New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday cleared the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 by voice vote on Wednesday, with social justice and empowerment minister Virendra Kumar hailing it as a symbol of the government’s “comprehensive mission to ensure justice to long marginalised sections of society” even as opposition MPs questioned the government’s haste to pass the bill and pleaded that it be sent to a standing committee to permit wider community consultation. LGBTQIA+ community members hold placards during a protest demanding the withdrawal of the Transgender Amendment Bill 2026, in Mumbai, India, March 25, 2026. (REUTERS)
The bill was cleared by the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, and will now go to the President for her assent before becoming law.
Since it was tabled in the Lok Sabha on March 13, the bill has been widely panned in demonstrations, public hearings and press conferences across the country. Over 60,000 emails have been sent to Members of Parliament and political representatives in a sustained campaign, and 40,000 signatures were collected for a joint statement rejecting the bill.
Kumar enumerated the work the ministry has done since the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was enacted in 2019, including awareness — raising workshops, transgender job fairs, and even a helpline started four years ago. “We have brought this bill to ensure the dignity of the transgender community,” he said.
Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament Medha Vishram Kulkarni said the bill was necessary to separate “real” transgender people from “fake” ones. “In Pune, we have 805 registered transgender voters, but we see far many more on the signals and the markets. I was concerned about these numbers, so I investigated and found that many people collect money pretending to be transgender, and then go home where they have families and children. There clearly needs to be protection for transgender persons from the fakes,” she said.
“There are 1.4 lakh transgender persons in Uttar Pradesh, 43,000 in Andhra Pradesh, 40,000 (each) in Maharashtra and Bihar, and 30,000 in West Bengal. Can we see a natural selection in these numbers? (...) Based on these statistics, doubts of human interference can be raised. Are the youth being forcibly given transgender identities? Are people making fake identities to avail of jobs? This needs to be discussed,” she added.
Her party colleague, Dr Parmar Jashvantsinh Salamsinh said that intersex variations and differences in sexual development (DSD) were brought into the definition of transgender persons in order to provide observable, verifiable basis for certification.
“A birth certificate is made from physical verification at the time of birth, which is observable and verifiable. The doctor’s professional assessment then becomes a legal document,” Salamsinh said.
“I am not saying that a person’s inner experience is wrong or that their feelings are invalid. Identity is a deeply felt experience. But if the state has to issue certificates, legal rights, and reservation benefits, it must work in the domain of verification,” he added.
International human rights frameworks, including the United Nations, make a clear distinction between transgender identity and biological sex characteristics, which is widely considered to be the rule of thumb in international standards of care for the transgender community.
Of the 19 parliamentarians who debated the bill for four hours, 13 were from opposition parties including the Indian National Congress, All India Trinamool Congress, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray), Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Aam Aadmi Party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Indian Union Muslim League.
“I stand here in agony and anguish before you. I am sure even if this bill passes with the government’s majority, the Supreme Court will strike it down because it violates Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Indian Constitution, and all our rights to freedom, self-determination, privacy and dignity,” said DMK MP Tiruchi Siva.
Siva had tabled a private member’s bill called the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill in the Rajya Sabha in 2014, which was widely celebrated for according dignity and ensuring rights and benefits to the community. It was also the first private member’s bill passed in any House since independence.
“Already society abuses them at every signal, and now [the government] is going to put them behind bars by way of criminalising them. The guru-chela parampara is central to many of the transgender communities. This bill allows the guru to be put behind bars,” Siva said.
Introducing a list of 15 amendments to the bill, including removing the medical board for certification of transgender identity and relooking at the penal provisions against persons found to “allure” or “induce” someone into taking on a transgender identity, Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury said, “This bill in its current form will inject hatred and ignorance towards transgender persons in society.”
“We have never had to go to a medical board to certify our gender, so why is the transgender adult being asked to go? This is not an act of protecting their rights, but a dilution of them,” Sandeep Pathak of Aam Aadmi Party said, adding that of the 34,000 requests for certification under the 2019 Act, 5,566 have been rejected.
Bringing up concerns with the current process of certification, Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi asked, “On what basis were they rejected? What is the redressal mechanism for the transgender people?”
Reiterating that the right to self-identify gender mentioned in the 2019 Act, which was based on a Supreme Court judgement, put India in a select international list where this specific right was granted. “Now this has been rolled back,” she said.
Though Siva’s bill received support across parties, the government did not support the bill and said that it will table a new one. It constituted a standing committee that conducted widespread consultations with the community, stakeholders such as medical professionals, support service providers, parents and educators among others, and submitted a report to the Parliament. The same year, the Supreme Court delivered the NALSA and others vs Union of India judgement that enshrined self-determination as the basis of gender identity. Two years later, the government introduced a bill defining transgender persons as “neither male nor female”, leading to backlash. The ministry withdrew the bill and introduced another one a year later, which was eventually modified and passed in 2019.
On Wednesday, retired Justice Asha Menon, who chairs the advisory committee set up last year by the Supreme Court, to look into the strengthening of the systems in place under the Transgender Persons (Protection Of Rights) Act 2019, wrote a letter addressed to the minister asking him to withdraw the bill.
“By limiting transgenders to congenital variations, those who do not identify with their assigned gender at birth would not be able to access gender re-affirming surgeries. They can neither access the benefits of various schemes the governments at the central and state levels that are intended for the transgenders due to an inability to get a certificate under Section 6 and Section 7 due to anomalies in the proposed amendments. The insistence on reporting of surgeries is violative of privacy and its objective is unclear. Amendments to penalties are unnecessary as existing provisions in the BNSS and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 are sufficient,” she wrote.