Binary Blunders

The gender spectrum is a consequence of the complex interplay between culture and highly-nuanced and protean brain.

- Rakesh Kalshian

INDIA'S TRANSGENDER community, numbered close to 5 million, is up in arms. Last November, the Union government rejected a Parliament committee’s amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016. The committee felt that the very definition of “transgender” in the bill as “partly female or male; or a combination of female and male; or neither female nor male” goes “against global norms and violates the right to self-determined gender identity”.

The critics of the bill point out that a former version of the bill allowed transgender people to identify themselves as a “man”, a “woman”, or a “transgender”. The current bill takes away that right and, what’s worse, it gives that authority to a District Screening Committee comprising a chief medical officer, a psychiatrist, a social worker, and, a member of the transgender community. However, it is not clear on what grounds they will approve or reject anyone who, regardless of their biology, embraces a particular identity.

The controversy has inflamed the ever-simmering gender/sex, masculine/feminine tinderbox. Gender is often conflated with sex. Biologically speaking, society is classified into a binary of men and women based on obvious sexual differences—crudely put, penis means man, vagina means woman. That’s sex for you. Those who don’t fit the procrustean bed of sex are either surgically tailored and assigned one (mostly in the West), or tolerated as transgender/intersex (for instance, hijras in India), albeit with very few civil rights.