Post-script to the Jane Kaushik verdict: Trans-employability through the narrow lens of ‘Respectability’

THE RECENT  Jane Kaushik v. Union of India (2025) verdict marks another transformative shift in India’s transgender rights jurisprudence, right before the duodecennial anniversary of the NALSA (2014) verdict. In the writ petition, Jane Kaushik, a transgender woman and qualified teacher, had challenged the trans-exclusionary hiring practices that implicitly require conforming to cisgender expectations. The verdict delivered. It addressed the structural barriers that transgender persons face in accessing employment, not merely as a matter of individual discrimination but as a systemic failure. It also directed the state to revise recruitment policies towards institutional recognition of transgender employability.

While the verdict was undoubtedly a significant moment, the conversation that has followed has failed to be critical of the way in which ‘trans-employability’ discourse is typically captured in a cis/hetero normative middle-class respectability politics. When trans inclusion is articulated through these narrow frameworks, it effectively limits the horizon of rights. It evaluates  trans lives not for their intrinsic dignity but for their capacity to perform roles that the State recognises as legitimate. 

Despite its progressiveness, the Jane Kaushik verdict does not entirely escape this logic. By focusing on the issue of discrimination singularly as a procedural failing of recruitment systems, it obscures how respectability politics itself functions as the filter of employability. This allows structural violence to effectively mask the hierarchies that determine which lives are seen as deserving of dignified work.

When Respectability becomes the Gatekeeper

At this point, it is important to ask why ‘respectable employment’ is imagined to be so crucial for trans emancipation? 

This is where sociologist Liz Mount’s analysis of middle-class respectability becomes precisely instructive. Mount argues that Indian middle-class politics operate through a double move: first, by policing the boundaries of who can be seen as ‘respectable’, and second, by creating institutional pathways for inclusion that require conformity to those norms. Thus, respectability, in this framework, is not just about morality or social status. It is an apparatus of governance. It functions through modalities that reward those who perform recognisable middle-class gendered selves (well-educated, professionally oriented, disciplined, apolitically aspirational, etc). It demands a compliant body that is economically productive, socially compliant, culturally assimilable and governable.

Furthermore, the architecture of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, frames social inclusion primarily through skilling, welfare schemes, and anti-discrimination in employment (Sections 9 and 14). The Act imagines ideal trans citizens as the ones who can be trained, integrated, and employed within existing economic structures. It problematically overlooks trans communities’ participation in informal and survival economies as valid forms of work or worthy of state protection. Instead, it sets up a hierarchy of labour where cis/hetero-normative middle-class professions become the pathway to full citizenship.