New Delhi: Rights activists, opposition leaders including Members of Parliament and hundreds from the LGBTQ+ community and their allies came together on Sunday (March 23) for a public hearing at the Press Club of India to reject the government’s proposal on what they described as an attempt to “snatch away” hard-won rights, through the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026. All present criticised the provisions of the Bill, and also said that introducing a law with its features, without proper consultation and discussion, was an extremely regressive move.Sunday’s discussion was organised by the Rachnatmak Congress (formerly known as its outreach cell) and led by Supreme Court advocate Avani Bansal. Rajya Sabha Members of Parliament Professor Manoj Kumar Jha of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Renuka Chowdhury of the Congress party, John Brittas of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) were present, as were Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) spokesperson Anish Gawande and activists and social workers Grace Banu, Krishanu, Samar Sharma, Nikunj and Tan.Demanding a complete rollback of the Bill, Rachnatmak Congress chairperson Sandeep Dikshit said, “This is not about party politics but the politics of rights and justice.”Professor Jha criticised the Union government’s Bill, saying it was reminiscent of many previous actions, and called it a “bus in reverse gear with no person in the driver’s seat”.“Every action of this government tells you that they have a regressive mindset. We must understand that this government is not scared of the parliament, it is scared of the streets,” he said, adding that “this bill should be thrown into the dustbin”.Brittas pointed to how the Bill will “subject an entire community to harassment and trauma bureaucratically”.Meanwhile, Congress Member of Parliament and former Union minister Renuka Chowdhary said “it is and will be an uphill battle” to demand the rights of transgender persons again. “We have to fight collectively and cohesively,” she said.The Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha on March 13 by Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Virendra Kumar and has drawn severe criticism and opposition from people across the country for it seeks to change the definition of “transgender persons”. The definition, critics say, restricts the meaning of “transgender persons” to just a few socio-cultural identities.The transgender community has argued that it reverses the 2014 National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) v. Union of India judgement, which, for the first time, recognised self-identification as a fundamental right and an integral part of personal autonomy and self-expression”. It also erases all progress social workers and activists have achieved through the enactment of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.The government has justified the Bill, saying it is to prevent the misuse of welfare benefits and ensure only “genuine oppressed persons” can access the schemes.‘We decide our identity’Raising serious concerns about the clauses in the Bill, the transgender community has said that it was not consulted at all in the discussions on the proposed amendments.“I have lived this life on my terms. I make my own decisions, earn my own money. I have fought my family, fought society over who I am. Now you ask us to prove our identity? Who gave anyone the right to decide that?” asked Samar Sharma, a trans man and social worker, raising an existential question that encapsulates the unease and anger of the protesters.Grace Banu, noted transgender rights activist and a Dalit, recollected how the community fought human rights violations for many years and how she, too, was a victim of “medical harassment”, a situation that may return if the Bill were to be passed.Speaking on the continuous back and forth with judgments and laws on transgender rights over the years, she said, “We have been oppressed for years by a cis-Brahminical-patriarchal society. They are still struggling to define our identity. They don’t know we all have the right to live a dignified life.”“There is fear and so much anger. We don’t have the rights to our own identity. Even now we don’t have a safe space to open up about our identity, more than 75 years after independence. The government is not ready to protect us,” she said.Nikunj, a trans man from Indore, Madhya Pradesh, spoke about how, growing up, he faced many difficulties in just trying to explain to the people around him what his identity meant. “I come from a village where education has not reached every household yet. They don’t even know the meaning of a trangender person,” Nikunj said.Activists tear the Amendment Bill in a symbolic show of protest at the Press Club of India, March 22, 2026.Nikunj, the director of Tapish Foundation, a trans rights and education advocacy organisation, explained that their struggles never stopped for a minute even after the 2019 Act.“When we went to collect our TG [transgender identity] cards, they would look at us, clueless. The awareness was so little that, despite the law on ‘self-identification’, the authorities would ask us if we had undergone surgery. We’ve spent years creating awareness about us and now all of it is under water. My rights are gone,” he said.Tan, a non-binary queer-transgender rights activist on the panel, said, “A majority of the Indian population resides in non-urban areas. This includes transgender people. And the reality of rural India is that a district magistrate or local authority does not understand trans man or trans woman, or what the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act is.”Among the key concerns regarding the Bill are proposed changes that will require hospitals to mandatorily report details of gender-affirming surgeries to district authorities. This would introduce not just another bureaucratic layer but also body screenings, violating the right to privacy and personal autonomy of transgender persons.This, the protesters argued, was invasive, undermined their dignity and “pathologised” gender identity.“It has only been five years since we have got a constitutional right to our identity. For any policy to effectively be implemented on the ground, it takes nearly a decade on average. You [the government] have not given us that time yet. And you’re already trying to revise it with no actual rationale!” Tan added.Ministry faces backlashThe gathering was organised just a day after six representatives of the National Council of Transgender Persons (NCTP), a statutory body formed under the 2019 Act, were called for an “urgent” meeting with the social justice minister on Saturday, and then told that minister Kumar could not make it because he had a “family emergency”.Instead, Yogita Swaroop, senior economic adviser in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, met the council representatives and held a discussion on gaps in the policy. The charge against Swaroop is that she resisted the demands raised by the representatives. When asked why they were not consulted on the Bill, she allegedly told them, “We know what needs to be done with the Bill, so there was no need to consult you.”Opposition Members of Parliament and activists present at the Sunday gathering at the Press Club demanded Swaroop’s resignation for “humiliating” members of the NCTP who met her.“Such a bureaucrat cannot be allowed to continue,” Gawande of the NCP (Sharad Pawar) said, adding that if the Bill were passed, it would also “increase attacks on chosen families more than ever”.Chowdhury called the government’s approach “a shocking lack of understanding and empathy”.The Wire has reached out to Yogita Swaroop for a comment over call and on email. This story will be updated upon receiving a response.At the end of the public hearing, the panelists gathered to demand the immediate rollback of the proposed revisions to the law. Tearing a copy of the Bill before the audience, they raised the slogan: “Pehchan khud banayenge, hum kaghaz nahi dikhayenge (We will decide our identity, we refuse to show you our papers).”The slogan is taken from the poem ‘Hum Kaghaz Nahi Dikhayenge’, written by writer-comedian Varun Grover, which became the anthem for the 2019-20 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens.“We demand the resignation of Yogita Swaroop. We demand a complete withdrawal of this bill,” the activists and panelists said.