The British Colonial Connection to the Contemporary Attack on Transgender Rights in India
- Arnav Bhattacharya
- 4 minutes ago
- 6 min read
In March 2026, despite widespread opposition from transgender and queer rights groups, the Indian parliament passed an amendment to the 2019 Transgender Persons Act. The 2019 act was considered a landmark legislation, as it enacted an inclusive definition of being transgender based on the agency of individuals to determine their own gender identity. The act built upon a 2014 judgement of the Supreme Court of India which extended the rights of transgender and intersex individuals by recognizing them as the “third gender.” Both of these rulings protected transgender persons from discrimination and called upon the state to provide equal opportunities in matters of health care, education, housing and employment. The 2026 amendment, however, makes a sharp U-turn, stripping transgender individuals of their right to gender self-determination, and requiring a physical examination by medical and administrative authorities in order to be recognized as transgender.
Policing queer individuals and their bodies is not a new phenomenon in India. In the mid- 19th century, for example, British colonialists constructed elaborate social, medical, legal and ethnological procedures to legitimize the pathologization and criminalization of the hijras (a South Asian term for transgender and intersex persons). My thesis on the history of Indian sexology delves deeper into this subject to show how colonial spaces such as India served as laboratories for the pathologization of non-binary gender identity in global sexology. But here, I will briefly highlight how British authorities in India came to understand hijras and queer individuals as anomalous sexological species, citing “abnormal” physiological markers to legitimize the intrusive and disciplinary regulation of their lives and bodies.
One of the earliest modern laws that sought to regulate trans lives was the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), enacted by the British in India. In pre-colonial India, the hijras lived rich social and political lives, with some of them playing important administrative roles in the courts of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal empires. By 1860, the British had already criminalized all non-heteronormative sexual acts as being against the “order of nature.” The CTA further flattened the social roles of the hijra community and branded them all as pathological criminals. Unprecedented in scope, the CTA aimed to identify hijras, restrict their free movement, and even imprison several lower caste indigenous groups, branding them as “habitual criminals.” British officials argued that these communities were “criminal tribes” who exhibited a constitutional predilection for theft, plunder, and kidnapping.
The hijras, termed as “eunuchs” in colonial literature, had faced wrongful imprisonment since the mid-19th century, even before the official enactment of the CTA. A report on medical curiosities exhibited by the Medico-Legal Society in England included, among other things, a specimen of the “pubic region of an old Mahomedan Eunuch,” named Edoo. In 1863, Edoo died after being imprisoned in the Monghyr jail, located in the present-day state of Bihar in Eastern India. The medical report, which intended to compare Indian castration practices to the rest of Asia, focused extensively on Edoo’s genitalia. It is important to highlight that this “specimen” could only be obtained, and fetishized as an exotic object of global sexological study, due to the absolute control exercised by the British colonial regime over Edoo’s body and corpse. The report provided faint glimpses of the life that Edoo had lived before his imprisonment. The legal trial that took place after Edoo’s arrest stated that he lived among four or five other individuals, and that his job was to attend on women, “serve and amuse during the family festivals of their wealthy compatriots,” and “be the passive agent of those unmentionable eastern practices.”
The Monghyr jail where Edoo was imprisoned contained an entire ward for the confinement of “these miserable beings,” as Dr. Norman Chevers (1818-1886) termed them in his influential work, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India (1870). Chevers was a surgeon in the Bengal Medical Services as well as an inspector general of jails in Bengal between 1860-62. During his tour of the Monghyr jail, Chevers examined the bodies of two hijras. In his manual, he highlighted that their general appearance was of “very tall and bony old women,” and delineated the details of their genitalia with a focus on castration practices. Delving into further details about the discrete physical markers of those “unmentionable eastern practices,” Chevers cited the opinion of other British colonial physicians who had begun to study the folds and ruptures of the anal mucous membrane in order to identify “professional sodomites.”
This obsession with the physiological evidence for sodomy was not merely theoretical. British officials began to treat markers such as folds of the anal mucous membrane as evidence for convicting persons accused of sodomy. In January 1871, for instance, following the arrest of a 14-year-old boy named Moolah, the court noted that he had been found “in the possession of a eunuch, with marks of the frequent commission of an unnatural offence on his person.” The report further suggested that the boy had been frequently used for “unnatural purposes,” because his “anus was unusually large and patent,” and possessed, “a certain hardness of the skin at its posterior aspect.” Thus, the doctors inferred that the “crime had been frequently committed.” By the early 1870s, a medical examination of the anus to detect whether it was a “trumpet” or a “funnel” was an established practice of medico-legal jurisprudence for the detection of sodomy.
Colonial ethnology and travel literature, in particular the works of the famous British explorer and Orientalist traveler, Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), further popularized the pathologization of non-Western queer bodies. Best known for his English translation of the Kamasutra (1883), Burton created an elaborate ethnological and sexological theory in order to explain the supposed non-heteronormative predilection of the inhabitants of particular regions of the world. First appearing in the Terminal Essay, appended to his translation of Arabian Nights (1885), Burton demarcated a “Sotadic Zone” which encompassed a huge swathe of the world. It included parts of Southern Europe and North Africa in the West, and ran eastwards to include parts of West Asia, almost all of Central Asia, East and South-East Asia. In the Indian sub-continent, the Sotadic Zone included the regions of Sind, Punjab, and Kashmir. It also included all of the Americas, where Burton believed “pederasty” was an “established racial institution.” Besides suggesting race and climate as possible explanations for this peculiarity, he also conjectured on the physiological causes of the phenomena. He cited the Italian physiologist and criminologist, Paolo Mantegazza, who attributed such comingling of “masculine and feminine temperaments” to a “perversion of the erotic sense” that was caused by an abnormally close association between “the nerves of the rectum and the genitalia.”
By the turn of the century, therefore, there was an elaborate physiological vocabulary that demarcated, pathologized, and exoticized transgender and queer bodies. Such theories gained further credence as the leading British sexologist, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), included the same colonial prison reports, as well as Burton’s theories, in his research on non-heteronormative sexuality in the non-west. Moreover, this circulation and pathologization of queer and colonized bodies was not restricted to South Asia or the British colonial empire. French colonial authorities were similarly engrossed by the gender variant bodies of the “sarimbavy” in Madagascar, who like the hijras attracted tremendous sexological attention in Europe. The power of global imperialism sustained the pathological obsession with trans and queer bodies like that of Edoo, allowing their bodies and body parts to be endlessly circulated, exhibited, and examined. This relentless obsession with the examination of transgender bodies, made possible by draconian colonial era laws like the CTA, finds its echoes in the regulatory policies of contemporary nation states that similarly demand a physical examination of the bodies of transgender individuals to determine their gender identity. The recent amendment to the Transgender Persons Act in India along with several other restrictive legislations targeting the transgender communities across the world continue to delegitimize their dignity and humanity.
Arnav Bhattacharya is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Health Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College. He is a historian of medicine focusing on South Asia and the Global South more broadly. He is presently working on his first book project on the history of sexology in modern India, entitled, From the Kamasutra to Scientia Sexualis: A History of Sexology in Modern India (1871- 1960). The work highlights how India emerged as a colonial laboratory for the global production of sexological knowledge. It also shows how Indian sexologists developed a unique tradition of sexual science that was consequential in transforming sexual health as an issue of public significance in the fields of medicine, education, and the law. His research has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Porn Studies, and the Czech historical journal, Archiv Orientální.
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