The BJP’s war on trans rights

Kai I analyses the BJP’s latest assault on trans rights in India, situating it within the broader structures of Hindu nationalism, capitalist patriarchy, and the bourgeois family.

On the 30th of March, the Indian parliament passed a bill proposing a series of amendments that redefine the rights and identification of trans Indians. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill removes the right of transgender people to self-identification, reduces prison sentences for sexually assaulting trans women, and subjects the trans community to dehumanising medical exams in exchange for legal protections. This is an attack against one of the largest queer communities in the world – produced by a Hindu nationalist political project that combines capitalist modernisation with a traditionalist family structure. Revolutionaries globally need to stand in solidarity with trans people in India.

The Hindutva government, currently dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has faced sustained criticism for enacting discriminatory laws and inciting violence against ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in India. This includes the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which explicitly excludes minorities such as Eelam Tamils and Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan from seeking citizenship following refugee status. Since the rise of the BJP and the repeated re-elections of nationalist Narendra Modi, hate speech incidents have soared by 74.4 per cent.

This bill is the latest in a long line of attacks against minority groups in India, and make no mistake — it is motivated by the fascistic ideology espoused by the ruling BJP. It redefines trans people as those exclusively belonging to the Hijra-Kinnar community, a socio-cultural grouping of transgender women and intersex people in India. Members of this community already face casteist, transphobic, and sexual discrimination, which leaves them vulnerable to poverty, begging, and often forces them into sex work. Under this bill, they will additionally be subjected to dehumanising medical exams for any semblance of government protection. Trans men and women outside the Hijra-Kinnar community are stripped of their agency and right to self-identification entirely, forced back into their assigned gender at birth.

According to civil rights and constitutional organisations across India, this fits into the BJP’s broader assault on democratic rights. Trans woman and activist Tista Das has condemned it as a “sweeping violation of constitutional and human rights.”

The bill also legislates against “influencing a child to present as transgender” — a provision the government can deploy to prosecute working-class activists, queer community members, and health and social workers. This mirrors the transmisogynistic attitudes of TERFs and American legislators who frame transgender women as predators corrupting the naive with “transgender ideology.”

These attitudes connect to the global bourgeoisie’s relationship to sex and gender, which positions the cisgender heterosexual man as the bourgeois figure within the family. Friedrich Engels understood gender-based oppression as intrinsically linked to the class system, both in The German Ideology and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. He argued that the transition from primitive communism into class society reduced the status of women and children to their labour power within the family unit, making them effectively the private property of men, their supposed natural function being reproduction. In this way, the bourgeois family structure becomes a vehicle for the reproduction of class society itself.

Globally, the traditionalist image of a patriarchal, single-income household has undergone a broad recession alongside the rise of neoliberalism. Growing economic pressure has produced more dual-income households, complicating Engels’ model of the bourgeois family. While this shift affects India to some degree, the bourgeois, traditionalist family structure continues to function as a protector of capital, caste, and patriarchy there, and remains central to how queerness is conceived and policed.

The existence of transgender men, women, and non-binary people intrinsically challenges the false image of the essentialised gender binary, which itself upholds the interlinked structures of patriarchy and capitalism. By erasing transgender people, the bourgeoisie further codifies gender-based oppression as part of the global capitalist and patriarchal order – along with the abuse, violence, and systemic inequalities that come with it. This is exemplified starkly in the bill’s reduction of prison sentences for sexual violence against trans women, and in the ever-growing rate of transfemicide targeting trans women across the globe.

The struggles of oppressed peoples under capitalism are intrinsically linked. As our trans comrades face brutal violence, gender-based oppression, transmisogyny, and discrimination targeting trans men, we must demonstrate solidarity with them in the face of fascism, capitalism, and patriarchy. As revolutionaries, we must unequivocally oppose this expansion of oppression against trans people in India and stand with one of the largest queer communities in the world against the nationalist, capitalist Indian state. 

Solidarity with trans women, trans men, and non-binary people in India. An attack on trans people is an attack on the working class.