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Several students of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) held a protest on Saturday, March 14, condemning the introduction of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 in the Lok Sabha on March 12 by Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Virendra Kumar.
The Bill seeks to amend the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019. Among the key changes are removing transgender persons’ right to self-perceived gender identity, and altering the definition of who a transgender person is.
UoH’s queer collective, Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA), said in a statement that “taking away the right to self-determination and introduction of a medical board appointed by the government is a gross invasion of privacy and a gruesome attempt towards policing of transgender bodies.”
The new Bill says that the existing “vague definition” of the term “transgender person” makes it “impossible to identify the genuine oppressed persons to whom the benefits of the Act are intended to reach.”
The Bill proposes a new definition as “a person having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta, or eunuch,” or a person with certain specified intersex variations.
SAGA said that such a definition “conflates transgender and intersex identities, reducing trans identities to an incomplete biological perspective.”
“This goes against the current scientific consensus and undoes progress that has been achieved by relentless effort by the community,” it said.
The Bill also includes the following definition: “any person or child who has been, by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence…compelled to assume, adopt, or outwardly present a transgender identity, by mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure or otherwise.”
SAGA called this language “dehumanising, demonising and infantilising”, and an attempt to portray trans persons in a negative light.
The amendment Bill says that the original law was intended to “protect a specified class of persons socially and culturally known as transgender people who face societal discrimination of an extreme and oppressive nature,” and not to protect “each and every class of persons with various gender identities, self-perceived sex/gender identities or gender fluidities.”
SAGA noted that many transgender persons who are already marginalised will lose the limited support that was provided to them through the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 because of these amendments.
The amendment Bill also says that anyone who “kidnaps or abducts any child” and hurts them by “mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure” could be punished with life imprisonment.
SAGA said that demonising trans persons as those who "kidnap adults and children and mutilate them…is intentionally demonising language used by the government to further marginalise an already deeply marginalised group of people.”
Members of multiple student organisations of UoH, including Ambedkar Students' Association (ASA), All India Students' Association (AISA), Bahujan Students' Front (BSF), Dalit Students' Union (DSU), and Students' Federation of India (SFI) joined the protest in solidarity.
The protesting students burned copies of the amendment Bill at the campus main gate. They demanded the immediate withdrawal of the amendment Bill, the restoration and strengthening of transgender persons’ right to self-determination without medical intervention, and a genuine consultation with a diverse range of transgender and non-binary stakeholders.