Not enough. Too much.Earlier this month, the Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment introduced a Bill in the House of the People to amend the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. I read it, and promptly forgot how to breathe. The Bill was passed this week.A decade ago, the university at which I studied responded very matter-of-factly to a request I made for a gender neutral honorific in my transcript. They said yes. I became Mx Anindita Mukherjee.It made a bit of a hullabaloo.Many people thought the ‘Mx’ instead of the ‘Ms’ was simply a typographical error, and joked about it. For those making the decision, the move from Ms to Mx was related differently – after all, the mainstreaming of ‘Ms’ over ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ was also a hard-won battle about the right of women to be more than their marital status. This, they thought, was a logical next step.I teach now, at that university. The nameplate outside my office says ‘Mx Anindita Mukherjee’ and will do so until I finally manage to acquire one of the few socially acceptable gender-neutral honorifics and become ‘Dr Anindita Mukherjee’. Many of my students work hard at respecting my desire for gender-neutral language. They do not ask me for proof. It heals something within me to witness them learning to wrap their tongues around language that is unfamiliar. I imagine this is how mountains shift.I do not insist on it, though. My parents have not attempted to make a switch. Most of my colleagues haven’t either. For the most part, it does not bother me. But on some days, a shard lodges itself in my mind: These people say they love you, but they can’t be bothered to learn the language that makes you feel most like yourself. On other days, I wonder if I am a fraud, and if that is the real reason why I don’t insist.I have never laid claim to transness, because I understand it as an identity born of experience that I am not sure I share. Yet, I have also never felt at home within cis-gendered categories. Where does a person go if they can’t find a box within which to park themselves? Is one condemned to live a life feeling like a fraud? Not queer enough, yet too loud, too aggressive, too brusque, too masculine to be a woman.What does it do to a person to have their chosen identity respected? Speaking for myself, it allowed me to breathe. A friend, whose knowledge of English is limited, once asked me, “You are little bit outside woman, no?” No sentence has ever captured me as well as that one. I may not have had any interaction with the state under the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, but its promise was a promise that the state made to respect choice. This matters to every last one of us.Self-identification includes within it the possibility of greys – of being unsure, of becoming. It is no surprise, therefore, that authoritarian forces that thrive on false certainties and are afraid of people doing the work to find themselves should move swiftly to curb a movement of people making a simple but radical claim upon the law: Take me as I am. Your law should be tailored to my reality, not my reality to your law.A lot has been written about the proposed amendment since it became publicly available. It is patently unconstitutional in its exclusions and violent in its intent, that much is clear. To me, it appears as though the point of the amendment is to make it possible to jail trans people under the transgender rights statute.It also smells of fear. Taking transgender identities seriously, like taking disability seriously, requires the law to grapple with fluidity and unsettle long-standing categories. It requires creativity, trust and respect. None of which are on display amongst the ruling dispensations we are saddled with in many parts of the world.Ultimately, it is a battle between those who have the courage to imagine themselves to be different from what they’re told they are, and those whose strength comes from unquestioning obedience to the narratives they are fed about themselves and the world. I fear that, in the short term, the latter may win. But I haven’t a doubt in my mind about who wins the war.Anindita Mukherjee is an assistant professor at the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.