Indian court rules a transgender woman is a woman

[BeeSouriante]

https://www.washingtonblade.com/2025/06/25/indian-court-rules-a-transgender-woman-is-a-woman/

Can they identify into a higher one from a lower one and is everyone in the higher caste legally required to accept that self ID?

But this means that funding eg for NGOs has to include them in women’s groups . Which means funding is diluted so men can have it. And my experience of meeting these man in India is of bullying on public transport , prostitution and involving young boys . Already there are eg hotel facilities which offer She/ they signage which is of course putting actual women at risk. ( check out the Lalit hotel chain) none of this is for the benefit of women.

No. But India has a huge affirmative action plan.
This is not to say that Dalits do not suffer. They do.

But being a woman isn't a 'gender', it's a biological fact.
You can have two genders, three genders, 1,001 genders, but there are still only two sexes, and it's not possible to swap between them.

So a third gendered person remains in the sex they were born into.
Sometimes the law is an ass, and as the UK is discovering, the law can make a complete ass of itself in 'recognising' an impossibility, i.e. that men can become women and vice versa.

India may find itself having to face up in the future to the mess that the law becomes if it legislates for fiction over fact.

& have all the rights of men.

I do agree these are dangerous waters. I bet the judge has no idea who JKR even is. Or only knows her as the Harry Potter author.
The whole discussion has not reached India. There are far bigger problems there.

These societies with a traditional third gender - can women (in the original non-sexist sense of female bodied people) also become them or are they in fact a subset of male social roles?

And at the end of the day, female people exist. We are materially different to male people in concrete observable way that pre dates language and every human culture ever has recognised that fact even if the cultural and linguistic lines they draw on top of it vary. Moving the lines around the word "woman" does not change the material reality under which female people live, nor does it change the cultural and physical consequences of being female.

There is no reason, none whatsoever, that accomodating the gender non-conformity of trans identifying men and women should require that we undefine the social and legal validity of female only rights and language. The only reason this is being pushed for is the ugly selfishness of men and their age old expectation to define and constrain women for their own benefit.

@BeeSouriante why do you hate women (original sex based meaning) so much that you want this to happen to us? Why is it not acceptable to you to support trans people unless it also hurts women?

And why not? If India is so keen to legally accept that men are women, why not extend that right to self ID into other areas across their society and provide the same legal rights to those in lower castes (not just the Dalit) who wish to identify as higher castes?

Or are women's rights not as important?

Quite agree. It's only due to the British colonials that suttee got outlawed there.

I suppose because the laws support Dalits. There are innumerable laws supporting them. So legally, there is no need for them to identify as upper caste. Reality is often very different.

Just as there are laws supporting women, but enforcing them is hard.

This India?
30% of reported sexual assaults happen when women and girls go outside for the toilet.
www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/too-scared-to-go/

<Deleting, because I'm not sure this was a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.>

Raja Ram Mohan Roy? Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar?
Are you now going to argue that colonialism was good for India? Please expand your reading sources.

Surprise, surprise, men rejected anyone different from them (and made them women's problem).

Yeah this says more about Indian men than Indian women.

So OP, do you think the "real" men are all clamouring to have sex with their new class of "women" knowing how much they chase anything in a wrap?

Yeah. They’re the women not forced into child marriage, killed by their husbands and fathers in the name of “honour”, expected to obey their husbands unconditionally or be beaten, treated as pariahs if they don’t follow their husbands unconditionally strict rules. So what you seem to be saying is, India’s a really progressive place for women, as long as they’re male women?

This is really not true. Hijras have terrible lives in India. They are not India Willoughby!
Really, applying a Western lens to India does not work.

I just stated a fact, the debate is about women in India and I pointed out A FACT that the British outlawed suttee there. Do facts need a trigger warning nowadays for the always offended who don't like them?

The FACT is that they got substantial aid from liberal Indians who risked their lives. And sati- to use the real term- was by no means common across India. You need to read more about reforms in India.
Not triggered. But gosh the ignorance.

So the answer is no then - lower castes cannot simply self ID into something they are not.

It seems that only men can do that and women have to step aside to accommodate them.

A transwoman marries a man in a country that hasn't legalised same-sex marriage. Can't imagine why such a country would recognise transwomen as women. It's a mystery

That's not the point

The answer to the question of "can you identify into another caste?" is no

The answer to the question "is everyone else required to accept your self-identified caste?" is no

And that's why the affirmative action plan is in place

Anyone who knows anything about India knows that it is a deeply patriarchal society where women are still very much the underdogs and VAWG is omni-present.

We all know what a woman is, and it's not a man.

Agree with this, ofc.
It's an odd decision.
I wonder what will come of it.

I mean, I'd love to do some sort of swap, but the reality is that the number of women in India who need safe single sex toilets is far too great for the UK to welcome them all as refugees, and the number of trans women in the UK who think they'd be better treated in India is so small that it wouldn't make a dent in our population numbers at all.

So it's better for global feminism to help oppose this misogynistic bullshit everywhere in the world, including in India.