Guest post by SVATI P SHAH
On October 8, 2026, a group called ‘Women’s Declaration International India’ filed a PIL in the Indian Supreme Court which calls for further narrowing transgender legal rights, as afforded in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 (‘Transgender Act’). The PIL takes courage from the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 (‘Amendment Act), which removes the right of self-attested gender (as was legally affirmed in Transgender Act) and requires medical ‘evidence’ of gender identity that does not conform to sex assigned at birth. The October 8 PIL builds on language in the Amendment Act to demand the legal enshrinement, ‘protection’ of ‘biological’ women. Specific ‘prayers’ include that the Court declare ‘sex’ and ‘gender identity’ as legally distinct, declaring that Section 7/18 of the Transgender Act, which allows for administrative orders to change gender on official documents like Aadhaar, be defined as unconstitutional, specifically excluding transgender people from access to welfare schemes with gendered quotas, overruling transgender legal recognition and the right to benefits guaranteed in the 2014 NALSA judgement, and stripping away the protection from emotional and verbal abuse by declaring a portion of Section 18(d) of the 2019 Transgender Act as unconstitutional. The PIL essentially frames transgender rights as an encroachment of the rights of women, where women are defined with respect to an extremely partial and misunderstood use of the term ‘biology.’
This argument presents itself new but is in fact an old tactic dressed in a new context. It comes from a perspective in Global North women’s movements that was known as ‘radical feminism,’ which began in the late 1960s. The roots of the argument in the PIL can be traced back through feminist debates on prostitution in the 1990s and 2000s, when radical feminists called for carceral, criminalizing responses to commercial sex, largely by conflating trafficking with prostitution. The campaign to abolish prostitution was itself a reinvention of arguments that had been developed in the unsuccessful campaign to abolish pornography. In both cases, this branch of Western feminism saw prostitution and pornography as indexes of violence against women. In routinely disregarding perspectives of sex workers or people working in pornography who disputed the conflation of their industries with violence, radical feminists called for strong punitive responses from the state. In the campaign to end pornography they demanded that governments censor printed materials according to definitions of obscenity that they would presumably determine. In the campaign to end prostitution they conflated sex work and trafficking and made migration for poor women across borders across the world even more challenging and dangerous.
A quick internet search of Women’s Declaration International reveals this lineage in the present PIL. One of the authors of the original Declaration is Sheila Jeffreys, an Australian feminist who has been active in anti-prostitution and anti-pornography advocacy for decades. Jeffreys’ contemporaries included Janice Raymond, who was active in the 1980s and 1990s and was a founding member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). CATW was at the forefront of advocating for the kind of anti-prostitution policy that, in India, has resulted in indefinite extrajudicial detention of women doing sex work in so-called rescue homes. This is the subject of the recent Supreme Court of India decision in the Prajwala case, where the judgment actually acknowledged the difference between sex work and human trafficking.
On paper, arguing against pornography, prostitution and transgender rights may seem unrelated. In practice they have always been part of the same radical feminist agenda, which has turned on protecting what it perceives as inherently vulnerable women from inherently violent men, and using the carceral state to do it. This politics has led to some of the worst kind of transphobia, via a denial of the very existence of trans women, and the erasure of trans men and trans masculinity altogether. It is no coincidence that when Janice Raymond was establishing CATW, she was also writing against transwomen, famously in a deeply problematic 1979 book called The Transsexual Empire. The book has been critiqued in recent years as a touchstone for white British feminism in the 1980s. Radical feminism has always held both prostitution-abolitionism and transphobia together because it is a commitment to the immutability of gender-based inequality. In so doing, radical feminism contributes to reifying binary gender difference. There is no way out of the violence of men in this world view. It is, in its own way, a politics of gender-pessimism cloaked in a defense of respectability.
Radical feminism is remarkably consistent, if ironically so, in its uncomplicated faith in the punitive powers of the state. Today they insist on the state legislating binary gender without a thought as to whether something truly physically immutable would require drawing juridical lines around it. In India this reverberates through the unsavory history of casteism and colonial and neocolonial efforts to expand the security state and surveillance. The hammer of criminalisation has historically targeted minorities and people of marginalised castes the most. The present PIL recalls the British colonial period, when gender-nonconforming people and people who were engaging in householding and transactional sex were deemed uncivilised, criminal, and legally outside of the purview of the civilising encroachment of the British Raj.
Lest we forget, the criminalisation of non-cisgender people alongside nomadic tribes under the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 was also a reification of caste-based hierarchies. Imperialist feminism is often at its finest when it attaches itself to local respectability politics and to comprador classes who agree that respectability ‘itself’ is at stake in acknowledging the historicity, processualism and contingency of something like binary gender. In this case, the zero-sum equation of transgender rights ‘versus’ women’s rights has the potential to cause great harm to transgender people and women alike. This is especially so in light of the slate of laws stripping away the right to documentation and legal recognition. This PIL does, however, benefit 21st century radical feminists who still insist on coming to the rescue.
The author would like to thank the friends who read this piece and gave comments. All errors remain my own.
