NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a batch of writ petitions filed, including that of noted transgender, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, and others, challenging the Transgender Amendment Act 2026 on May 4.
According to the causelist, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court, headed by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant and also comprising Justice Joymalya Bagchi, is slated to hear the plea.
The matter has been listed as item number 12 in the causelist. It is expected that the top court will take up the batch of pleas for hearing at 12 or 1 pm.
Tripathi, the Chairperson of National Council for Transgender Persons (NCTP), and its member Zainab Patel have moved the Supreme Court and filed a petition challenging the Constitutional validity of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, which introduced many changes to the legal framework governing the recognition, rights and protection of transgender persons.
"The amendment was passed by the Parliament recently in March, taking away the right to self-determination of gender", the plea claimed. The law had received presidential assent on March 31.
The petition challenged the Amendment Act, as causing "irreparable constitutional injury" to the fundamental rights of transgender persons guaranteed under Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21 of the Constitution.
"Section 4(2) provided, in express terms, that a transgender person shall have a right to self-perceived gender identity. It was the direct statutory embodiment of the NALSA mandate. Parliament has simply deleted it. A legislature cannot repeal a provision that gives concrete form to a fundamental right recognised by this Honourable Court without violating Article 21. The unconstitutionality is in the act of deletion itself," the plea stated.
Criticising the role of the state that it could not impose medical, psychiatric, or bureaucratic gatekeeping as a condition for the recognition of gender identity, the plea stated.
It further added that this court held that informational privacy, including the right to control the disclosure of one's own sensitive personal and medical information, is a fundamental right.
"The deletion of Section 7(3)'s protective Proviso strips certificate-holders of guarantees that their existing entitlements will not be disturbed. The drafting of Sections 18(e)-(h) stigmatises transgender presentation by making it the object of criminal offences rather than targeting coercion alone," the petition said.
"The failure to enhance the maximum sentence for sexual and physical abuse of transgender persons under Sections 18(a)-(d), while introducing life imprisonment for trafficking offences, reflects an arbitrary legislative hierarchy that continues to undervalue the bodily integrity of transgender persons," it added.
"The continued failure to implement the reservation directions issued in NALSA for transgender persons under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) compounds this constitutional default. No legitimate state objective can justify this cumulative regression from the constitutional standard set by this Hon'ble Court over a decade ago," it also highlighted.
The plea further submitted that the deepest constitutional wound inflicted by the Impugned Amendment Act is the substitution of the definition of "transgender person" in Section 2(k) of the Principal Act.
"The original definition, which identified a transgender person as 'a person whose gender does not match the gender assigned to that person at birth,' faithfully reflected what this Court held in NALSA: that gender identity is determined by the person herself/himself, not by biology, birth assignment, or state verification," the petition claimed.
The new legislation is being severely criticised by opposition parties and LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Agende, etc.c) communities.
Those who opposed the legislation have argued that they were not consulted prior to the introduction of the Bill in parliament.
Two members of the NCTP, Kalki Subramanium and Rituparna Neog, resigned from their posts the day the Rajya Sabha passed the Bill.