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Transphobia, Racism and the Rise of Fascism: intersecting resistance from India to the UK

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Venue: Online

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In March 2026, India's Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill was passed by Modi's far right, Hindutva supremacist government, and has since become law. The amendments were brought in without community consultations including the statutorily constituted National Council for Transgender Persons. In blatant opposition to globally recognized Yogyakarta principles affirming the right to self-identification of one’s gender and the 2014 NALSA judgement of the Supreme Court, the amendment narrows the definition of a ‘transgender person’ by only including certain socio-cultural identities, those with ‘intersex variations’ and congenital variations in sex characteristics. Trans persons’ gender will be scrutinised by a District Magistrate, with the assistance of medical ‘experts’ to determine if they will legally be recognised as transgender. This process is dehumanising, pathologising, and threatens to strip trans people of their dignity.
This legislation is a clear erosion of trans people's rights and freedoms, excludes trans women and trans men, gender diverse, gender fluid and non-binary persons from the legal protections and entitlements and restricts access to essential and life-saving gender-affirming care. The move from self-identification to biological markers of gender reflects a broader trend of surveillance, categorisation, and bureaucratic violence that we have seen through exclusion exercises such as the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019.
Meanwhile the UK has seen a similar regression with a 2025 Supreme Court ruling changing the interpretation of sex in the Equality Act. This judgement ruled that the legal definitions of "man" and "woman" in the Equality Act, 2010 now refer to biological sex, not gender identity. This ruling, fuelled by sustained campaigns by prominent transphobic public figures like author JK Rowling and far-right politicians, has led to rising hate crimes, exclusion from ‘women-only’ shelters, services and spaces and trans people increasingly feeling unsafe in day-to-day life.
Yet these rulings have, of course, been met with mass resistance and protests. This event will explore the connections between institutional and state-sponsored transphobia and the rise of racism and fascism in the UK and India, with a view to building solidarities between grassroots resistance movements in both countries.

Contact name: Tanya Serisier

Speakers
  • Arsen —

    Arsen (they/them) is a physics graduate and a community activist from Indore, Madhya Pradesh, focusing on queer welfare and social engagement keeping intersectionality at its core. They are engaged in helping queer people find necessary organisational and peer support while facing issues of being a minority in a country where the far right has been exponentially rising at least for a decade now. Arsen has worked with the Solidarity Foundation (Bangalore), Hridayam (Indore) and Tapish Foundation (Indore)

  • Dr Sarah Lamble —

    Lamble is a writer, educator, and organiser, with a focus on queer, feminist, and transformative approaches to safety, justice, and harm reduction. Their forthcoming book is Unsafe: The carceral roots of the anti-trans backlash. Lamble exposes how carceral approaches to safety fail to address root causes of harm, ultimately deepening social divisions and legitimizing new forms of violence and control.Drawing on feminist and queer traditions as well as their experience organizing against prisons and policing, they make a principled case for a different vision: one where safety is not built on punishment but on collective care, radical solidarity, and transformative justice.

  • Grace Banu —

    Grace Banu is a Dalit and trans activist and a software engineer. She was the first trans person to be accepted into an engineering college in Tamil Nadu. She is the founder and director of Trans Rights Now Collective—a Bahujan-centred collective of transgender individuals in India. She campaigns for trans representation, including fighting for horizontal reservations for trans people in Tamil Nadu, which would provide trans people a specific percentage of seats or posts within each existing category for reservation

  • Hina Baloch —

    Hina Baloch is a researcher, writer, and political organizer [Karachi-London and a member of Pakistan's KhawajaSira community. Organizing Transgender communities since 2010, she is co-founder of Pakistan’s first political transgender pride Sindh Moorat March, a Chevening Scholar, a SOAS graduate in Gender Studies, and authoring a book on post-partition evolution of KhawajaSira Culture in Pakistan.

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