In the Mahabharata, right in the middle of the war at Kurukshetra, Bhisma said Shikhandi is a woman because he was born with a female body. He refused to fight Shikhandi. Krishna said Shikhandi is a man because Shikhandi saw himself as one. Bhisma did not respect Shikhand’s self-identity. Krishna did. The Trans Bill signed by the President of India aligns with the commander of the Kauravas, not Krishna. The Kauravas were more aligned to Christian Evangelists, not “woke” Krishna.
Sanatan Dharma did not imagine the world in rigid boxes. It made room for ambiguity, transition, and in-between states, not as deviations but as part of the sacred order of existence. Gods themselves embodied fluidity: Ardhanarishvara was neither solely male nor female, Narasimha neither human nor animal, Ganesha human yet elephant-headed. These forms were not anomalies. They were symbols that helped society accept complexity and cosmic mystery.
What we today call transgender identities were traditionally understood within this wider civilisational imagination. Difference was not immediately medicalised or criminalised. That impulse came much later, particularly under colonial rule, when European frameworks of law, medicine, and morality sought to classify all bodies into fixed categories.
Subaltern traditions preserve this older accommodation through the story of Bahuchara Mata. A woman discovers on her wedding night that her husband desires men and cross-dresses. Out of rejection and rage, she transforms into a fierce goddess who rides a rooster, a powerful symbol of masculinity. Her command is not destruction but transformation: those who resist their feminine identity must accept it and live it. The temple becomes a place of belonging for trans women and gender-nonconforming communities. Even the name Bahuchara suggests plurality of conduct, many ways of being, many ways of inhabiting the self.
Elite Sanskrit traditions offer a parallel through Ila in the Mahabharata. Born biologically male, this son of Manu becomes female in an enchanted forest of Shiva and Shakti. Ila’s husband is Budh, the son of the moon-god Chandra and the goddess Tara, cursed to be born androgynous. Together Ila and Budh create the lunar line of kings, to which Krishna and Arjuna belong. Of the nava-graha, only Mercury (Budh), husband of Ila, is often shown with a feminine posture, in temple art. A ‘thrice-bent’ (tri-bhangi) posture that Krishna adopts as he downplays his masculinity to delight the women who dance around him in the forest, at night, away from the security of the village.
Between Ila, Bahuchara, and Shikhandi, folk and classical traditions reveal a shared civilisational pattern: gender variance is acknowledged, narrated, and ritualised.
In medieval India, especially with the rise of Sufi networks, new collective spaces emerged outside the conventional household structure. Lodges (khanqahs) and lineages of guru-disciple relationships offered refuge and social belonging. The hijra tradition absorbed Islamic vocabulary and institutional forms while retaining older Indic associations with fertility, blessing, and liminality. Here too, transgender communities found a place in lived culture rather than outside it.
Temple traditions continued this accommodation. In Karnataka, the cult of Yellamma, and in Tamil Nadu, the festival traditions around Aravan, created ritual frameworks where trans identities were publicly visible. Trans persons were invited to bless households, mark life transitions, and mediate between auspicious and inauspicious spaces. They occupied a sacred threshold, much like the gods who themselves embodied thresholds.
The rupture comes with colonial modernity. The British administrative state was deeply uncomfortable with fluid identities. Bodies had to be classified, recorded, certified, and surveilled. Hijras were documented and criminalised under laws such as the Criminal Tribes Act. What had once been a socially recognised liminal category was transformed into a legal problem. Dignity gave way to suspicion.
The irony is that echoes of this colonial mindset persist even today. Modern legal frameworks often demand certification and bureaucratic validation of identity. One must prove who one is to the state. This is not a return to tradition, but an extension of colonial logic in contemporary language. Community recognition is replaced by institutional approval.
At the same time, imported ideological battles now shape the discourse: rigid biological essentialism on one side, equally rigid identity frameworks on the other. Neither fully aligns with older Indian ways of thinking, which were more symbolic, ritual, and plural.
The danger today is not merely exclusion in law, but the shrinking of imagination. A Hindu civilisation that once made space for ambiguity through myth, ritual, and story is increasingly pressured to think in binaries. The older world did not ask for proof. It asked for participation, recognition, and ritual belonging.
That is perhaps the deeper lesson of Sanatan Dharma: compassion was not charity, but structure. It was built into the stories people told, the gods they worshipped, and the rituals they lived by. To reduce this inheritance to a medical category is to misunderstand its civilisational core. Let us stop marketing colonial ideas as Vedic.