Tanvi Kishore
Source: Arunesh Blog, “Regressive Bill Insults Trans People, Pushes India Decades Back”, available at https://aruneshblog.com/regressive-bill-insults-trans-people-pushes-india-decades-back/.
Abstract: This piece reads the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 through the history of Indian trans cinema. It argues that the self-perceived identity principle recognized in NALSA v. Union of India (2014) found early expression in films like Naanu Avanalla… Avalu and Njan Marykutty, which depicted trans selfhood as a given rather than something requiring institutional proof, a shift from decades of cinematic mockery and stereotype that the constitutional scaffolding of NALSA had made possible. The 2026 Act’s reintroduction of medical gatekeeping re-imposes the categories that cinema had worked to move beyond, and threatens to chill exactly the storytelling that had only recently become possible. This chilling effect operates on two distinct tracks: state censorship through CBFC certification and private risk aversion beginning at the scripting stage, both grounded in the Act’s vague penal provisions. Drawing on Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli v. State of Telangana and Article 19(1)(a), the piece closes by identifying three concrete remedies, namely the CBFC operational guidelines, legislative re-amendment to restore self-perceived gender identity, and judicial challenge, arguing that the contest between self-determined and institutionally verified identity will shape not only transgender rights in India, but the cinematic record the next decade produces.
In Njan Marykutty, the entire emotional architecture of the film turns on a question of institutional recognition: can a transgender woman become a police officer? The film never once doubts who Marykutty is, that question is settled in the first ten minutes, and settled by her.What she wants from the state is recognition of a self she has always been . Today, The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 answers Marykutty’s question, and the answer is no.
Under the amended law, before any equivalent document of recognition can be issued, a medical board must first agree that she is who she says she is. Self-perception, the principle the Supreme Court placed at the centre of transgender rights in NALSA v. Union of India, and which the original 2019 Act at least formally retained has been replaced by institutional verification. This piece makes a narrow claim: the 2026 Act does not simply roll back a right in the abstract. It re-installs, as binding legal fact, the precise gatekeeping logic that the best Indian trans cinema of the last decade was built to dismantle. Because law and cinema are not separate ecosystems, legal categories shape what stories are safe, fundable, and certifiable and this Act is likely to make harder to produce exactly the kind of films that had only just begun to be possible. Rather than expanding the emancipatory vision articulated through trans filmography, the Amendment risks reasserting bureaucratic control over identities that cinema has long sought to liberate.
From Spectacle to Selfhood and Back Again?
Indian cinema reaches people that law never does. A parliamentary debate runs in the gazette, a film runs in every theatre in the city, on every phone screen, in every village and on OTT platforms where a teenager watches something they have never been allowed to name. The sociological reach of cinema is not ornamental, it is infrastructure. What the screen normalises, society eventually tolerates. What it refuses to show, society continues to refuse to see. In this sense, the history of trans representation in Indian filmography is not merely cultural history. It is a record of how visibility was fought for, inch by inch, against institutional resistance and what it produced in the social imagination. It is against this backdrop that the Amendment’s consequences for filmmaking must be understood.
It is worth being clear about what Indian cinema’s default mode was before films like these existed. For most of its history, Indian cinema’s engagement with trans lives was not absence but active mockery and recognisable negative stereotypes. “where its transgender villain was written and played as a figure of pure menace, won a Filmfare award for it, establishing a template in which trans femininity signalled danger, recycled in multiple other films like “Sangharsh” and “Murder 2”. For most Indian audiences across most decades, this was the only version of a trans person cinema offered them: a figure to fear or a figure to laugh at, never a figure to recognise as a person.
As Chayani and Sahoo observe in From Gender Trouble to Turned Tables: Examining Trans-visibility in Indian Cinema, these early commercial portrayals deliberately weaponised trans identities as objects of ridicule to reinforce majoritarian stereotypes. It was only when NALSA and the 2019 Act codified dignity and self-determination The shift represented by “Naanu Avanalla… Avalu” and “Njan Marykutty” was possible, it was a move from stereotype to subjectivity. It is also a very recent shift, and a narrow one that NALSA and the 2019 Act provided, a climate in which dignity, rather than suspicion, was at least the stated default. The 2026 Act does not, by itself, resurrect such cinema since mockery and dehumanisation were never illegal, and thrived for decades under exactly the kind of legal vacuum this amendment risks recreating. What the Act threatens is not a return to those images overnight, but the removal of the legal ground beneath the newer ones, the films that took thirty years, and a Supreme Court judgment, to become possible at all. Because, as Chayani and Sahoo warn, trans-visibility remains highly vulnerable to shifting policies and commercial interests.
Self-knowledge on screen, Gatekeeping in law
South Indian regional cinema was the first to step into the legal sunlight NALSA provided. As the study Screening trans narratives: representation of transwomen in Indian regional cinema demonstrates, films like Naanu Avanalla… Avalu and Njan Marykutty challenged entrenched transphobia by centring transwomen with genuine dignity, rights, and agency, moving beyond caricature to reshape public perception in ways that the law had only just begun to authorise.
Naanu Avanalla… Avalu, the Kannada film based on Living Smile Vidya’s autobiography, was released the year after NALSA and the proximity is not incidental. It depicts a person who, from childhood, knows herself to be a woman, and who must then negotiate what a society organised around the hijra category as the only legible form of trans existence will allow her to become. The film does not ask permission to treat her self-knowledge as real. It simply does. Cinema, here, was not illustrating a principle that had filtered down from the courts. It was depicting the same lived reality that the NALSA petitioners had described to the Supreme Court, interiority, self-knowledge, identity that precedes and exceeds any administrative category. Cinema and constitutional law were converging on the same truth from different directions, at almost the same moment.
Njan Marykutty, three years later, makes the relationship between self-knowledge and state recognition the literal plot. Marykutty’s struggle is to have the state agree to what she already knows: that she is a woman, and that the police force must acknowledge her as one by the very institution built to uphold law. . The film is a dramatization of the NALSA principle under pressure: what happens when self-perceived identity meets an institution that demands its own form of proof.
The 2026 Act is precisely that institution, now with the law rewritten in its favour. Where the 2019 Act retained self-identification as a starting point for legal recognition, the amended Act requires a medical board’s recommendation before a District Magistrate can issue a transgender identity certificate, and narrows the definition of “transgender person” to historically accepted socio-cultural categories – hijra, Kinner, aravani, jogta, while removing trans men, trans women, and genderqueer persons from protected coverage altogether. Two members of the National Council for Transgender Persons resigned over the amendment, describing it explicitly as a reversal of the rights to self-identification and dignity. Marykutty’s place in the police force, in other words, just got harder to claim and for those whose identities fall outside the categories the Act now recognises, official acknowledgment may not be obtainable at all.
If Njan Marykutty gives us the legal parable, Taali (2023) gives us the irony. It dramatizes the life of Shreegauri Sawant, the trans rights activist who was a petitioner in NALSA v. Union of India itself , the very case that established the self-perceived identity principle the 2026 Act now dismantles. In 2023, mainstream Indian streaming platforms found it commercially viable to tell, at scale, the story of the person whose legal victory secured that principle. Three years later, Parliament passed an amendment that, according to legal commentators, was processed without referral to the relevant Standing Committee, without compliance with the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy, and without consultation with the National Council for Transgender Persons that the 2019 Act itself had created. What culture had absorbed as settled, law has chosen to un-establish.
The Chilling Effect: Two Distinct Mechanisms
It is tempting to treat the Act’s consequences for cinema as simply symbolic, a law that rolls back rights producing a cultural climate that rolls back stories. The actual mechanism is more precise, and operates on two distinct tracks that must not be conflated.
The first is state censorship through the Cinematograph Act and the Central board of film certification. The 2026 Act’s broadly worded provisions, particularly language criminalising conduct that causes a person to “act transgender”, create direct legal exposure for films whose narratives affirm trans self-identification outside the Act’s narrowed categories. A certification examiner applying the 2026 Act’s framework to a film about a trans man’s self-determined transition would be reviewing content that depicts something the law no longer recognises as valid. The CBFC has historically treated legal uncertainty as grounds for cutting or refusing to certify material, a dynamic the Telangana High Court directly addressed in Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli v. State of Telangana, where comparable criminalisation provisions were found to chill freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a) and to entrench derogatory stereotypes of the transgender community.
The second mechanism is private risk aversion, and it operates earlier and more invisibly than any certification board. Legal commentary on the 2026 Act has noted that the Act’s penal clauses, including criminal liability for those who “induce” or “allure” a person to adopt a transgender identity create serious exposure for producers, writers, and OTT platforms. Unlike CBFC scrutiny, which occurs at the point of certification, this exposure begins at the scripting stage. A production house commissioning a story about a non-binary character, or a streaming platform acquiring a film centred on a trans man’s self-perceived identity, must weigh whether that content could be read as “inducing” a viewer toward an identity the law refuses to recognise. By legalising suspicion and broadening penal exposure, the 2026 Act signals to investors and platforms that narratives of self-determination carry legal risk ensuring scripts that centre non-binary realities may be strangled at the funding stage, long before a certification board ever sees them.
Together, these two mechanisms produce an asymmetric chilling effect. The 2026 Act disproportionately raises the cost of producing self-perception-centred narratives, the kind Naanu Avanalla… Avalu pioneered while leaving largely untouched the stereotype-driven narratives those films were a corrective to. The chilling effect falls squarely on cinema’s best trans representation, leaving its worst untouched.”
A resilience objection deserves direct engagement. Both Naanu Avanalla… Avalu and Njan Marykutty were made before NALSA was codified in statute, in an environment that was, on paper, no friendlier than today’s. If those conditions did not stop those films, why would the 2026 Act’s environment stop the next ones? The honest answer is that it probably will not prevent them outright. But the resilience of those earlier films depended partly on a current they could swim with rather than against: their makers could point to a Supreme Court judgment or a self-identification-based Act as legal ground when a complaint was filed, a certificate questioned, or a financier hesitated. The 2026 Act removes that current. It does not make the next Njan Marykutty impossible, it makes it more exposed, more precarious, and more dependent on filmmakers absorbing legal risk that the law once helped distribute.
One qualification must be stated honestly: the Act came into force only months ago, and its effect on what gets written, pitched, funded, and certified over the coming years is a forecast grounded in doctrinal mechanism, not yet a documented pattern. Whether countervailing forces, OTT platforms commissioning across jurisdictions, international festival demand, the persistence of filmmakers who have worked under restrictive conditions before blunt these mechanisms remains to be seen. The claim here is that the pressure is real and points in a particular direction, not that its consequences are already visible.
Conclusion: The Record and the Remedy
The camera’s record cannot be undone by Parliament. Naanu Avanalla… Avalu exists, with its two National Awards, as a record of self-perceived identity rendered on screen before the medical-board logic of 2026 existed to demand otherwise. Njan Marykutty exists as a record of what it looks like when a person who already knows herself asks the state to catch up. Taali exists as a record, however imperfect of the life of the person whose Supreme Court petition the 2026 Act now contradicts. These films cannot be unmade.
Viewed through the lens of Indian trans filmography, the Amendment reflects a contest between two competing visions of citizenship. One, articulated through constitutional jurisprudence and transgender cultural expression recognises identity as self-determined and dignity as inherent. The other views identity as something to be verified, classified, and approved by external authority. The future of transgender rights in India turns on which vision prevails and, this piece has argued, which kind of cinema gets made while that contest is being decided.
Three concrete remedies follow from the analysis. First, the CBFC should issue clear operational guidelines explicitly insulating creative works from the 2026 Act’s penal provisions, distinguishing the depiction of trans identity from the “inducement” or “allurement” the Act criminalises, a distinction the CBFC is both empowered and obliged to draw under the Cinematograph Act’s public interest framework. Second, and most fundamentally, the legislature should re-amend the statutory definition to restore self-perceived gender identity as the basis for legal recognition, in line with the principle NALSA established and which the 2026 Act discards without constitutional justification. Third, the grounds for a judicial challenge under Article 19(1)(a) are already substantial: the Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli decision has mapped the doctrinal path from transgender criminalisation to expressive harm, and the 2026 Act travels further down that path than any of its predecessors.
What the Act changes is not what has already been filmed, but the conditions under which the next films are made. The question this symposium might productively ask is not only whether the 2026 Act survives constitutional challenge though the Article 19(1)(a) and Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli arguments suggest it may not but what kind of cinematic record India will have a decade from now, if the stories that most need self-perception to be the starting point are the ones a law written in 2026 makes hardest, and most precarious, to tell.
Tanvi Kishore is a 2nd Year BA. LL.B. (Hons.) student at the National Law School of India University.