The Madras High Court has ordered the Tamil Nadu government to make sure that all transgender persons in the state are immunised with both doses of the vaccine within the next three months. The court directed the state to do after hearing a petition submitted by Thoothukudi based trans rights activist Grace Banu seeking an order from the Tamil Nadu government to provide Rs 4,000 COVID-19 relief to all transgender persons.
In June 2021, Grace Banu had filed a public interest litigation (PIL) before the Madras High Court asking the government to extend Rs 4,000 cash relief to all transgender persons even if they did not have valid identity cards or registration papers. The PIL came after the government announced that it would give Rs 4,000 cash assistance to all ration rice card holders in the state. In the PIL, Banu argued that many transgender persons in the state did not have valid ID cards or had lost the validity of their existing ID cards while applying for a third gender ID card, ever since the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and the statutory rules framed thereunder in 2020 came into force.
The petitioner also added that there were over 50,000 transgender persons in Tamil Nadu even though the state had only registered 11,400 odd transgender persons, out of which 2,541 members had ration cards.
The PIL called for special vaccination camps to be held for trans persons in Tamil Nadu and for trans community members to be fully educated about the vaccine and their fears eliminated before being inoculated.
Hearing the matter, Chief Justice Sanjib Bannerjee ordered that relief be provided to all trans persons who do not have ID cards and also that a vaccination camp be held for them. Appearing before the bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Bannerjee and Justice Adikesavulu, Attorney General of Tamil Nadu R Shanmughasundaram said that the government had already released the first instalment of Rs 2,000 COVID-19 relief fund to transgender persons and that it would soon release the second instalment as well.