Amendment Bill sparks outrage among transgender community in Karnataka
The Hindu
Karnataka's Transgender Amendment Bill faces backlash for threatening rights, identity, and legal protections of the marginalized transgender community.
Members of the Transgender community and trans rights activists in Karnataka have expressed shock and vehemently opposed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 that has proposed significant changes to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.
Terming it a shocking attempt to take back the hard-won rights of the transgender community, they fear that the Bill, if passed, will strip the identity, access to rights, safety and legal protection of a large section of all already marginalised transgender community.
The Bill narrows the definition of “transgender person” to those having socio-cultural identities such as kinner, hujra, aravani, jogta, or eunuch, persons with specified intersex variations or congenital variations at birth, and persons or children forced to assume a transgender identity through mutilation or castration.
Further, it excludes persons with different sexual orientations and self-perceived sexual identities.
Akkai Padmashali, who works for the rights of gender minorities, termed the Bill extremely regressive. Ms. Padmashali, who is a part the Karnataka State Gender and Sexuality Minorities Coalition for Convergence, called it “exclusionary” and noted that the amendment, instead of expanding the rights of the transgender community, contracts them.
“The only option for a transgender person under the Bill is a traditional identity. Those who see their identity on a spectrum fall outside this conservative new definition proposed by the amendment,” the coalition members pointed out.
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