Swarupa Deb

The Karnataka Devadasi Bill 2025, while abolishing dedication practices, reinforces cis-normativity and creates potential legal precarity for the gender-diverse Jogappa community. The result is cultural erasure and the undoing of constitutional guarantees to gender plurality.

The Jane Kaushik verdict addresses discrimination in employment for transgender individuals. However, the rhetoric of ‘employability’ continues to be grounded in essentialist, cis/hetero-normative, middle-class respectability politics.