Plea in Supreme Court challenges transgender law amendments as breach of right to self-determined gender identity

Activists challenge the 2026 transgender law in Supreme Court, claiming it violates the right to self-determined gender identity.

Activists, one of whom spearheaded a historic legal battle to recognise transgender persons as a third gender, have moved the Supreme Court against the Centre’s new law, which dismantles the fundamental right to self-identification of gender, a basic imperative of personal autonomy and dignity.

Editorial | On the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026

Laxminarayan Tripathi, who became the first transgender person from the Asia-Pacific region to address the United Nations General Assembly, besides leading the first transgender participation in the Kumbh Mela, has challenged the constitutional validity of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, for disregarding transgender identity as an “authentic human identity, freely chosen”.

The other petitioner, Zainab Javid Patel, a recognised figure in transgender rights advocacy, agrees that the 2026 Act veers away from the Supreme Court’s own 2014 NALSA judgment that identity is determined by the person, not by biology, birth assignment or through state verification.

The petitioners, represented by advocates Nipun Katyal, Surya Pratap Singh Rana, Aishwary Mishra and Manan Sharma, said the 2026 Act throws up a singularly fundamental constitutional question of law, that is, whether the state, through the instrument of legislation, may define who a person is and, in so doing, “substitute its own biological or sociomedical classification for the lived, autonomous, and self-perceived identity of a human being”.

The petitioners, who may request the court, likely through senior advocate Kapil Sibal, for an early hearing, said the Amendment Act, which came into force on March 30, dangerously allowed the state unfettered authority to determine gender identity despite the 2014 NALSA principle.