Are we seeing what some of us feared? Last week, Union social justice minister Virendra Kumar gave the country’s transgender population a fresh round of headaches. While the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) judgement promised the right to Indian citizens to self identify their gender, the sex apparatus of “biology” has once again been tightened by the government. For the government, alas, we remain a fiction – a community from old days, with old desires and hence the reversal of the right to self identify. Our government’s failures in securing trans rights are enormous but its prescriptions for how to be trans are also endless. In this double eradication, having no programme for trans welfare but an entire surveillance culture machinery to distinguish a trans subject, our government has only revealed its insincerity towards its citizens. It says we are better than the British, those foreigners who knew nothing of our ways of life – a culture of fluid sexuality and transgressive gender roles but it appears that the native ruler is just as clueless as its foreign masters once were. Archival records have shown how the Indian middle classes, proud Hindus and Muslims, eagerly named and reported trans people to the police of the Raj, contributing to the colonial differentiation of Indian sexuality through the control of public expressions of gender variance. The elimination campaigns, with the passing of the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, were hailed as uprooting the native who sabotages the perfect biological gender roles which came to be honed as Indian morals in the post-colony. Even though the ruling dispensation ideologically negates “biology” (‘non-biological prime minister’ or removal of Darwin’s thesis) especially descript in the case of the self-perceived identities of renouncer-ascetics, the same act is judged harshly when it comes to the transgender population. One begins to ask: Why?The renouncer in the case of the transgender does not merely reject biological roles like marrying or producing children, but simultaneously makes a joke out of them, substitutes them with sharp humour. What the renouncer-ascetic attempts to hide beneath its political identity, the transgender sets to reveal. The renouncer obfuscates the sexual foundation of life, because the abstract nation it represents imagines men and women reproducing without desire, without physicality, as if sexuality itself were absent. No traffic whatsoever of desire or women. But a transgender exposes through herself these impossible desires: the bride’s winner, the lover around the corner, the child she never had, and the leader of the masses. Transgender thus challenges both reproductive dominance and its apparent silence on the sexual health of humanity. Why must a transgender provide certificates after certificates to prove what they are, while the renouncer is seen as having left the worldly mirth merely based on his vocal rejection of maya? If a fiction is certain in one case and we have quite frankly acknowledged it in public view, why should the same attitude not extend to transgender people? Is the ruling dispensation trying to declare one form of ascetic’s legitimacy over the other? Is privileging one asceticism over the other not geared towards keeping the ruling disorder of things i.e. reproductive dominance and silenced sexuality. The infinity of procedures that one must undergo to assert a simple fact of self-identification seems to our government the most important of all tasks in transgender reality. It cares less about jobs generated or reserved for trans people but displays a profound concern with what goes on under the clothes, under the skin and in the minds of the trans folks. For the government, clothes, skin and mind become sites of scrutiny through which transgender identity is verified. It is here that the government’s insatiable hunger to define cultural identity becomes most visible.Also read: ‘Unconstitutional’, ‘Brahminical’: Why Trans Persons Are Opposing Amendments to Their Rights LawBeards, moustaches, sarees, skirts, bras, breasts, hormones, DNA, all appear to be very important categories of use for our government. Castration, the new amendment says, must be reported to the government. When all these objecthoods that are supposedly willed by a transgender persons do not follow a singular pathway, can we let our government enforce them all in one direction? Is this government thinking rightly of us? If the partial truths embodied by renouncers of maya – sadhus who claim indifference to body and mind yet travel by helicopter – are accepted and even celebrated with dignity, why does transgender identity remain such a prick in the Indian throat? The transgender person reveals that spiritual life is not simply opposed to material life. Seeded within material life itself, trans spiritualism emerges as a contingent eventuality – a happenstance of life shaped by desires and social conditions, even as these forces push it toward normative categories that later appear to designate the natural categories of sex, what we call biology. The natural categories of sex: the skin carrying the testicles, the mass around nipples, the penis appear as the ‘essence of sex’ whose cause is further sought in what is invisible to the ordinary i.e. hormones and DNA. Is it not similar to the renouncer sitting in his AC lounges finding cause of his unrelenting life in God? In totality, this sexual composition converts reproductive sexuality into a musical opera, an experience originally lacking in the practitioners of heterosexuality. Reasoned sexual totality in this way is not the cause but an additional pleasure to the heterosexual life. No man really cared what his DNA had to say as we know men reproduced much before Watson and Crick published their findings. And before such publishing, many scientists, who still cared for the ‘essence of sex’, believed sperm to carry an entire human minified waiting to grow in the womb of a woman. Reproduction is ordinary, in need of no genius. Animals, like man, produced their kinds; products restricted by nature only to their kinds. Genius, they say, produced the ascetic. If the denial of maya is an act of genius, transgender is a mirror to our Indian normative genius. The ascetic says he cares less about this life and renders life as sorrow; transgender shows how sorrow gets generated in the ordinary, and how impossible its cure is, such that she goes on to humiliate the peace of the world, and reciprocates what the world gives her: indignity and inhumanity. The threat of incivility is hardly a weapon; she armors it believing that this society might buy her lie as it has of the renouncer. While our government goes on to portray a renouncer as India’s biggest cultural feat and wants the transgender to fully subsume in the ascetic, this is an impossible task. The government wants its transgender people to remain trapped in this web of lies: lies that a renouncer has put us all into believing, lies that there is an afterlife, beyond maya or there is something called total sexual order. While pind-daan is one such lie of most of our households now, we cannot escape the fact that material infrastructure is needed to even pay the pandit of the last rites. To that extent we have no choice but to strive for maya. And we do. If we want any dignity, including that which is culturally conferred upon transgender people, we must rescue them from the web of lies towards a totality of maya. If India is the world’s fastest growing economy, an expression of maya, transgender people have a right to ask for a share not just in the normative allowances of ritual begging but in abstract divisions of labour, where actual cases of dignity can be instantiated. Transgender people are not just your ritual dealers, they ritualise you only because they see you tremble before the ascetic-priests. The new amendment seeks to arrest transgender persons as ascetic-priests: exclusive knowers of a special knowledge of sexuality and holders of ritual status within gharanas. Yet, as such, they remain disadvantaged from dignified existence – from the right to declare themselves transgender and to participate in the general economy. We must protest this new amendment and remind the government that its task is limited to generating employment, not to sort transgender persons into “real” and “unreal.” If we can have infinite sadhus – why can’t there be infinite transgenders? In absence of any generative policy for trans people in India, the government has instead limited itself to administratively capturing the non–job-seeking segments of the trans population. It is determined that we must all beg. It’s not like transgender people can even beg in peace, as the new amendment seeks to criminalise begging and put the blame of begging onto the trans person herself. This view of the government is utterly disturbing as it absolves itself of any rational responsibility or any foresight toward welfare. We have a theoretical totality where society is only geared towards partial truths: the ascetic has also stayed in the household but it still doesn’t mean we think there’s no one who has left. Ascetics breed disavowal. Similarly, it is absurd to think of trans as only a disconnected essence of reproductive sexuality. Especially when we know that reproduction is only an ancillary fact of sexuality – one that merely reflects the biological limits of our species, which can reproduce only its own kind. It makes more sense if a human can give birth to a peacock, than to render someone trans based on genital mutilations. Indian society will have to come to terms with the fact that some people are not thinking within the frameworks of reproductive sexuality: like the ascetics, like the transgender. The genius of the former cannot be used to ravage the genius of the latter. And as we observe the genius of transgender trump the genius of ascetic, we shall only remember that truth-bound transgender asceticism will guide the lie-bound ascetic-priests in the future to come. Ascetic may or may not cease to exist, but transgender will always be there, maybe not on our government’s certificates, but certainly on Indian soil. Kaushal Bodwal is a Dalit trans person pursuing PhD in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Their research concerns the evolution of trans rights and households in Tamil Nadu, India.