Binary Friction

A transwoman’s struggle for official recognition of her identity / Gender

- SOUMYA MISHRA

Soniya Pandey was struck by surprise as she saw a WhatsApp forward one afternoon in June 2019. Someone had leaked her application asking her employer, the Indian Railways, to change her name and gender in official records, along with two photos from before and after her sex-change operation. “I pulled up a few of them who were forwarding the message,” she told me. “But how many people could I stop? It was going viral across the country, in the social-media circles of railway groups. So I let it be.”

Formerly known as Rajesh Kumar Pandey, Soniya is a 35-year-old transwoman from the Bareilly district of Uttar Pradesh. She underwent a sexchange operation in December 2017, after years of struggling with gender dysphoria and feeling like an outsider in her own body. Pandey submitted the application a couple of months later. The northeastern branch of the Indian Railways was not prepared for her request—there was no official procedure to deal with an employee wishing to change their gender. She was instead questioned for not taking permission prior to the sex-change operation. “They told me they didn’t know what to do next,” she said.

After not receiving any response on her first application, she submitted another one in April 2018, with which she attached a copy of the Supreme Court’s landmark 2014 judgment in