Trans Identities & Intersectional Activism

Transfeminine author Alok Vaid-Menon puts the cruel state of global trans rights best in Beyond the Gender Binary when they write, “How are you supposed to be believed about the harm you experience when people don’t even believe that you exist?” While trans communities have existed across ancient civilisations for centuries, they remain one of the most vulnerable communities worldwide. Only a handful of countries legally recognise transgender identities, and even fewer offer any explicit protection against violence. Even where these legal rights exist, they are often conditional—requiring invasive medical examinations, reassignment surgery, or suffocating layers of bureaucratic barriers. Only eight countries in the world even acknowledge “transgender” as a distinct gender category.

Even in so-called progressive nations, trans communities endure devastating levels of transphobic bullying, harassment, discrimination, sexual violence, homelessness, and criminalisation. The legal rights available to them fall extremely short of the everyday violence they face. India’s laws, however flawed, at least provide a right to life and some degree of protection. Across the world, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, being trans can invite the death penalty, while in Malaysia, merely “imitating another gender” can result in state-mandated conversion therapy. The difference in these lived realities is staggering.

Inequalities within the trans community itself deepen this vulnerability. Being trans does not exist independently of caste, religion, race, class, ethnicity, or indigeneity. A Dalit trans woman in Tamil Nadu, a Paniya Adivasi trans girl in Wayanad, a Black trans man in Mississippi, and a Two-Spirit Indigenous youth in Canada may all be “trans,” but their experiences of violence, access, and dignity are shaped by unique histories of oppression. In India, the horrors faced by Dalit and Adivasi trans persons range from family abandonment to forced labour and sexual violence, varying greatly from the experience of upper-caste trans persons. Across the world, Black, Indigenous, and trans people of colour (BIPOC) experience homelessness, incarceration, and hate crimes at disproportionately high rates. Queerness layers onto existing marginalisation, exacerbating situations of poverty, discrimination and lack of safety.

And yet, within communities pushed to the margins even of the margins, some of the most influential political organising has emerged. Across India and the global South, Dalit, Adivasi, and BIPOC trans activists continue to fight on the frontlines—demanding structural change rather than symbolic inclusion. Their work is fierce, intersectional, and grounded in the material realities of dispossession, landlessness, poverty, and social exclusion. 

In India, Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi trans activists have offered the most piercing critiques of the 2014 NALSA judgment. Grace Banu, one of India’s most influential Dalit trans thinkers, has repeatedly pointed out that while NALSA was hailed for affirming self-identification, it failed to address caste-based exclusion. The judgment ignored horizontal reservation, and condemned trans persons to bureaucratic gatekeeping through medicalised certification. Banu, who was Tamil Nadu’s first trans woman to be formally admitted into an engineering college, demonstrates how “legal recognition without social justice” produces only fragile progress. As founder of the Trans Rights Now Collective, she has advocated relentlessly for reservation and economic redistribution.

Writers like A. Revathi,one among the earliest trans autobiographers in India, have used literature to show that rights without material protections simply recirculate violence. Her narratives, drawn from South Indian trans communities, illustrate how family rejection, police harassment, and exclusion from schools and workplaces remain unchanged by court judgments. Prakrithi N.V., the first trans woman from the Paniya Adivasi community and a rising poet from Wayanad, deepens this critique. She describes how Adivasi trans youth confront layered dispossession—loss of land, of language, of schooling—conditions NALSA never acknowledged. Her community work in Wayanad, especially with Adivasi students, gives us a model for trans activism rooted in Adivasi self-determinism.

Activists like Disha Pinky Shaikh were among the first to protest the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, which replaced self-identification with a humiliating certification process dependent on district magistrates. Patruna (Patruni) Sastry, a Telugu Dalit writer-performer and Tranimal drag innovator, popularly known as Sas Who Maa, employs Telangana folk and tribal anthems in their art. They have been outspoken in their activism, appearing on mainstream platforms like Bigg Boss Agnipariksha and Prime Video’s In Trans, challenging both caste violence and queer erasure.

Northeast Indian activists like Santa Khurai have added another critical layer by highlighting how NALSA ignored ethnic identity, armed conflict, and militarisation. Based in Manipur, Khurai talks about how trans persons in the Northeast face double stigma—from both society and the security state—conditions far outside the judgment’s imagination. 

Across the world, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPoC) trans activists have shaped liberation movements in similarly transformative ways. In the United States, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera redefined queer politics by centering the needs of street-involved queer youth, sex workers, and homeless trans women. Their organisation STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) created one of the first shelters for trans youth, working at the grassroot decades before state protection for the trans community existed. 

Today, Black trans leaders like Kylar W. Broadus carry this legacy into legal systems. Broadus, a Black trans attorney, became the first openly transgender American to testify before the U.S. Senate in support of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. His work on Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act and the Equality Act shaped federal policy on trans rights. Across North America, Indigenous Two-Spirit activists have fought to reclaim pre-colonial understandings of gender suppressed by religious and colonial violence, reminding us that transphobia is not native to Indigenous cultures but was imported through colonial conquest.

These activists, while separated by geographical lines, fight for a common political truth. That trans activism is impossible without confronting the inequalities within the community itself. Legal recognition is simply meaningless if it does not consider caste, race, class, land, disability, religion, and indigeneity. The lives of Dalit and Adivasi trans women in India, Black trans men in America, and Indigenous Two-Spirit youth globally reveal that rights can only transform reality when they are grounded in systemic transformation rather than symbolism.

References: 

Wayanad Literature Festival. (n.d.). Prakrithi. Retrieved from https://wlfwayanad.com/speaker/prakrithi/

National Women’s History Museum. (n.d.). Marsha P. Johnson biography. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson National Women's History Museum

Scroll.in. (n.d.). Meet Dalit transgender activist Grace Banu, who campaigns for reservations for transgender people. Retrieved from https://scroll.in/article/1055658/meet-dalit-transgender-activist-grace-banu-who-campaigns-for-reservations-for-transgender-people Scroll.in

Khurai, S. (n.d.). Author profile — Santa Khurai. Varta Trust. Retrieved from https://vartagensex.org/author/santa-khurai/ Varta Trust

Vaid-Menon, A. (n.d.). Quotes by Alok Vaid-Menon. Goodreads. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/19436850.Alok_Vaid_Menon Goodreads

SAS3 Dancing Feet. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sas3dancingfeet.com/

Aranya. (2025, September 1). Grace Banu on why the struggle for transgender rights must evolve beyond tokenism. The Caravan. Retrieved from https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/grace-banu-on-transgender-rights-and-horizontal-reservations The Caravan

Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University. (2024, April). A. Revathi, Activist and Performer, on Her Journey as an Indian Trans Woman. Retrieved from https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/2024/04/a-revathi/

Written by Anjali Paruvu, 1st year, BA Multidisciplinary