TK Arun
Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act dilutes rights seriously enough to attract adverse commentary from Rajasthan High Court
and Supreme Court’s advisory panel on transgender rights. This is part of
public discourse. What is not widely discussed is the harm the Act’s attack on
individual autonomy and personhood does to economic growth and development.
Pretence must end that the law affects only the LGBTQIA+ community, that it
does not directly affect the heterosexual majority, the nation as a whole, or its
aspiration to secure growth and development. ‘What was recognized by the
Supreme Court as an inviolable aspect of personhood now risks being reduced
to a contingent, state-mediated entitlement,’ wrote Rajasthan High Court’s
Justice Monga about the amendment Act’s removal of transgender persons’
right to determine their own gender status.
Self-determination of gender is out of the window. Multilayered medical
boards must examine genitalia of those who wish to assert their transgender
identity, and their assessment must get the district magistrate’s endorsement,
before a person is recognised by the state as transgender.
This embodies and perpetuates the mistaken conflation of gender with sex.
Sex has its basis in biology, and is not always binary. Gender is social and
psychological identity. Medical boards have little expertise in gender and DMs
have neither expertise nor time, in the middle of all the diverse functions he
oversees as the nerve center of governance at the district level.
Suppose a medical board fails to recognise an individual’s claim to being
transgender. The law then criminalises the individual’s associates as those
who imposed this identity on that individual – whether it was in the form of
human solidarity, financial support, or medical, surgical or psychological
intervention. These associates can be sent to prison for up to life.
As transgender activists have pointed out, crimes committed against
transgender people go unpunished. But now, those who help transgender
people stand to be prosecuted and put behind bars for long periods.
This is an attack on individual liberty and one more weapon in the state’s
armoury to be used to control society. Such curtailment of freedom is inimical
to the flowering of human creativity, whether aesthetic, cognitive or
entrepreneurial, and harmful to growth.
In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen sees freedom as development’s end
as well as means to that goal. Development is not just economic growth,
skyscrapers, fast trains, high fashion and billionaires signaling virtue through
philanthropy. Development is expansion of human agency, ability of people to live the lives they value.
Not that this is a blinding new insight from the Nobel laureate. When Nehru
identified the basis of India’s tryst with destiny as ending poverty, ignorance,
disease and inequality of opportunity, he pretty much said the same thing.
While Sen emphasises individual empowerment, the actual case of effective
empowerment to achieve a modicum of freedom from assorted social,
economic and political deprivations has materialised through collective
action – as through peasant mobilisation to secure land reforms, popular
struggles and agitational politics to make government spend enough on
schools and healthcare, for example, in Kerala.
The natural tendency for the state is to stay biased towards incumbent elites,
and against attempts to change power equations in society, even if such
change is being demanded to secure the very goals the Constitution of
democratic India sets for the nation. Enhancement of power of the state over
the people is inimical to expansion of political, economic and social freedoms
that produce growth and prosperity.
How does this square with the lived experience of authoritarian governments
presiding over fast economic growth, whether in Nazi Germany, Indonesia
under Suharto, South Korea under its authoritarian rulers before 1987, Taiwan
under the Kuomintang, and China under the Communist Party?
Nazi Germany collapsed into ruin and rubble. Indonesia and South Korea grew
out of authoritarian rule and achieved democracy. So did Taiwan. The fact that
China is still authoritarian doesn’t mean that it would be forced to become
democratic, if growth is to sustain.
China might be ruled by a party that calls itself communist. But the economy
is capitalist, with minimal rights for workers and common people. Control of
the state comes twinned with support under carefully-crafted industrial
policy, and so growth has materialised and sustained. But cancellation of Ant
Financial’s planned IPO at the last moment, and its founder Jack Ma’s virtual
exile, show limits of entrepreneurial freedom in China.
Singapore and Dubai are full of Chinese entrepreneurs exercising the freedom
they are stripped of back home. For them to channel their entrepreneurial
energy at home, China will have to break out of the integument of
authoritarian control exercised by the Chinese Communist Party.
India’s goal is to strengthen its democracy, not to erode whatever little it has.
The Transgender Act is a step back on freedom, democracy and growth.
About the Contributor
T.K. Arun, ex-Economic Times editor, is a senior journalist and columnist known for incisive analysis of economic and policy matters, based in Delhi.
This article was first published in The Economic Times as Transgressionary state: Transgender Amendment Act is a step back on freedom, democracy and growth. on March 31st , 2026.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
Read more at IMPRI:
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Acknowledgement: This article was posted by Anish Pujapanda, a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI.
