Recently, on Eid, someone told me, “Aapke haath ki eidi barqat wale ko milti hai.” It translates to, blessed are those who receive a gift from me. On another occasion, an auto-driver requested I pay in cash over UPI, so he can keep it as a blessing. “In our culture, we respect you all a lot,” he said. What for, you must be wondering. For I am a transgender person.I happen to be an upper-caste, English-speaking, law-degree-carrying transgender person. And this always makes people’s responses to my presence interesting, at the very least. A woman once offered me Rs 10 at an ice-cream shop in exchange for “mataji ka aashirwad,” and then got promptly embarrassed upon realising that I am perhaps not the kind of transgender person to be offering it to. Bystanders often say “Pranam maasiji” to me, the Gujarati word for hijras. Once a policeman said, “This one is educated,” trying to reconcile me with his understanding of a maasi. I even got “Are you a shemale?” once from a man hitting on me. Popular understandings of transgender persons often diverge to intersex people or socio-cultural groups like hijras, seen often as exotic and divine; seldom as human.People are clearly unclear about what a transgender person is, for there are many different kinds of trans people. The definition in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, itself names trans-men, trans-women, people who are genderqueer and intersex – though included somewhat incorrectly – and socio-cultural groups like hijras and kinnars. Each of these identities have different needs. The new law that replaces the 2019 Act is only the latest instance of a law that operates without understanding its target beneficiary.This article is based on years of fieldwork on the operation of various laws in rural areas that show how popular imaginations often trump lived realities of people, even in the law. Confusions and contradictions in understanding transgender persons existed in state documents even before the 2026 amendment. However, the amendment gives in to the popular imagination of transgender persons, changing this definition to people ‘immutably’ trans. It lets go of a definition that understood its stakeholders better, to one that fundamentally misunderstands them.Laws that imagine communitiesMuch like the 2026 Trans Act, various laws enforce definitions wholly incongruent with lived realities. Among many such examples, I share two here: households and village boundaries.In South Gujarat, rural households are often shared between family members living together. Laws often miss this.For instance, the Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SWAMITVA) aiming to establish ownership of properties in rural-inhabited areas by issuing property cards for economic security. Ground operation revealed that these cards were found to have been issued carrying the name of only one person – almost always a man.This understanding of the household as a nuclear, male-led one results in other equal owners – parents, wives and brothers – being excluded from legal proof of this ownership. Many adivasi communities have a gharjamai pratha, or matrilocality. When a woman is excluded from property cards due to imagined definitions, she is excluded from her rights in both, the natal home and the marital home. Land is seen here as a privately owned, economic security resource, misunderstanding the cultural and social value of land to adivasis.When households are seen this way, their monetary values are overestimated. Of late, in south Gujarat, notices are being sent to people following which benefits become inaccessible to them because ration cards rely on a minimum family income to decide who benefits. In shared households, the total land owned by that family ends up being worth more than what makes them eligible, which would not happen if it is seen as split between multiple families.Even laws with relatively realistic definitions of a “household” exist imagine the physical contours of this household. Under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, judges can pass a residence order, restraining the offending relative from entering the part of the house where the aggrieved woman resides. However, this becomes unworkable for rural houses where there is hardly any such separate section.Resources in villages too are often shared. So, a water source or grazing land in one village is usually accessed by all the nearby villages as well. Fieldwork done during lockdown measures taken during COVID-19 revealed in enforcing revenue boundaries, authorities blocked off access to such shared resources to those who do not reside in this artificial boundary.There is a difference in how a boundary is being understood, where the lawmakers are keeping in mind the popular imagination, while for the people, real boundaries are much different.Will the real transgender person please stand up?The 2026 amendment recalibrates itself in search for those transgender persons who are “genuinely oppressed”. The wide net cast by the 2019 Act, to include anyone whose “gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth” is gone because it is harder to identify such self-perceived transgender persons. “We have no trans-accessible washrooms here because we don’t have any transgenders” is a genre of response I have often received from state officials during my fieldwork to get the 2019 Act enforced. The principle that the 2019 Act was built on was ‘self-determination of gender’ as held in NALSA v. Union of India (2014). However, it is a principle that is somewhat hard for people to grasp. Transness can be hard to comprehend. Whether I am trans or not is something that only I can know. The 2026 amendment, in the same vein, desires something more objective – for something so inherently subjective – to prevent alleged misuse.The 2019 Act was never a community favorite but it created some legal protections and obligations, which pushed ministries to publish circulars, notifications and advisories, courts to hold pro-trans judgments and public and private stakeholders to create institutional protection for trans people. Almost all state documents refer to or reproduce this definition. It also helped push forward an understanding of transgender persons as more than what is popularly imagined. In the many trainings I’ve facilitated with police officers, students, teachers, paralegals and lawyers, I have received a range of conceptualisations of what a transgender person is: people who change their gender, have no genitals, have both male and female genitals, whose soul is of a different gender, and who are trapped in the wrong body. In all these training sessions, the 2019 definition was still helpful to clear up confusions and myths about trans people, and help participants develop a deeper understanding of the lives and needs of all trans people. Rather than pushing forward, the new legislature has chosen to let the Act once again give way to more confusion.The trans law always had issues……but references to the 2019 definition did not immediately translate to what the rest of the state document entails. For the learned judges sitting on the bench of NALSA v. Union of India, gender meant self-determination and trans people meant a mixture of many. For all official stakeholders, however, this was perhaps not the case. An analysis of several legal documents by me points to the same. Indian policy on trans people appears mired with confusions that coexist with each other.Consider, for instance, the flagship scheme Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise (SMILE) that aimed to create welfare measures for transgender persons and beggars. At some places, it recognises self-determination, such as when it states that despite unisex washrooms in hospitals, patients should be allowed to access washrooms of their self-identified gender. In other places, articulations like “’eunuch/transgender’” indicate confusion. It never truly clarifies whether it is targeted towards all or specific transgender persons. It never outwardly excludes, say, trans-men. The Press Council of India has explicitly discouraged the use of “eunuch” because apart from its negative connotations, it can in no way mean anyone who is not transfemme. The 2019 Act does not use it either. Meanwhile, the transgender portal explicitly answers FAQs for trans-men. However, SMILE’s articulations raise confusions. It interprets NALSA as holding “along with other directions the Court directed that Hijras, Eunuchs, apart from binary gender, be treated as ‘third gender’.” Unsurprisingly, these words also find a place in the amended law.Which is it then? Self-determination or a third gender? Or is it self-determination to be a third gender? The latter would not really work for trans-men and many trans-women.For scholarships, it limits entitlements to class IX and upwards, stating that “self-perceived gender identity of the Transgender persons up to the age of class 8th remains ambiguous to large extent and therefore the transgender identity of the children may not be established.” This is neither medically true nor the lived reality of trans people. I myself have sensed my trans-ness since I was four years old, for sexual maturity and gender identity are two very different things. As a child, I could not express this, because I had no vocabulary, rather than not being trans itself. The 2019 definition too made no such link. In fact, the 2019 Act contradicted itself. Despite its inclusive definition, the Act required a “surgery” for a transgender person to legally transition to either man or woman. This contradicts the meaning of self-determination as well as the definition’s emphasis on needing no surgery, further compounding when the 2020 Rules were notified asking for a “medical intervention” which included but was not limited to hormone replacement therapy and laser. But Acts generally override Rules. The impact: transwomen and transmen looking to legally transition were confused about whether or not they are eligible. The Hindi translation of the 2019 Act carries this confusion too. “Transgender Persons” in it is translated to “उभयलिंगी”, meaning hermaphrodite or androgynous, inclining less towards self-determined gender and more towards biology, in specific a crude understanding of intersex biologies. In all legal training that I have conducted with Hindi speakers, no one recognises this term – trans or otherwise. In translating “genderqueer” as part of the definition of transgender persons, the word “लिंग-समलैंगिक” translates to homosexual. For a Hindi-speaking court, a homosexual person would also be transgender then, which is not what the authoritative legal definition is. As a result, the legal documents listing entitlements of transgender persons are themselves confused. The lived experiences of trans individuals seem to never have become fully a part of the trans-centric law, though now, it is fully excluded. Every day, I experience things that all women do, because I am transgender. Nothing out of the ordinary: escaping assault by a hair’s length, being stalked, publicly masturbated to, accosted for sex work, receiving unsolicited illicit images and filmed, photographed, morphed and circulated without consent by men – all punishable offences against women, which were on the verge of protecting trans people too. Yet, the laws will now not punish anyone for this when it happens to me. The law now tells me that I am not trans enough, even though I’m trans enough to be routinely gifted with slurs, staring, mockery, lechery and refused housing by people; to worry endlessly about whether my clothes are modest enough or will they get me raped, whether the room has exit-routes, whether a woman is present in the bus coach, whether I am being followed on the road, whether if I step out of my house, will I make it back; in a state that refuses to address it. I am, yet, not a transgender person who is “in actual need of such protection,” says the law now. It denies the lived experience of trans people and imagines what this experience is. It denies the rape and sexual harassment, custodial violence, homelessness, and heightened suicide and murder rates that trans people experience. It denies the abductions and missing trans people that NCRB itself reports, and the ones it does not report. It denies the trans victims of sexual harassment, rape, marital cruelty and domestic violence that courts have adjudicated on. It denies the maltreatment and healthcare issues in prisons for trans people that the Ministry of Home Affairs itself responded to. The 2026 Act becomes the very thing it swore to destroy: discrimination against transgender persons. Vulnerable people are always excludedHow does one learn about lived realities? Usually, asking people who experience it, albeit sensibly, is a good first step towards it. The Pre-legislative Consultation Policy makes public consultation a legal obligation for each department/ministry while drafting bills before introduction. The 2026 amendment took place with no such public consultations.In each of the examples above, what is missing is sufficient opportunities for vulnerable people – women, Adivasi, rural residents and transgender persons – for the welfare of whom each law is made. To not have a voice in the law as it is defined or articulated makes definitions myopic as they inevitably rely on widespread perceptions. In every example above, a law ends up working against the community because the community is imagined – not understood. Their every day lived experiences fail to become part of the process, and by extension, of the law. The only hope is that our lawmakers move towards greater consultation while legislating future plans for vulnerable communities.Farhan Zia is a legal researcher at the Centre for Social Justice.