THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The 2024 Lok Sabha election saw an increase in the number of transgender voters in the state. Compared to 2019, there was a six-fold rise in transgender community voters this time. However, this did not reflect in polling as only less than half of them could cast their votes.
In the 2024 election, there were a total of 367 voters from the transgender community in the state. However, only 150 of them could cast their votes, a mere 40 per cent. In 2019, the total number of transgender voters in the state was 62. However, only 22 people exercised their franchise (35.63 percent). During the five-year gap in which the number of voters rose six times, there was only a five per cent increase in the number of people who exercised their franchise.
Kerala was one of the first states that framed a policy for transgender people in 2015 when separate voter ID cards were issued nationwide for the community in 2014. “The transgender community was granted entry into parliamentary democracy very recently,” social scientist J Devika told TNIE. “Hence, society has the responsibility to persuade them to vote. The community has to feel a connection with the democratic process,” she said. Incidentally, in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Kerala the first intersex candidate Aswathi Rajappan contested in the Ernakulum seat. It was seen as a sign of LGBTQ individuals getting more acceptance in the public sphere.
However, Syama S Parbaha, state secretary, Democratic Transgender Federation of Kerala, a wing of DYFI that formed the first political wing for transgender people in the country, told TNIE, “In this election even though many transgender members had applied for address change, most of them were rejected. We don’t know the real reason. There were also issues of duplicate cards in some districts. I think more than political parties it is the responsibility of each member to exercise their rights."
The first transgender voter in Kerala and the first member of the Democratic Transgender Federation of Kerala, Surya Ishaan, pointed out the lack of interest on the part of family and the public to remind them about adding the transgender member’s name to the voters list. “Party workers who are happy seeing people exercise their franchise, do not show the same enthusiasm to help change the voter ID address and include our names in the voters list. Usually the family members and villagers are not interested in the process. Political activists do not take the issue seriously,” she said.
Surya, a celebrity make-up artist, said she cast her vote for the first time after obtaining a voter ID card through her own initiative.