Aastha Nayak

In this episode of the Law School Policy Review podcast, Mihir Rajamane Rajendra, DPhil candidate in Socio-Legal studies at the University of Oxford and consultant at the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR), speaks with Aastha Nayak (Senior Editor), on transgender rights in India and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026The conversation traces what has changed since NALSA v Union of India, examining the Section 6 and Section 7 “hierarchy” under the 2019 Act and its effect on access to reservations, and the 2020 Rules’ attempt to soften it. It also considers how the 2026 amendment narrows the definition of transgender, adds a medical board to the certification process, and leaves trans masculine and non-binary persons outside its three categories, along with what remains of self-determination in the Act.The discussion then turns to the Supreme Court’s 2026 gender stereotypes report, including its treatment of terms like hijra and thirunambi and its recommendation of “intersex” in their place, and what such framing means for judicial sensitisation. It concludes with the “bureaucratisation of identity” across the state and private life, from rental agreements and passports to workplaces, and the networks of community and mutual aid emerging in response to the amendment.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Aastha Nayak: Thank you. Hello and welcome to the Law School Policy Review podcast. Our topic for today is transgender rights in India, with a special focus on the recently passed Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, which was passed earlier this year. Our guest for today is Mihir Rajamane. Mihir is a DPhil candidate in sociological studies at the University of Oxford. He also has an LLM from King’s College London and a BA in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford. Alongside his studies, Mihir acts as a consultant at the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) and is currently on fieldwork in Bangalore. He has frequently written articles and columns on issues concerning transgender rights in India. We are honoured to have you on our podcast, Mihir. Thank you for being here.

Mihir Rajamane: Thank you for having me.

Aastha Nayak: For some context on our topic, the Indian Parliament has passed the Transgender Persons Amendment Act, 2026, which amends the earlier Act of 2019, which followed the Supreme Court’s judgment in NALSA v Union of India in 2014. The 2019 Act let a person self-declare as transgender under Section 6 with just an affidavit, but required proof of surgery to be recognised as male or female under Section 7. The 2026 amendment narrows who counts as transgender to begin with, adds a medical board to the certification process, and introduces new criminal offences. The Act is currently being challenged before the Supreme Court and several high courts. In this episode, we will not look at what the courts might hold, but at what has actually changed since NALSA, and what the amendment does to a decade of law built around the principle of self-determination.

We will start with a chapter that Mihir wrote with Vibha Swaminathan in Transforming Rights: How Law Shapes Transgender Lives, on identity and community in India. Mihir, in your chapter, you call Sections 6 and 7 a hierarchy: self-declaration for the third-gender category of transgender, but proof of surgery to be recognised as man or woman. What does that hierarchy actually do when people are trying to access reservations available to transgender people? And since you wrote this chapter before the amendment was passed, do you think that framing still holds under the new definition?

Mihir Rajamane: Definitely. Let me start by explaining why we called it a hierarchy. The 2019 Act recognised transgender people and provided a process by which you could change your gender in law and on your documents. Under Section 6, you could change it to transgender, and under Section 7, you could change it to male or female. For male or female, you had an additional requirement: you had to prove surgery. For Section 6, an affidavit is enough to prove that you are transgender, but for Section 7 you need something further.

We argue that this is a form of protection of the categories of male and female, protecting those two genders, while the other gender, transgender, doesn’t need that kind of protection. So even though you’ve recognised a third gender, if you’re going to call it that, you’ve already separated it from the two genders you had previously recognised. That’s the hierarchy you’ve created. We then look at how that affects the provision of reservations.

You have this idea of transgender, then male and female, and you also have transgender men and transgender women. But which of these categories can access reservations is a question the courts have struggled with. Intuitively, people who understand trans identity as based on self-determination would say that if someone is a trans man, they are entitled to be recognised as a man, and also to claim any benefits meant for transgender people. But in some cases, courts refuse to accept both identities together.

For example, there’s a case in West Bengal where a trans woman had received a job as a woman, and then identified as transgender when transgender reservations became available. The court said, “You have already identified as a woman, you can now not identify as transgender.” So it fails to recognise both identities existing together; you can only be one at a time. The opposite has happened too, where people who claimed transgender could not then claim to be a woman. I think it’s Sumita Kumari, a case of someone trying to become an ASHA worker, a social healthcare worker, who wasn’t allowed to claim she was a woman because she had claimed to be transgender on her documents.

So the Section 6 and Section 7 hierarchy separates who is transgender from who is binary, male or female, and doesn’t allow you to hold both identities. One final point: this doesn’t come up only in court cases, but very practically. In Karnataka, for example, when you apply for a job, you have three boxes for gender: male, female, transgender. But lower down the form, under reservation categories, you just have Category 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, all the OBC categories, SC and ST, but not transgender. So if you want transgender reservations, you have to tick “transgender” in the gender box. If you are a transgender man and have ticked “man,” you can’t then claim your reservation.

Aastha Nayak: Correct me if I’m wrong, but the 2020 Rules try to soften this hierarchy slightly. They broaden what medical intervention means, so it’s not just surgery but includes hormonal therapy and counselling as well. Do you think this changes the outcomes for reservations, or is it still a two-tier hierarchy?

Mihir Rajamane: I think it does change things slightly. Roughly a majority of people who have transgender ID cards didn’t get them on the basis of surgery. The 2020 Rules defined medical intervention as any kind of intervention, including counselling. So many people could go to a psychologist or psychiatrist and receive what’s colloquially called a GID certificate, which is basically a gender dysphoria diagnosis. They could upload it on the form, claim it as medical intervention, and be recognised under Section 7 as male or female. That was a way to actually get ID cards, and in many cases it worked.

But this is an area of law that is very uncertain, because of a mix of bad drafting, social norms clashing with legal norms, and the fact that the 2020 Rules had a different idea of what counts as male or female than the 2019 Act. Surgery versus medical intervention meant a lot of difficulty for people on the ground. When you apply for a job, they’ll say, “You have a transgender ID card saying male, so you must have undergone surgery; show me your surgery certificate.” You say, “Actually, no, the Rules provide this,” and they say, “No, the Act provides this.” And as law students know, primary legislation always trumps secondary legislation. So technically speaking, they wouldn’t be wrong to ask for the surgery.

Aastha Nayak: So even though the 2020 Rules help people on the ground, because the parent Act would override them, they don’t do much in practice.

Mihir Rajamane: Exactly. People continue to use both, so on the ground you’re tackling both together, and it’s a matter of constant contestation. You’re never certain about your identity.

Aastha Nayak: In the chapter, you’ve also written about the delays and hostility people face when they first apply for the transgender ID card under Section 6. Even before the amendment it was a difficult process. Now that it’s no longer based on self-declaration or the principle of self-determination, has it become a lot harder? And since you’re doing fieldwork right now, can you tell us what you’re hearing from people going through this?

Mihir Rajamane: Right now that process doesn’t practically exist. Since March, the website has been down; they replaced it with a new website, and that has been down since July. No one has actually gotten an application through since the passage of the amendment. What happens from here, we’re uncertain. But as you described in the introduction, the process has been made more complicated; it has added at least three more steps.

Before, you could submit an affidavit to the District Magistrate, who had a timeline within which to approve it. Now it first has to go to a medical board, created at the state level. We don’t know who it will consist of, so we have no idea what procedures it will use. One thing we definitely don’t want is any kind of bodily examination, because that creates more instances of harassment. So what the medical board will do is one open question. Then it sends the application to the District Magistrate, who considers what the board said. If they are not happy, they can refuse it. If they are unsure, they can recruit more medical experts. So it’s not just a medical board; there are further medical experts, and that phrase is not defined. Who can the District Magistrate call? Is it going to be his uncle who is a doctor? Are they actually trained in transgender medicine? Do they understand trans people’s bodies?

So it is going to be very difficult, but the short answer is we don’t know yet, because it hasn’t been operationalised, and the hope is it never will be. Everyone is waiting for it either to be operationalised or struck down by the court.

Aastha Nayak: Hopefully it will get struck down soon. In 2014, in the NALSA judgment, the Supreme Court established the principle of self-perceived gender identity. Now that this right has been taken away, do you think there is anything left of self-determination in the Act?

Mihir Rajamane: Even in the previous Act, Section 4(2), which provided for the right to self-perceived identity, wasn’t doing much work, because to change your gender legally you had to go through the Section 6 and Section 7 process. Section 6 is very similar to self-identification legislation in other countries. If you compare it to Argentina or Germany, it’s a very similar framework: you go to one authority, submit an affidavit or some sort of declaration, and thereafter your gender is changed. But Section 7 never followed self-identification; you needed surgery proof. So the 2019 Act didn’t actually have self-identification. Section 4(2) was more a statement of intent than an actual right. The right came from NALSA, which is where it always existed.

That said, the fact that it’s removed now is still significant. Even if Section 4(2) wasn’t doing much, removing it makes clear that the legislature intends not to respect that right. So when it comes to the constitutional challenge, you can guess there will be arguments that the right to self-perceived identity is no longer a constitutional right.

Aastha Nayak: The 2019 Act, as we discussed, had a narrow sense of transgender as a third formal gender category beyond the male-female binary. But in your chapter you also talk about a broader, umbrella sense of transgender. This was an ambiguity in the 2019 Act, but the 2026 Act seems to resolve it by narrowing the definition. It specifies three categories: first, sociocultural identities; second, five specific intersex variations; and third, people who, in the legislature’s words, were compelled to present as transgender. In your chapter you say that instead of the five specific variations, the term “intersex” would be more appropriate. In the context of the 2026 amendment, what happens to trans masculine or non-binary people who don’t fit into the three categories the legislature has set out?

Mihir Rajamane: I’ll take this in two parts: first the broader and narrower senses of transgender, and second the exclusion of trans masculine and non-binary persons.

In the chapter, when I spoke of a broader and a narrower transgender, I was referring to the fact that the definition section defined transgender people as anyone whose gender identity is different from that ascribed to them at birth. It explicitly included, as you say, trans men, and it used the word “gender-queer,” which would include non-binary people, but also trans women and sociocultural identities and so on. That’s the broader idea. But there’s also Section 6 and Section 7, and under Section 6 you could identify as transgender on your ID card. So there are transgender people, but also transgender male people, transgender female people, and so on. The narrow sense of transgender is the one we used to refer to people who have “transgender” on their ID card. But even people who don’t have “transgender” on their ID card could still be transgender under the old Act. That’s the broad and narrow.

How has that changed under the 2026 amendment? I would say it doesn’t actually resolve the ambiguity, because there is still a separate definition of transgender in the definition section. As you identified, that definition is now much narrower: sociocultural identities, people with certain intersex variations, and those compelled to present as transgender. But that can still include someone who identifies as a woman on their ID card. This person can still go through the Section 7 process and get “woman” on their ID card. So they’ll be transgender in the broader sense but not in the narrower sense. That ambiguity continues, and it affects the provision of welfare schemes. I talked earlier about transgender women being caught between their female identity and their transgender identity; that can still happen after the 2026 amendment. It doesn’t make things easier, as the legislature claims it should.

As for the exclusion of trans masculine and non-binary people, it’s a great puzzle why they have been excluded. The reason we think it happened is that there is no longer a blanket definition saying that anyone whose gender identity differs from the one assigned at birth is transgender. Now you have to fit within one of the three boxes. Most sociocultural identities are for trans feminine people rather than trans masculine people, so it’s very difficult for them to fit in. There are a few that would include trans masculine persons, such as Thirunambi in Tamil Nadu and Nupa Maanbi in Manipur, and Kothis might include non-binary people, so some might be included, but not explicitly. People who don’t want to identify with a sociocultural identity no longer come under the broader definition. And when you don’t come under the broader definition, you don’t even get to start the process of going to Section 6 and Section 7. So you are left out even of the broader category. Their rights to legal gender recognition, their rights to go through life with their gender on their identity cards, and their rights to claim reservations are all taken away from communities who don’t fit within those three boxes.

Aastha Nayak: Your answer gives us a natural segue to your recent Supreme Court Observer piece on the Supreme Court’s gender stereotypes report of 2026. In it, you highlight how the report uses terms like hijra, thirunambi, and jogappa, which it describes as implicitly pejorative, and recommends using the term intersex instead. Could you walk us through the implications of either framing, why these terms may or may not be pejorative, and why intersex should or shouldn’t replace them?

Mihir Rajamane: We have no idea where the authors of the 2026 report got this from, but terms like Thirunangai and Thirunambi are definitely not pejorative. They developed in a specific context. Previously in Tamil Nadu, transfeminine people were called Aravani, a term whose etymology and myth come from Hindu mythology, from Aravan, a Hindu deity. Some people didn’t want to be associated with that Hindu imagery and the baggage that came with it, so they came up with their own term, Thirunangai. Similarly, they came up with Thirunambi, which refers to trans masculine people. It comes from a politics of secularism and progressivism. So it’s a term of self-reference, and there hasn’t been much usage of it in a pejorative sense.

A term like Hijra is different. Those of us who are queer and grew up going to school may have seen it used against us as a pejorative term, but at the same time, there are trans people who describe themselves as Hijra. So it’s a term that can be used both ways; maybe that’s where the report’s view comes from. But the reason I’m going into this in detail is that the report doesn’t acknowledge any of this nuance. It just says all of these traditional terms are pejorative, stop using them, and replace them with “intersex.” That doesn’t reflect an understanding of what these terms are or where they come from. And it’s definitely wrong to replace them with “intersex,” because intersex people are people with variations in sex characteristics, and not all transgender people are intersex. By conflating the two, it adds to the myth that all transgender people have bodies that are not considered biologically “normal,” which is not the case. Being trans comes from self-identifying your gender, whether socially, medically, or legally; it can involve biology, but it doesn’t have to. So the report confuses those two ideas.

Aastha Nayak: That was going to be my follow-up: what effect would this framing have on the judges reading the report? If they are not given the context behind these terms, they may just assume they are derogatory, when they might not be.

Mihir Rajamane: Exactly. The judiciary obviously replicates social norms, just like every other institution of the state. But one thing we had with judges was the NALSA judgment. Lawyers, activists, and members of the trans community could cite NALSA back to a judge, and the judge would understand it, because they know what a Supreme Court judgment means, they know how precedent works, and how to work out the ratio and what is binding. We were able to use paragraphs of NALSA strategically to argue for self-determination. If a judge has no idea what trans communities are like, you can use NALSA to educate them. The hope was that something like the 2026 report, or the 2023 handbook, or even before that, in 2022, the sensitisation module on LGBTQIA+ persons for the judiciary, would work the same way.

Aastha Nayak: That was in 2022, prior to the Supriyo judgment.

Mihir Rajamane: Yes, prior to Supriyo. I believe it was the E-Committee of the Supreme Court that issued the LGBTQIA+ sensitisation module, and it was actually quite progressive. The hope was that these publications go to judges’ desks, and they may not read them immediately, but when a case involving a queer person comes before them, at least they read it. But it’s only useful when it comes alongside progressive judgments like NALSA, because that’s when judges really grasp what’s happening. What’s happened with the 2026 report is that it makes mistakes itself. So how can we use it, along with NALSA, to educate judges?

Aastha Nayak: Right. Even the 2023 handbook was described by Chief Justice Surya Kant as too “Harvard-oriented,” whatever that means. What do you make of that framing? Do you think the 2026 report will be received more positively by judges, or will it still be seen as a product of academia that they don’t relate to?

Mihir Rajamane: I don’t know what to make of the remark either, but I think it’s part of a larger trend where judges talk about things like Swadeshi jurisprudence, relying less on foreign judgments and citations. To an extent I actually agree with that tendency. You don’t want to always look abroad when the context of your disputes is local. Accessibility is always great. But you also want to be careful not to use foreignness as a crutch to attack progressive ideas, because there are all kinds of ideas within India as well. Just because something talks more about queer people doesn’t mean it’s Harvard-oriented, for example, not that that’s the reason the judge said it. We should be careful of describing something as foreign just because of what it contains. But I definitely agree that we should look more locally, and to that extent I think the 2026 report does quite well. They did a great survey across various district courts; something like 125 trial court judgments were read to figure out what kinds of stereotypes were actually being used. It does a really good job of using that data, especially in the first half of the report, to show how these stereotypes affect people. And it’s incredibly intersectional: it talks about trans women being harassed at police stations, how intersectional discrimination works, and so on.

But when it comes to the recommendations, I found it a bit lacking. It didn’t do as much as the 2023 report. It didn’t go into cases outside sexual offences. It didn’t talk about other kinds of intersectional discrimination: women with disabilities, whose testimonies are usually dismissed; Dalit women who face sexual offences and usually face gender violence and caste atrocities at the same time, but courts don’t use both frameworks; lesbian women who run away from home but are often asked to return because they were “influenced” by something. These stereotypes, which affect all kinds of women, don’t find themselves in the 2026 report, even though they happen in India. That’s what I think should be improved. If you’re going to make it more India-oriented, try to include those examples.

Aastha Nayak: You mentioned that the report only looks at cases of sexual violence and not the broader discrimination women or queer people face within families or at work. What are the consequences of treating gender stereotypes as only a problem related to sexual violence, and not the lived realities of people?

Mihir Rajamane: On a broader, more abstract level, it turns women’s issues into issues of crimes or violence against them. That makes the issues of women and gender minorities ones of plight or pity, as if we just have to protect them from all this violence. But the issues are much broader than that. It’s not just violence; it’s also about different kinds of freedom and affirmative equality.

One great example: when I was looking at how the 2023 handbook was used, I found that one of its most impactful uses was not in a sexual violence case but in a case under the Motor Vehicles Act. A woman had died as a result of an accident caused by a motor vehicle, and when the court was calculating compensation for her next of kin, it was argued that the value of her care work as a homemaker should be respected, not just as a nominal figure, but as work that sustains the way the economy functions, and, in her case, sustains the way the men in her family were able to perform remunerated work. That allowed the court to actually see the value of her work. The stereotypes are much broader than sexual violence cases, so both at the abstract level and in individual judgments, if you look at gender as an issue in every single case, there is something more for judges to learn and for the law to progress.

Aastha Nayak: This podcast is part of our broader symposium on the documentation and bureaucratisation of gender through the 2026 amendment, and you use the phrase “bureaucratisation of identity.” What happens when the state plays such an important role in the process of self-determination of gender, something that ideally should be internal to the individual? This is also what NALSA was meant to protect. It’s been almost six months since the amendment was passed. What have you seen change in that time?

Mihir Rajamane: A few small changes have happened. On the phrase “bureaucratisation of identity,” I was borrowing it from an article by Deepika Jain and others. It means that your identity has to be read through processes and papers and everything that comes with them. We’ve already talked about the Section 6 and Section 7 process, so I won’t go into that, but it’s worth talking about how those papers and processes matter to everyone outside the state as well, because everyone replicates them.

In the last six months, some of the things people have been afraid of are things like landlords evicting them. What do they do in that case? If they are signing a rental agreement, what name should they use: the deadname, or the name they want to use in the future? And if it’s the name they want to use in the future, what process can they use to show legally that this is their name, when the old processes under the 2019 Act don’t exist anymore? How can they prove their name to the landlord? Or take flying: if you have a certain gender on your passport but don’t look like that gender for whatever reason, you get pulled aside by security and asked questions.

Aastha Nayak: And changing the gender marker on your passport was a very difficult process even before the amendment. I’m sure it’s a lot harder now.

Mihir Rajamane: Definitely. Even before, there were several people who spent multiple years visiting the passport office time and again to try to get their gender changed. And it’s not just the state. When you apply for a job, I’ve been at a few DEI seminars where a lot of corporates come in, and they’re actually very keen to hire trans people. They want to make sure they’re included in the workforce, but the HR departments want to be safe from any legal issues, so they want work documentation: Do you have citizenship? Are you this person? When someone’s name is different on different documents, they always ask extra questions: “Then show me your transgender ID card. If you want to express yourself under this name, show me proof that you are this name.”

It’s easy to get around this. There’s nothing illegal about calling your colleague by a different name in the workplace, even if their legal name is different, and many companies have preferred name and preferred pronoun policies. But I can understand why some companies may be afraid to implement those policies when there is a law that provides for that change. They may ask, “Why didn’t you go through the law?” Well, because the law is so difficult to apply under and get your name changed. Those are the ways in which the state’s control over your name and gender passes on to almost every aspect of the way you navigate life.

Aastha Nayak: If we assume the amendment survives the constitutional challenges against it, what normative impact do you think it will have more broadly on policy in India? The amendment wasn’t really deliberated in Parliament; it was passed by a voice vote even though the opposition was protesting.

Mihir Rajamane: Let me start with a smaller-scale example relevant to how the idea of transgender is viewed and what’s behind this amendment. I’m thinking of a school near Delhi that tried to collect data on its students. In the survey’s gender question, it had male, female, and non-binary. Shortly after the survey was released, several people on social media and in publications started writing about why the phrase “non-binary” was used, saying it’s not an Indian idea but a Western concept, and so on. Interestingly, they didn’t say to make it just male or female. Instead, they complained to the NCPCR, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, and the NCPCR intervened and asked the school to remove “non-binary” and replace it with “transgender.”

What this tells me is that the law is affecting how even private bodies understand gender. The phrase “transgender” is in the law, in the 2019 Act, so when someone uses it, they can rest easy that this is what the law provides for. In that case they could have a third category, but it had to be “transgender,” not “non-binary.”

Aastha Nayak: But doesn’t that conflate the two as well?

Mihir Rajamane: In my understanding, the 2026 amendment explains it. When more conservative people use the phrase “transgender,” they’re referring to certain sociocultural identities, and those are legible in society. We understand who the Hijra person is, we understand who the Kothi person is, because they’re physically visible in our public lives. But “non-binary” is something else, something foreign. The 2026 amendment does this explicitly: before, “transgender” could include non-binary; now it’s clear that “transgender” refers only to the kinds of people society considers legible. The problem is that rights are being given on the basis of protecting these legible kinds of people, framed through particular narratives, rather than on the basis of the freedom they should enjoy.

Aastha Nayak: Right, or they are not viewed as equal rights-holders either. There’s a very paternalistic tone of giving them protection.

Mihir Rajamane: Exactly. That’s why I bring up the school example: after the 2026 amendment, even social norms will change, with the phrase “transgender” becoming narrower and narrower as it’s used in private settings too. The normative impact isn’t only at the state level; it goes down to the ground, with every private actor understanding “transgender” to mean something quite different from what it did before the amendment.

To end this question with your point about policy-making more generally: I think this is one of many examples of the bureaucratisation of all our identities. It’s not just transgender identity. Look at the SIR, for example. Which person has not had to prove themselves through papers?

Aastha Nayak: Even the caste census that’s going to happen soon.

Mihir Rajamane: Exactly. And even before the census, the process of getting a caste certificate, if you’ve gone through it, is very demanding. In some cases you have to go up two generations to prove what lineage you come from. Or take disability certificates. I was reading a great chapter by Kiran Nayak in Queer India Now. He is a trans man living with disability, and he talks about how he had to go to the hospital every single month to get his disability certificate: he’d wait in a queue for a very long time, the doctor’s hours would end, and the doctor would say, “Come next month.” This went on for multiple months before he finally got his examination done and received a certificate, in a hospital that didn’t have any ramps. So these kinds of processes are not just for transgender people; it’s across the board, from interfaith marriages to live-in relationships.

Aastha Nayak: Do you see things improving in the near future, or regressing?

Mihir Rajamane: A tendency I’ve developed in my recent fieldwork is that with a social-legal process, you have to try to follow the facts as they are, and hopefully when I take a step back and think more, I can come up with a better answer to that. Rather than asking whether things are getting worse or better, perhaps it’s better to focus on where the impulse for community, and for escaping bureaucratisation, comes from.

In the protests against the 2026 amendment, people are meeting each other and forming networks of mutual aid and care. There have been initiatives; I’m forgetting the name, I think it’s something like the Trans Pledge Project, where people can pledge, say, ₹1,000 or ₹2,000, and that can be matched to a trans person who needs access to hormone therapy, or a cab to a doctor’s appointment. It can be anything: things that make the process easier and make their lives easier. That came out of the networks organising against the amendment, and these kinds of things are happening across the country. So these are communities developing and finding ways to keep living freely despite the requirements the state keeps imposing. Maybe that’s where we have to focus our attention, and see not just what hope but what kind of politics is coming out of those spaces.

Aastha Nayak: That’s a really nice answer and a good point to end on. Thank you so much for making time for this today. I hope everyone listening enjoyed it, and I personally learned so much.

Mihir Rajamane: Great, thank you so much for having me. I also love talking about this, and every time I do, I learn a lot, including from your questions. It was a great conversation.

Aastha Nayak: Thank you.