british colonization

The general Victorian outlook on trans people was significantly less accepting or tolerant than that of the Mughals, or even the Delhi Sultanate or Hindu Golden Age before them. As the East India Company began amassing more power, the trans communities all over India were forced to break apart and flee to states that were still accepting or tolerant of them. The states granted them their own land and agricultural plots to live on and grow food on in order to make money. These plots were eventually confiscated by the British through the Doctrine of Lapse which stated that any plot of land where the owner died without leaving behind a natural born male heir to inherit the land would be seceded to the British.

After the Revolt of 1857 threatened to loosen the iron grip the British had asserted over India, the government enacted S377 of the IPC. This act was a blatant tool to reassert and strengthen control over India. Though it wasn’t enacted specifically to endanger them, the normalized acceptance of the trans community in India was something that stood directly at odds with Victorian conservatism and concepts of gender identities. The medicalization of this act essentially pathologized all behavior that lay outside the rudimentary confinements of heteronormative acts.

The British government enacted the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 to enforce even more control over any and all tribes and castes they deemed to be deviants from heteronormativity in order to force their conservative beliefs onto India. The Act clearly demarcated trans people as a separate caste from cisgender people. The government attempted to produce ‘rational’ medical evidence to support this claim by linking sexual fluidity to a tendency to commit criminal acts. They cited the work of Michel Foucault who believed that people could only assert complete control over themselves and their actions by repressing their desires and sexuality. Since a lot of trans people had been forced to take up sex work to earn a livelihood by the increasingly less tolerant attitude of the British, the courts accepted this ‘rational’ evidence.

The Act broadly classified all those who fell under it as “persons of the male sex who admit themselves, or on medical inspection clearly appear to be impotent.” This category further included individuals who “are reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children, or of committing offenses under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, or of abetting the commission of any of the said offense, “appear, dressed or ornamented like a women, in a public street or place; or in any other place, with the intention of being seen from a public street or place” and “dance or play music, or take part in any public exhibition, in a public street or lace or for hire in a private house.”