Bhattacharya Shamayeta, Ghosh Debarchana, Purkayastha Bandana
Shamayeta Bhattacharya (First Author) is a PhD candidate in Geography, at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her research interest includes health and gender geography, human rights, postcolonial queer literature, and South Asia.
Bandana Purkayastha (Third Author) is Professor of Sociology and Asian & Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut, USA. She has published extensively on human rights, intersectionality, transnationalism, migrants, violence, and peace.
J Hum Rights Pract. 2022 Apr 11;14(2):676-697. doi: 10.1093/jhuman/huac004. eCollection 2022 Jul.
The amendments to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of India in 2019 address non-binary persons' constitutional rights, recognition of their gender identity, and non-discrimination laws across institutional spaces (for example, family, workplace, education, and healthcare). The Act discusses legal rights in isolation of praxis, structural support and, more importantly, lacks guidelines needed to substantively access rights. Such a disconnection relegates human rights to merely legal changes with limited practice. In this article, we discuss the achievements and failures of the act from the perspective of a transgender community in India, and the impact it has had on their lives from its formulation in 2014. Although non-binary communities are recognized, they face severe abuse and discrimination. We analyse accounts of 15 transgender persons' lived experiences and challenges they faced in claiming their rights in Kolkata, a metropolis in eastern India. We used the framework of substantive access to rights, that is, the actual ability to practice and access documented rights, to critically discuss our findings across family, work, education, and healthcare spaces, often showing the gaps between achieved legal status, and the practical realities on the ground. We provide several recommendations to bridge these gaps-improving educational equity for non-binary people, including transgender specific training for healthcare providers and, more importantly, increasing the adequate representation of non-binary people in the positions of negotiation. The road to claiming social and economic rights following legal rights for non-binary gender communities cannot be achieved without overcoming their erasure within families and hypervisibility in public spaces.
2019年印度《跨性别者（权利保护）法案》的修正案涉及非二元性别人士的宪法权利、对其性别认同的承认以及跨机构领域（如家庭、工作场所、教育和医疗保健）的非歧视法律。该法案孤立地讨论法律权利，缺乏实践、结构支持，更重要的是，缺乏实质性享有权利所需的指导方针。这种脱节使人权仅仅沦为有限实践下的法律变革。在本文中，我们从印度跨性别群体的角度讨论该法案的成就与不足，以及自2014年制定以来对他们生活的影响。尽管非二元性别群体得到了承认，但他们仍面临严重的虐待和歧视。我们分析了15位跨性别者在印度东部大都市加尔各答的生活经历以及他们在主张权利时所面临的挑战。我们运用实质性享有权利的框架，即实际行使和享有成文权利的能力，批判性地讨论我们在家庭、工作、教育和医疗保健领域的研究结果，这些结果常常揭示了已取得的法律地位与实际现实之间的差距。我们提出了若干建议来弥合这些差距——改善非二元性别人士的教育公平，包括为医疗保健提供者提供针对跨性别者的培训，更重要的是，增加非二元性别人士在谈判岗位上的充分代表性。若非克服非二元性别群体在家庭中的被忽视以及在公共场所的过度曝光问题，就无法在获得法律权利之后进而主张社会和经济权利。
