Readers' comments: Kerala HC's recognition of trans family is progressive but precarious

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19-07-2025

The piece thoughtfully captured the Kerala High Court's progressive judgement recognising the right of a transgender couple to be recorded as 'parents' instead of 'mother' or 'father' on their child's birth certificate (' How a landmark Kerala High Court judgment recognised the existence of transgender families ').
The judgement not only reaffirmed the right of transgender persons to self-identify, but also takes it beyond: into the intimate and deeply social realm of parenthood and partnership. By allowing the transgender partners to be designated with a gender-neutral parental identity, the judgment simultaneously upheld the dignity of transgender lives while resisting the bureaucratic violence embedded in documentation procedures.
Nonetheless, a critical dimension that remained underexplored was how the construct of 'parenthood' itself is essentially binary. The court providing for a gender-neutral term like 'parent' marks a significant rupture. However, it still operates within a context where the very idea of parenting is saturated with heteronormative, cis-gendered expectations that are culturally disseminated along a male/female axis. Even the need to petition for neutral recognition reflects how deeply entrenched the binary structure of parenthood is.
While the ruling opens new possibilities, it also reveals the urgent need to rethink how the law and society continue to articulate childcare, family, and partnership through a gender-essentialist lens. A need for an intersectional analysis of transgender rights also emerges, one that would engage with how caste, class, disability, or religion may intersect with trans parenthood to create compounded vulnerabilities.
The ruling also exposes the uneven terrain of legal reform in India, where constitutional jurisprudence outpaces policy implementation. The judgement heavily relies on judicial interpretation in the absence of adequate legislative reform. Clearly, birth registration forms and state procedures still do not accommodate gender-neutral or non-binary categories systemically. As such, while the judgment is progressive, it is also precarious: it remains dependent on the discretion of sympathetic judges and the political will of administrative actors.
This indicates that without structural changes to registration norms, policy frameworks and civil service training, transgender parents and their children will continue to face systemic apathy. The judgement's full potential will only be realised through generating a broader jurisprudence that looks at childcare, partnership and family through the lens of lived, complex, and queer realities. – Swarupa Deb
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The Kerala High Court has delivered a landmark ruling on the rights of the transgender community and respectable living in Indian society. It is also significant that the couple's interfaith marriage did not spark false allegations 'jihad' of any sort. The judge's acumen in understanding the difficulties faced by trans individuals and delivering a thoughtful ruling deserves praise. This was a perceptive story by Vineet Bhalla. Thank you, Scroll for such in depth stories. – Naresh Dev
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