Grace Banu: “Welfare measures don’t empower my community, only rights do”

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 prohibits discrimination against transgender persons—including trans men, trans women and persons who are intersex, genderqueer or identify as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta—in educational institutions, jobs, healthcare, housing and public access to goods, spaces and services. It also allows the union and state governments to enact provisions to enforce the law. However, it stops short of incorporating the Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment in National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India, which stated that transgender persons must be recognised as a “socially and educationally backward class of citizens” who are entitled to reservations in educational institutions and government jobs.

Grace Banu, the founder and director of Trans Rights Now Collective—a Bahujan-centred collective of transgender individuals in India—has been at the forefront of opposing the government’s tendency to categorise all transgender people by default under the Other Backward Classes or the Most Backward Classes categories in Tamil Nadu. She has been fervently fighting instead, for horizontal reservation for transgender persons, which would provide trans persons a specific percentage of seats or posts within each existing category for reservation.

The Tamil Nadu government released its State Policy for Transgender Persons on 31 July, outlining a five-year roadmap on measures to secure rights of and improve access to welfare measures for the community. The policy affirms the right to self-identify gender and proposes guaranteeing inheritance rights. It too fails to mention, however, the longstanding demand for one-percent horizontal reservations.

A few weeks before Tamil Nadu unveiled its policy, Aranya, an assistant editor at The Caravan, spoke to Grace about the demand for horizontal reservations and about key issues facing the transgender community in the country.