Revised Transgender Bill to be reintroduced in Parliament, but ignores key quota issue

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill is set to be reintroduced in the ongoing Monsoon Session of Parliament after incorporating the recommendations made by the Standing Committee report of July 2017.

The Bill, which was originally introduced in Lok Sabha in August 2016, was approved by the Union Cabinet on Wednesday. Even though the government has made no formal announcement regarding this, the Social Justice Ministry has confirmed this development, The Indian Express has reported.

While the revised bill contains most progressive recommendations made by the 31-member Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, it has ignored a crucial issue — reservations in education and jobs for transgender persons. This anomaly has also been pointed out by the standing committee.

In fact, in the landmark April 2014 NALSA judgment, the Supreme Court had directed the government “to extend all kinds of reservations in cases of admission in educational institutions and for public appointments” by treating them as socially and educationally backward classes.

Clarifying the stance on the bill, a source told the paper that in 2014, the National Commission for Backward Classes had also recommended the inclusion of transgender persons in the Central OBC list so that they can get the benefit of 27 percent OBC quota. However, this move had led to protests from various OBC groups which didn’t want their share to shrink.

Another crucial recommendation which has not been dealt with in the revised bill is that of civil rights like marriage, divorce, adoption. These civil rights are critical to the reality of transgender persons, especially when many of them are engaged in marriage-like relations without having legal recognition from the state. This increases their risk of criminalization under Section 377 of the IPC. To this, the Ministry officials told the paper that this issue has been left out since the Supreme Court is still hearing the matter of Section 377.

A key revision made in the bill was definition of the word ‘transgender’. The earlier definition, “neither wholly female nor wholly male” was found to be offensive by members of the community as well as the Standing Committee. Hence, it has been changed to “a person whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth and includes trans-man or trans-women”, irrespective of whether the person has undergone sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapy etc. It also recognises all sociocultural identities such as hijra, kinnar, aravani, jogta as well as people with inter-sex variations.

The revised bill provides a redress mechanism against discrimination. It also states punishment of up to two-year imprisonment for crimes against transgender persons based on the severity of offence.