at the heart of the prejudice against transgenders. Second, while prohibiting discrimination against transgenders the Bill does not define the term. It also does not provide for the right to marry and adopt children.
The Government needs to address these issues and make changes in the Bill. Civil society must realise that while judicial pronouncements and laws help, the plight of transgenders will remain unchanged as long as society's attitude towards them does not change. This is an area where its members have to join the battle.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
