Ajitesh Singh
Published on: 25 March 2026, 06:30 am
What is the half-life of a word the State has decided to stop recognising, and what happens to the people who are still living inside it?
Earlier this week, while reporting on the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 (which is set to be taken up in Parliament today) I was speaking with Kanmani, an advocate from the Thirunangai community who works with trans and intersex persons across India, and she asked me a question I didn't have an answer to. “What’s the Hindi word for transgender?”
“Frankly, even the community does not know,” she said. “You cannot get anywhere close to a respectful Hindi translation. You can’t even translate gender cleanly.” And then she told me about Thirunangai.
The term emerged from self-respect politics in Tamil Nadu. Nangai means ‘woman’, thiru means ‘respectful’. A conscious divorce from Aravani, a word sheltered in religious and regional context. The trans communities coined Thirunangai to assert Tamil pride, dignity and a grammar of self-description that belonged to them. The government adopted it. Lal Zimman has written that “trans activists have developed a particular understanding of linguistic agency, best understood as a form of linguistic self‑determination, that centres the desires of individuals regarding how others should refer to them.” Thirunangai is exactly that.
So when the 2026 Amendment Bill replaces the broad self-determination based definition of transgender person with a narrow list of named socio-cultural identities, leaving identities like Thirunangai off it, it renders a word the State once recognised, suddenly illegible. “A district collector from the north will look at the list and say ‘Thirunangai? What’s that? You're not there.’”
On the afternoon of March 22, under the dappled shade of a peepal tree in the open courtyard of the Press Club of India, a monkey or two watching from the ledge, a rough hundred or two members of the queer and trans communities gathered for a Jan Sunwai (Public Hearing) organised by the Rachnatmak Congress.
“Strangers probing our bodies, demanding proof of who we are, our privacy shattered, our dignity crushed. Who gave anyone the right to decide my gender for me?” Dalit trans activist Grace Banu roared, as people clapped and speakers thumped the table.
Supreme Court advocate Avani Bansal traced the Bill’s constitutional faultlines along a person’s right to determine their own gender identity, a right which the State cannot take away. “This Bill is just like a bolt from the blue. No consultation, no trigger explained. It looks like a bureaucratic officer sitting in the government imposing their own ideology across the nation.” The retrospective clause, she said, was its own category of violation. “It's like pulling the blanket from under your feet. Today they are coming for transgender people. Tomorrow, who knows, [Section] 377 and all the landmark judgments go out again?” The legal challenge, when it comes, she is confident, will succeed. But the years lost in the fighting? “Nobody gives those back, unfortunately.”
NCP’s national spokesperson Anish Gawande, who is a queer person himself, pushed back on the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s senior economic advisor, Yogita Swaroop’s framing of the Bill as resistance to Western influence. “Transphobia is Western. Inclusion is Indian,” he said.
Near the end of the afternoon, activists held copies of the Bill. They passed it from hand to hand and then, in that courtyard, under that tree, under that sky – set it on fire. The crowd broke into Faiz. Hum dekhenge. Laazim hai ki hum bhi dekhenge. We will witness. It is inevitable that we too shall witness.
Today, the Parliament will reportedly table the Bill for consideration. But from Delhi to Kolkata and from Bengaluru to Bhubaneswar, it has already been set on fire multiple times. Languages might not be clear on defining what gender is, but languages can be made more inclusive, more expansive. Languages grow when communities are allowed to grow them. The State cannot uninvent a word a people made for themselves.
For a detailed account of what the Bill does and who it erases, read our detailed report here.