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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Indian J Plast Surg 2022; 55(02): 205-210
DOI: 10.1055/s-0042-1749137
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Right to Health and Gender-Affirmative Procedure in the Transgender Persons Act 2019 in India

Dipika Jain
1   Centre for Justice, Law and Society, Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, New Delhi, India
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Abstract

The Transgender Persons Act, 2019 mandates that the government ensures medical facilities provide care to transgender persons (including for gender-affirmative procedures) and review medical curricula to address the health needs of transgender persons. However, despite the enactment of the law, many transgender and gender-variant persons in India struggle to access essential health care services. Legal provisions on health care strip them of their right to self-determination by setting up complex bureaucratic processes for the legal recognition of gender identity. In this article, I critically examine the health care provisions in the Act and the lack of efficient legal criteria for gender-affirming procedures, as well as the basic flaws in the medicalized model of legal recognition of trans persons' gender identity, which not only characterize the Act but also have serious implications for its implementation across the country.

Keywords

transgender persons - right to health - legal recognition of gender - gender affirmative procedure - self-determination

Note

The author has used the term ‘transgender’ in this article mainly because the term ‘transgender’ was used by the Supreme Court in the NALSA judgment and by the Parliament in the Transgender Persons Act and Draft Rules. She is aware that the term ‘transgender’ is not inclusive and its meaning varies across regions, cultures, and nations. She recognizes that it does not fully represent the diversity and heterogeneity among transgender persons in India.




Publication History

Article published online:
14 July 2022

© 2022. Association of Plastic Surgeons of India. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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