This story was first published by queerbeat. You can read the original here.One morning in July 2026, Shivani and her friend Paro* were begging at the Raebareli railway station in Uttar Pradesh when a policeman approached the two trans women. “Nowadays a lot of fake ones [transgender persons] are going around. You two aren’t among those, are you?” Shivani recalled the policeman asking.Shivani and Paro belong to the kinnar community, a South Asian, largely North Indian, transfeminine socio-cultural identity distinct from but related to the hijra community. To make a living, some members of these communities practise chhalla mangna—seeking alms in public spaces. When the cop first approached them, Shivani wasn’t alarmed. Police officials had also been stopping hawkers on the platform that day. But then he ordered them into a small police booth on the platform. He forced Paro to strip naked to “prove” that she was a “real kinnar,” Shivani recalled. Passersby watched through the booth’s glass windows as Paro undressed. “Four or five police officers were standing around, and all I could think was I would have to take off my clothes too,” Shivani said. Of the cops present, only one was a woman.“I said loudly that they could touch and see, from above my clothes,” Shivani said, laughing uncomfortably. She remembered trying her best to sound tough.A policeman patted her down while the other cops stared. “I’m heavier set, which makes me look naturally feminine. But I don’t have the silicone breasts younger girls get, and I haven’t had any surgery done at the bottom, so there’s always the fear they’ll say I’m a man. I’m not… I never have been,” Shivani said, her voice earnest with longing for the world to see her as she sees herself. When queerbeat contacted Paro, she declined a full-length interview but confirmed Shivani’s account of the incident.From the start, the officers were clear that they wanted a bribe; they threatened to lock the women up if they didn’t comply. Shivani eventually gave in. One officer pocketed the ₹2,000 they handed over and warned them not to beg at the station again.“It was disgusting, and day by day the harassment is only growing,” Shivani said. “The railways were always our territory, but the RPF [Railway Protection Force] has become relentless. Wherever we go, they stop us and ask for money.”When presented with Shivani’s account, Devansh Shukla, Divisional Security Commissioner of Lucknow’s Railway Protection Force – responsible for security at Raebareli station – side-stepped the allegations. He told queerbeat he was unaware of the incident, adding that without a formal complaint, taking action would be difficult. Rather than addressing the abuse, Shukla framed police interactions with trans people around passenger complaints: “We get complaints all the time about trans groups harassing passengers in trains and on stations, so we take appropriate action for the same, but we don’t ask for proof of gender identity from the trans people; we just address the specific complaint,” he said.But trans community advocates argued that these official interventions are often just extortion attempts disguised as police work. Ritu, a prominent trans rights activist from Uttar Pradesh and a nonbinary transfeminine person, said that calling someone ‘fake trans’ has become a way for the police to legitimise violence against trans people. “The police use this [fake trans] narrative to throttle, to exercise power and authority over the trans person and remove her from that space,” she said.“The cops also get their share from the begging… the day they feel like they haven’t been paid or they want more money, they will catch trans folks and call them fake,” said Sylvie Merchant, 46, a trans rights activist based in Vadodara.Sylvie’s observation aligns with findings from a landmark 2016 study commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which reported that transgender people are routinely harassed by the police for bribes. The study, which surveyed 900 trans people in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, remains the only large-scale government research on trans issues to date.Despite the harassment, Shivani and Paro continue to walk the trains and stations of central Uttar Pradesh every day, seeking alms to survive. Just this month, a different set of RPF officers stopped them on a train at Gauriganj station. The officers demanded ₹500 from each. Between them, Shivani and Paro could only gather ₹250. They were allowed to leave with the warning that if they wanted to beg, they would have to pay up every time or “be declared farji [fake] and locked up.”The narrative that many trans people are “fake”—that is, they are men pretending to be women—is often weaponised against them. Such assumptions fundamentally contradict basic human rights principles, which reject physical or medical scrutiny as a measure of gender identity. The Yogyakarta Principles, the foundational global standard for gender and sexuality rights, define gender identity as a “deeply felt internal and individual experience.” India’s Supreme Court cited this precedent as part of its landmark 2014 National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) judgment, which affirmed the right of citizens to self-identify their gender without medical or physical verification. Yet, activists across the country said the “fake trans” narrative has long coloured the attitudes of government officials and been amplified by media narratives that uncritically reproduce the state narrative. Mentions of the trope show up in media reports as early as 1998. However, it has grown more pervasive in recent years. queerbeat spoke to 12 trans rights activists across 11 states—Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu—all of whom said that the “fake trans” accusation has become a growing source of harassment. While some of these incidents have led to arrests and legal cases against trans people accused of being fake, community sources said they are more often detained, extorted for money, and released with a warning to stop begging in specific areas. “There is constantly this idea that they are dressing up a certain way to make money,” said Ritu. In her view, this “fake narrative” allows the police to demand larger bribes while cutting off income for trans people who are already excluded from traditional employment. The NHRC study found that only 6 percent of the 900 trans people surveyed had formal jobs.As a trans person who has not transitioned medically or legally, Ritu is accustomed to having her identity questioned. She recalled that, on a recent train journey, the ticket checker saw that her reservation carried a male gender marker and made a point of announcing out loud that she was a man. Dressed in a salwar suit, she was presenting feminine that day. Her co-passengers, who had been calling her didi (sister) until then, wanted nothing to do with her after that, she said. For a little over half a decade, the law offered some protection against this kind of harassment. Then it was rewritten.The law that legitimised the lieIn 2019, five years after the Supreme Court’s landmark NALSA judgment, the BJP-led government passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (Trans Act), codifying the right to self-identification of gender in law. The legislation gave trans people and advocacy groups a legal shield, which they could use to defend themselves whenever police or state officials weaponised the “fake trans” trope.“We used to do this work often, going to police stations and advocating on behalf of people from the community,” a trans activist from West Bengal said on the condition of anonymity. They often relied on the NALSA judgement and the Trans Act to counter “fake trans” allegations, they said. “But now the situation has become such that the law is not on our side. In fact, it is against us.” In 2026, the BJP-led government amended the Trans Act, removing trans people’s right to self-identify their gender. Under the amended act, trans people must prove their gender identity before a government-appointed medical board. According to Amit Bisoi, a genderfluid activist who works with the Chennai-based NGO SAATHII, senior government and police officials have long perpetrated the fake trans narrative, operating under the assumption that there are “men who put on women’s clothes at night and do sex work and call themselves kinnar, and these are all fake identities.” The amendments have lent new strength to these suspicions. “The amendment has legitimised the idea that fake trans people exist. Earlier, that was just an insult; now, if you’re called fake, your rights can actually be taken away,” said Sintu Bagui, another trans rights activist from West Bengal.While the erosion of legal rights poses a major challenge for India’s trans communities, the “fake trans” narrative cuts even deeper. Kinnars and hijras have long received grudging social acceptance. They have traditionally been allowed to collect alms in exchange for blessings. This acceptance is rooted in the belief that they are sacred. “For a long time, hijras were a mysterious community; where did they come from, how are they born, nobody knew, and it was this mystery that gave them a godly image. Who do people fear or worship? An entity that is unknowable,” explained Ritu. The fake trans narrative attacks this social sanction, which was the only protection trans people had before the NALSA judgment. The accusation of “fake” transness – which the police use to extract bribes and justify violence – has taken hold even within India’s trans community. Across India, some trans persons have begun weaponising the accusation to assert their dominance over other community members, activists told queerbeat.“We’ve seen cases where a person who has been in the dera [a group of kinnar persons who live and work together] for 5–10 years under the same guru [leader of the dera]… the day that there is some conflict, some disagreement, that same person will be made naked at a road crossing saying they’re fake and beaten up [by other members of the same dera],” Ritu said.While conflicts have always existed within the community, all the trans activists queerbeat spoke to across 11 states said that the Trans Amendment Act’s narrowing of the definition of transgender has sharpened internal divisions within trans communities in their regions. The amendments replaced the self-identification of gender with explicit legal recognition of a few specific socio-cultural trans identities—kinnar, hijra, aravani, and jogta – in addition to intersex persons. Aravani is a Tamil Nadu-specific term for trans women; jogta refers to a trans identity in Karnataka and Maharashtra.The threat of being labelled fake is also resulting in a troubling trend. It is pushing some vulnerable trans people towards surgery, often at a severe cost. The activist from West Bengal said that many members of the hijra communities they work with – who had not previously undergone gender-affirming surgery – have rushed to seek it at illicit clinics because of the “panic that your identity can be taken from you.” At the same time, others in the community view the amended law – and the fake trans narrative it supports – as a way to strengthen their power. “With the government bringing this act, many of the hijra gurus are happy,” the West Bengal-based activist said, pointing out that since the guru’s power is tied to their leadership of a gharana [the extended kinship structure of a kinnar or hijra community], they tend to label any trans person who chooses to oppose or criticise the structure as fake.The power play also has a saffron dimension. Over the past 12 years of BJP rule, as the Hindutva ideology has become firmly entrenched in India’s cultural politics, it has penetrated kinnar, hijra, and other trans communities as well. These communities have syncretic traditions that draw from many religions. However, these practices are now being reinterpreted in more explicitly, exclusively Hindu ways, said Don Hassar, a Himachal Pradesh-based queer rights activist now associated with the All India Professionals’ Congress.So a new slur is rapidly gaining currency among trans communities: Bangladeshi. Levelled at anyone deemed “not Hindu enough,” the pejorative is often used interchangeably with the accusation of being “fake,” several queer activists told queerbeat. The activist from West Bengal requested anonymity precisely because they have often faced these insinuations while advocating for their community.According to Amit, who works with SAATHII, the amendment’s most damaging consequence is that it has turned trans communities’ energy inward. Instead of coming together to demand rights, trans people across the country are now consumed by the question of who among them is real.How the narrative gained legitimacyIn March 2026, while introducing amendments to the Trans Act, the government claimed that self-identification of gender had made it “impossible to identify the genuine oppressed persons.”In Parliament, Medha Kulkarni, a BJP Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from Rajasthan, pointed to a supposed rise in fraudulent trans identities to justify the crackdown by the police. “Have they created this fake identity for easy employment, forcing children to be transgender to beg?” she asked during the Rajya Sabha debate. “We need a law that provides justice to ‘real’ trans people and strictly punishes ‘fake’ trans people.”In August, the government defended this position before the Supreme Court. Responding to a batch of petitions in an ongoing case challenging the amendments, Tushar Mehta, the Solicitor General of India, mocked the idea of self-identification. “Today I am a man, I may say tomorrow I am a woman,” he said.While the “fake trans” narrative has gained traction with the Trans Amendment Act, ill-informed news reports in media outlets across the country have laid the groundwork for it over years. Articles reporting on police action against trans people often repeat the official narrative verbatim, presenting transness as simply a disguise that men can put on to harass people for money, activists said. They argued that such reporting fuels panic about trans people being “fake,” often leaving them further ostracised and strapped for earning opportunities.Prasoon Shukla, a Kanpur-based senior journalist, reported on the arrest of several allegedly “fake” trans persons in July 2026. He said he saw no problem with repeating the police narrative without question. “The railway police work at the stations; they know the regular groups, they know who is fake and who is real. This has become a common nuisance now that men are dressing up as kinnars and extorting money,” Prasoon told queerbeat. When queerbeat asked Prasoon whether he had spoken to any members of the kinnar community or asked the police how they had decided the arrested individuals were “fake trans persons,” Prasoon said he had relied solely on the police narrative. Another journalist in Varanasi, who spoke to queerbeat on the condition of anonymity, also reported on a similar story about a “fake kinnar” for another Hindi newspaper in July 2026. The report stated that the accused had assumed a trans identity simply to extort people. The journalist also said relying entirely on police statements in such cases was sufficient; they did not feel the need to speak to the trans person accused of being fake. Like Prasoon’s report, this, too, carried images of the trans person in which they could be clearly identified. “This sort of constant misreporting drills into people’s minds that this is an issue, Ritu said. It creates the impression that a law is needed to “punish” these “fake” trans people, she added.On a missionShivani is all too familiar with the news reports that malign trans women as “fake.” She does not recognise herself in any of them. “I feel like I was born trans,” Shivani said. Now 24, she has been part of the kinnar community for a decade, begging at bus stops and railway stations to make a living.At five, she began presenting as feminine. She kept her hair long, wore a set of payals [anklets], and applied lipstick. “People dismissed it, saying ‘he’s a kid,’” she recalled.But when she was seven, she told a classmate that she loved him. The boy told everyone at school. When her parents heard, they beat her. They no longer saw her gender presentation as child’s play, she said. It had become a problem.In 2016, Shivani, then 14, left her natal home and began living with a kinnar community at a dera in Lucknow. Embarrassed by her defiance of gender norms, her relatives had long threatened to hand her over to the kinnars. “So they didn’t mind when I finally took their advice,” she said. She now sees the kinnar community as her only family.Shivani said she has had several run-ins with the police over the years. She’s been stopped and harassed while begging, and sometimes even been physically and sexually abused. However, she pointed out that they have only recently begun questioning her identity.“It’s like they’re on a mission to find who all the fake trans people are… I mean, there are good and bad people in every community, but I haven’t had surgery either; does that make me fake?” Shivani asked.Shivani, like the activists queerbeat spoke to, also believes that the recent amendments to the Trans Act are contributing to increased police harassment. “This act has declared us criminals, so of course the police feel they can question us, threaten us, do anything (to us), and no one will care,” she said.Members of Lucknow’s Kinnar community at a bus stop.The 2026 amendment’s criminal provisions—including penalties for forcing someone to transition and for coercing them to present as trans for begging—are rooted in a colonial-era myth that casts trans people as predators who abduct children and forcibly change their gender. Yet, as queerbeat has previously reported, the National Crime Records Bureau has no records of such cases.“Earlier, if someone was being called fake or harassed by the police, ten other kinnars would show up to support them. But now, with provisions that criminalise those who ‘influence’ someone to be trans, people are more afraid to support each other. And without self-identification, they’re always worried they may be called fake, too,” Ritu said.Further, the amended Trans Act requires a trans person’s gender identity to be certified by a medical board before it is legally recognised. As a result, trans persons like Shivani, who haven’t had gender-affirming procedures, are denied protections under the amended Trans Act and rendered more vulnerable to harassment.“You also have to ask who has the means and privilege to access gender-affirming care,” Ritu said, adding that the increased emphasis on surgeries stems from the state’s drive to push people into distinct gender binaries. “The Act also invisibilises nonbinary identities. There is a certain anxiety in society about them because they dismantle the patriarchal construct used as a means of control,” she said.Surbhi, a 26-year-old Lucknow-based genderqueer person who identifies as a she-male and as transgender, knows this invisibility firsthand. She chose not to participate in the dera system because she feels it restricts gender expression. “You are often told that only if you get surgery, get breasts, will people give you money, but that’s not who I am or what I want, so I chose to stay out of it and make my own way,” she said.Surbhi works as an independent activist, advocating for others like her who don’t neatly fit the gender binary. However, her own nonbinary identity remains a source of harassment in her daily life.In July, Surbhi visited a police booth in eastern Lucknow to follow up on her complaint of phone theft. Unable to locate her case officer, Surbhi asked a traffic cop at the station to call the officer for an update. Dressed in a shirt and trousers, Surbhi’s appearance leaned male that day. But when she spoke in Hindi, she used feminine verb conjugation. “The traffic cop started asking me, ‘Are you a girl or a boy?’” Surbhi said. Even after she told him she was trans and showed him her Aadhaar card, which lists her as transgender, he still didn’t seem to understand. “He looked me up and down and said, ‘You don’t look trans,’” she recalled. Then Surbhi clapped – or rather, she performed the taali, a ritual act associated with Hijras. “Because that’s the only version of trans they understand,” she said. “And then he started clapping back at me, saying, ‘Even I can clap. What’s the big deal? How does that make you trans?’” He refused to help her, and Surbhi eventually left without the information she needed.Speaking to queerbeat on condition of anonymity, the officer who registered Surbhi’s initial complaint said that her experience isn’t representative of the whole police force. “I would say 90 percent of the police force has evolved and knows how to interact with trans people, but there is still that 10 percent who don’t know, and sometimes someone acts rashly, maybe because they are having a bad day,” he said. However, experiences of trans people with the police suggests that the reverse is true.Ritu pointed out that trans people are often violently targeted by the police and that the fake trans narrative is used to legitimise this violence. When videos of violence against trans people are shared, according to her, people are generally sympathetic. “But when the fake narrative comes in, suddenly there is no sympathy. Hence, the violence becomes legitimised,” she said. Policing each otherShivani feels that even within the kinnar community, those without surgery are seen as less legitimate and face greater risk of violence. “If kinnars weren’t doing this to each other, there wouldn’t be this pressure to get surgery,” she said. While this tension has simmered for years as gender-affirming procedures became more common, the new law has turned a subtle divide into an active weapon. Now, anyone without surgery risks being branded a fraud by their own peers.Illustrating this internal policing within the community, Shivani said she feels surveilled and under threat whenever she enters a kinnar dera that isn’t her own. The people of the other dera may assume she is there to steal their business, she said, even though she could simply be visiting a friend.Zeenat, a 21-year-old trans woman who is part of the dera system and begs at bus stops and road intersections in Lucknow, has also experienced this kind of harassment within the community. “When I’m travelling, sometimes on a train or bus, they come and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ They call me a fake kinnar, pointing out that this is not your area. But I’m just trying to get to where I’m going,” she said, in tears.Zeenat and Shivani say there is pressure within their communities to undergo gender-affirming surgeries, both to protect themselves from harassment by the police and because those who appear more outwardly feminine earn more money.Zahra, a kinnar in her twenties and Zeenat’s senior in their dera, said it is valid for gurus to demand that their chelas [disciples] undergo surgery. Someone seeking to support themselves by sharing in the earnings of the dera should be willing to commit to live like them, she said. She added that gender-affirming surgery had helped her express her gender identity.However, Surbhi, who has chosen to live outside the dera system, said this exertion of power by kinnar and hijra gurus is shrinking the space for who gets to call themselves trans. A trans rights activist from Assam, who requested anonymity for fear of backlash from trans communities, concurred with Surbhi. “A couple of years ago, I rescued someone from the police [in Assam]. They were hitting her with batons and calling her fake. Now she has become senior [within the dera hierarchy] and has recently been calling other young trans people fake just because of this power politics. This is how the entire system functions, and the police take advantage of it,” she said. Because trans people must compete for limited opportunities, surgery has become proof of who is “real” – and therefore, more deserving.Who counts as realThe pressure to prove one’s identity pits trans individuals against each other in a competition for legitimacy. Ritu believes this dynamic is by design. “[The government is] fuelling this narrative so that we keep on fighting among ourselves. And they will just sit and watch,” Ritu said. Ritu, who was once part of a Kinnar dera herself, has been a victim of this internal competition. Last year, when she threw her hat in the ring to become a member of a transgender board in Uttar Pradesh, her guru accused her of being fake because she had not undergone surgery, Ritu said. With her guru and other powerful members of the community opposing her, she became embroiled in a legal case, which scuppered her chances of joining the board.“The thing is, when you ask the state for rights, it also gains the power to define who qualifies for those rights. The way the state is now defining trans people is not just a gender identity; it is a socio-religious, cultural identity,” Ritu said. She believes this promotes a binary of “good” and “bad” trans persons, where the Hindu, upper-caste Brahminical trans person is good, and the Muslim trans person is “not just bad, but fake, Bangladeshi, not trans enough and not Indian enough.” Trans activists from across the country whom queerbeat spoke to concurred with Ritu. Don, the trans rights activist from Himachal Pradesh, said that the current government and its new law are not just erasing trans identities but actively criminalising them using religion as a tool to aid in that project.Don, Ritu and other activists across the country believe that the legitimacy of a person’s trans identity has been conflated with religious and social hierarchies, and that those who fall outside them are automatically deemed fake in many parts of the country where Hindu trans communities are dominant. The “fake” trans person is an “illusion,” said Ritu. “Actually nothing like ‘fake trans’ exists… [When] a person says I am trans, they are trans. There is no if and but.”*Names changed to protect identity. Esha Mitra (she/her) is an award-winning journalist and producer who has reported on issues of socio-political inequalities and oppression across South Asia.