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(With a brief reflection on The News Minute articles by Dr Sumit Baudh and Arvind Narrain on the Trans Amendment Act 2026)
Slogans can be powerful tools for building collective consciousness and spurring collective action. But it is not necessary that all slogans do build and spur in the right direction: i.e. the direction of liberation for all. ‘Personal is political’, is a slogan I have had great difficulty uttering and implementing. And I would argue, it is a ‘slogan’ well past retirement. The grounds are as follows.
First, let us recall briefly the history and etymology of the slogan. The ‘slogan’ arises entirely from the White radical “second-wave” feminist closed discussions – specifically from the essay written by Carol Hanisch (1970)[1], edited and titled by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. No doubt it has been moulded, referred to, and anxiously attached to specific concerns of cis women’s liberation – across race, caste, class and disability, throughout time. However –
The primary concern of Hanisch’s essay is to defend against the criticism (from other liberal civil rights and women’s rights organizations) of the women’s movement as it was being articulated and practiced by ‘second-wave’ white feminists. In particular, the criticism that these “movement spaces” are simply “personal therapy”, where white cis-women come together and lament their personal lives and seek solutions. There is much to critique in the articulations of the essay, its understanding of oppressive human classifications, and who comprises the category of ‘women’ – that I leave to the readers. The most telling part of the article, for my purpose here, lies in its concluding paragraph that reads as follows:
“One more thing: I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say—not so we can do a better job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it’s because they are “apolitical,” not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for men whose hypocrisy is so blatant in their political stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is really a lot more to it than that. I can’t quite articulate it yet. I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.” [Emphasis added.]
Hanisch (and perhaps the editors) were concerned with what appears to be a failing movement that had become incapable of spurring its own class/group of people into action. And even in the articulation of the reasons for this, the author flounders. For she fails to grasp the heart of the issue – the abiding tension between the individual person and the collective, especially in foundationally hierarchical societies. The editors go on to produce a slogan/title – ‘personal is political’. This is the historical context.
Now, let us breakdown the etymology[2], and apply simple logic to the slogan to see whether, shorn of its drab historical context, it might still have any inherent power or application to the causes of emancipation and liberation.
The word ‘personal’ – originating from the Latin personalis – quite literally means ‘of or pertaining to a person’. Even without the vast sociological and historiographical understanding of person and personhood, the brief linguistic history of the word spans meanings – often ‘apolitical’ – from human being and living body to assumed characters and masks.
The word ‘political’ – originating from a mix of French (politique), Greek (politikos), Latin (politicus) – literally concerns organization of polity, citizens, state, resources, affairs of government. This necessarily includes Hanisch’s clarification in her 2006 introduction that ‘political’ refers broadly to ‘power relationships’. For, the organization of polity is the organization and reorganization of power relations.
Pursuing the logical train of thought, it becomes important to replace the terms in the slogan with their approximate synonyms and antonyms.
The TERF logic has always collapsed ‘personal’ into private and domestic. As a result the TERF-informed cis-queer political movement has also only ever organized on marriage equality or hyper-sexual freedoms, while destroying the trans movement from inside-out. Then the slogan becomes (one that often replaces the original) – private is political. Or, one can also say – domestic is political.
What happens if we replace the first word of the slogan with their antonyms? We get the following true statements: The impersonal (here, in the simple meaning of ‘not relating to a person’) is political; the public is political; the external/foreign/international is political.
Do we also have to replace the word ‘political’ with its antonym for these statements to remain true? Clearly not. Because the foundational truth statement is that ‘everything is political’. And thus, we could conclude that the statement ‘personal is political’ is merely a restatement of the Aristotelian tautology that ‘man is a political animal’, wherein the word ‘man’ has been replaced with the seemingly gender-neutral ‘personal’ – and yet deployed in a strictly gendered manner to reflect only the ‘personal worlds’ of one dominant class of cis-women.
Further, the enduring problem with Hanisch’s and following articulations on this statement (now no longer a slogan) is this: it is not at all concerned with the ‘person’ in personal. That is to say, if/when the ‘woman’ stops being a ‘woman’ (or stops being seen primarily as a ‘woman’), they would not know what to do with such a person. While this directly reflects in the consistent transmisia of ‘radical feminists’ everywhere, it is also the seed of ‘radical feminism’s’ enduring failure of its own “class” of cis-women. The ‘personal is political’ statement has not been made through a radically political engagement with personhood. Instead, what has predominantly ensued is the ‘radical’, anthropological, truncated display of identities and bodies – in such violent ways as to quietly disintegrate the very core of a full personhood.
The evocation of this statement in transgender rights
It goes without saying that this statement has been directly and indirectly criticized – from anti-racist, anti-caste, and other political philosophical formulations – for its limitations. But its aura and allure over political imagination across the board have continued unabated. My limited interest here lies in tackling the matter in view of its resurgence in articulations – by trans and non-trans actors – around the Trans Amendment Act 2026.
As with much else, the liberal – bordering on libertarian – position on this too is one of confusion. At least two strands emerge: one is the chest-thumping ‘don’t get into my pants’ (personal / private, as ‘resistance’) and the other simultaneous position remains some form of ‘the personal is political’ (articulated as an ‘assertion’ against so-called silent allies). Unsurprisingly, none of these articulations can adequately answer what is ‘personal’, describe the historical struggles for personhood of the transgender people in India, nor build comprehensive consensus on the most pressing of our political demands and the methods to secure it. And this same liberal-libertarian articulation will dub every transgender person who doesn’t speak this specific language of ‘resistance’ or ‘assertion’ as ‘apolitical’.
Following in the onerous shadow of the ‘personal is political’ logic, the dominant assertion of self-identification has been framed as a matter of the ‘private sphere’. The question that lies against this assertion is this: what is your framework of privacy? Yes, it is a fundamental right. And like all Article 21 rights, it is a procedurally bounded right. Does privacy precede or succeed the right to personhood? Which is the unbounded right? Do those who have never had to battle the State, society, and family for the fundamental right to personhood hold the locus now to articulate either the right to personhood or privacy for transgender persons?
The existence of the right to privacy presumes the existence of a functioning private sphere: and the essential ingredients of a private space, namely, autonomous personhood, livelihood, housing, food, householding, and the full spectrum of fundamental rights that scaffold this now elusive right to privacy.
At the same time, the political sphere – that is the sphere of ‘citizenry’, state and public resources – immediately invokes a call to near-absolute transparency, and is given solidity and material form through the reliance on such transparency. A sort of ‘transparency’ that indeed an individual person should never be forcibly subjected to. Even as it falls upon the socio-political sphere to create environments in which the most oppressed individual can freely aspire to build a life of fullness, transparency and truth, inward and outward.
In this lies also the fundamental difference between liberal (and libertarian) identity politics and radical identity assertions of the oppressed. The latter is a public assertion for equal and horizontal rights and protections across the public and private spheres of life. While the former rarely transcends a series of circular private laments or public posturing – because, after all, suffice to say ‘personal is political’ and call it a day. The silence around how the Supreme Court has quietly been diluting and reinterpreting at will the meaning of “public space”, “public view”, and “consent” in the context both of SC/ST atrocities act and sexual harassment laws is adequately telling of the actual politics of those now parroting “personal is political”.
Reflections on Dr Baudh’s piece –
On this limited point of how liberals frame public-private, and the incredibly difficult path ahead to secure the full breadth of constitutional guarantees, readers will find that I am aligned with Dr Sumit Baudh’s broad position as articulated in his/their News Minute article[3]. But I am afraid my alignment must stop there. My primary departure from Dr Baudh’s articulation lies against the ahistorical reduction of the transgender identity/category to a purely “gender” identity. The notion that the transgender identity (or the purported self-identification of such identity) is merely a gender identity erases the foundational resistance that the transgender category poses to a caste society: in that the transgender community is the only known inter-caste community formation (outside the bonds of sex/marriage), and in these communities we live out the challenges of practising liberty, equality and fraternity every day – often ridiculously failing and sometimes gloriously succeeding, while the world outside relentlessly ‘anthropologizes’ and ‘pathologizes’ us.
The transgender identity does not become difficult to categorize in law (or difficult to recognize in law – for the purpose of personhood or benefits) because it is reflective of ‘contemporary debates on gender identity’ or because the larger transgender community has relied solely upon a ‘self-referential’ model of identification. Rather, the transgender community has consistently broken open the faultlines between caste and gender [and every other ‘category’] in the clearest manner possible and then provided the simplest and most effective solution available in existing law for reservations, welfare, and benefits. Thereby, making it impossible for State and society to ignore our political demands – and its lasting implications on social reform – except by wielding the law in such fatal a manner as to force us to argue before the courts each singular block of our rights from nucleus stage. In this now, we must contend at once with the liberal agenda and the saffron agenda not in the parliament, not in democratic consultation, but directly in court.
The methodological folly in Dr Baudh’s piece is of moving directly from responding to the noise of (mostly cis-queer) liberals to addressing the question of benefits, with brief stops at NALSA and the most recent High Court judgment in Gangakumari v. State of Rajasthan (2026), while leaving fallow the long and painful history of (consistently silenced) transgender articulations before and between these two judgments.
Let me clarify this with the case of Gangakumari itself. Dr Baudh’s piece lauds the judgment, but without making any reference to the prayers and facts of the case. Gangakumari, now a two-time petitioner in the said High Court, an OBC transwoman, sought directions for implementation of [compartmentalized] horizontal reservations in employment, after establishing the State’s ‘inclusion’ of transgender in the OBC vertical classification as an absolute failure of constitutional mandate. Thus resulting in a partially laudable judgment. The judgment’s failure lies in not following on another feat achieved by transgender intervention in Indian constitutional law: setting the source legal entitlement of – and thus a legally maintainable prayer for a mandamus seeking – reservation directly in the Constitutional Court (NALSA judgment). Which, in no unclear terms, is what the State is violently seeking to undo with this amendment.
When I say that transgender articulation of political demands has never been of a ‘purely’ self-referential mode of identification, this is what I mean: following from the first clearest articulation by Dalit trans activist Living Smile Vidya, those of us with access to information about process/procedures of law have, whether in courts or otherwise, consistently argued for compartmentalized horizontal reservations as the just solution for all transgender persons. The minute both identities are referred together consistently in law, it stops being either a self-referential ‘identification’ or a cosmetic discourse on intersectionality. The evidence of which lies in the plethora of judgments (around provisional, interim and final reservations), brought by transgender petitioners across castes, that no one except the State has consistently challenged. In fact, wherever the question of ‘benefit’ has arisen in court (that is not legal gender recognition on existing ID documents at par with all other citizens) the ‘transgender’ category has largely existed with a qualifier of caste and/or homelessness, where the latter signifies the inability to prove caste or the inability to refer directly to already criminalized sex enslavement, begging and other as-yet illegible facets of our exclusion. In fact, the inability to prove caste by reason of homelessness, criminalization, begging, by itself means there can be no full ‘self’ before law, even in the extremely literal meaning of ‘self-referential’, as put forth in the article, for a majority of transgender persons in this country. Further, when we have made demands on fiscal/welfare benefits, in addition to the caste qualifier, we have consistently underscored specific axes of priority such as: ‘elders’ especially from ‘socio-cultural’ identities (for pension and disability benefits), class (for informal labour protections), internal gender difference (for specific transmasculine protections); HIV+TB (for healthcare budgeting), familial violence and abandonment (for shelter); and so on – without compromising on universally applicable demands such as legal gender recognition, free education, ban on conversion therapy and IGM, strict punishments for and protections from abuse, financial inclusion, and access to public infrastructure.
Suffice to say, holistic engagement with studied and independent transgender articulations will render legible the exclusions in existing categories of law as also simplify the solutions thereto – not the other way round.
No committed student of law will ever state that the law, and the categories within law, will offer the final salve to all exclusions. Our efforts are always only to consistently reduce the margins of exclusion.
Coming back to the question of reservations: barring the singularly oppressive right-wing groups within the transgender community, led by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, transgender people across castes have stood together quite publicly in our demand for horizontal reservations. And this public coming together, though fragile, has happened within a very short span of less than a decade. What this amendment and the resultant legal and socio-political discourse seeks to do, by pitting legal gender recognition against ‘benefits’ is to strike at the heart of this unity. The savarna/liberal trans representatives who have rushed to court now have to test their political commitment to all trans people: when the State offers you the choice of either legal gender recognition or reservation, will you be steadfast and repeat – legal gender recognition and compartmentalized horizontal reservation?
Will you betray us all? Will you fall for this trap that has separated “legal gender recognition” from “reservation and welfare benefits”? Or will you reiterate that the very fact that we need a procedure to assert and protect legal gender recognition is the source of our exclusion in law that reflects also our status as a sub-human horizontally within each vertical of the graded caste hierarchy? Will you remember that to stand in dignity is to stand on the fullness of who we are and what we want? Will you stand on the history of your community or succumb to personal benefits masquerading as legal and political expediencies? If your first appearance in court is anything to go by, you have all fared poorly – at tragically devastating proportions.
On Arvind Narrain’s ‘rebuttal’ —
There is nothing worthwhile to speak of Narrain’s so-called rebuttal to Dr Baudh, also appearing in the News Minute[4]. Everything that is wrong with the piece, as also his directionless politics, is summed up in his conclusion: “The 2026 Amendment thus hits at the transgender community’s right to liberty, equality, dignity and fraternity. It is for this reason that other social struggles, including women’s groups, Dalit movements, and civil liberties organisations, have stood in solidarity with the transgender movement in opposition to the 2026 amendment.” [Emphasis added]. After a lecture on ‘self-identification’, he proceeds to certify the transgender movement as validated by other social movements. Very well, then: here’s a reminder. The transgender people have been part of every movement in this society, before and beyond our identity, its recognition or erasure. Most often the cruelest erasures and over exposures being within these very movements/groups he speaks of. Everyone within this vast liberal political orbit, where Arvind Narrain resides, will do well to take a step back and stop distributing these (ultimately self-congratulatory) certificates of ‘personhood’ and ‘politics’ to transgender people.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the liberal takeover of the trans impulse to life – by cis and trans people across castes – is likely to take full form under the pressures and life-endangering impact of the amendment act. And this moment is not so much a test of the society we live in as it is a test of whether the transgender community can finally complete its transformation from being inter-caste to actively and uncompromisingly anti-caste.
As for the law: this much I can say, the law is simple, the law is limited, the law is a tool for us to shape and reshape in our image and imagination. And very often our constitutional law (Preamble, Part III and Part IV) holds in it the capacity to evoke the deepest spirit of universal justice – as whispers and roars – in ways that even the most evocative texts of liberatory literature might never be able to do. It is with this faith we must pursue the fight to the end — not for once distracted by who sits behind the bench or who reads the law, and forever directed only by the consequences that shall fall on the very last one of us.
And I say this as someone who may never – despite my best efforts – be able to profess or practise the law, in all of its fractured colours.
***
Post-script: I would be remiss to not point out that the two authors I have referred to here are both alumni of NLSIU, and to the best of my knowledge neither has made any public statement on NLSIU’s position on transgender reservation. The news portal, where they have been published – The News Minute – is perhaps the only “free media” that did not publish any news piece on the 2024 Karnataka HC judgment directing interim horizontal reservation for trans persons in NLSIU or their pursuant appeal against it. Worth a good personal and political chuckle for me.
[1] The full essay with Hanisch’s 2006 introduction can be read here: https://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html
[2] Resource: www.etymonline.com
[3] See Baudh, Sumit (09 Apr 2026): https://www.thenewsminute.com/voices/self-identification-and-the-transgender-law-an-ambedkarite-view
[4] See Narrain, Arvind (21 Apr, 2026): https://www.thenewsminute.com/voices/misreading-ambedkar-why-the-trans-amendment-act-betrays-the-preamble