South Asia has long had a complex relationship with gender non-conforming people. Identities such as Hijras, Kothis, Aravanis, Jogappas, and others have historically existed within specific socio-cultural and ritual contexts. While texts like the Kamasutra and Manusmriti contain references to gender non-conformity, these mentions did not translate into social equality. At best, these identities occupied symbolic or ritualistic positions within rigid hierarchies.

Contemporary narratives often romanticise this past, locating the origin of transgender oppression solely in colonial rule. While colonialism undeniably intensified repression through legal codification and surveillance, it is historically inaccurate to portray pre-colonial society as inclusive. Even where gender non-conforming individuals were visible, such as in royal courts, their positions were controlled and mediated by the ruling class. This romanticisation ultimately reinforces reactionary narratives that obscure material conditions and detach the question of trans oppression from class struggle.

These contradictions are seen once again as the ruling party in India attempts to introduce a bill to amend the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, The proposed changes restrict recognition of trans people to narrowly defined socio-cultural categories and impose invasive medical verification, justified through claims of misuse of self-identification provisions, when no substantial reports or evidences have been found to support such claims.

Their conditional role persists even in modern era, as trans people are frequently relegated to a homogenized "third gender" category. This happens despite many transgender people identifying within the male-female binary, which is disregarded by the institutional frameworks. This is not just a cultural misunderstanding but intentional and imperative to capital. By collapsing diverse identities into a singular, administratively convenient form, the system produces a demarcated “other,” further separating them and marginalising them within society.

These measures have clear material consequences. Certification decides who is recognised and who is denied, placing the entirety of an individual’s identity under the arbitrary approval of bureaucrats who will never face the consequences. A stamp of approval dictates access to employment, housing, healthcare, and welfare. Those unable or unwilling to comply with medical verification risk exclusion from formal labour markets, heightened precarity, and increased vulnerability to policing and harassment. What appears as a question of recognition is, in reality, a mechanism for regulating the conditions under which individuals can exist and reproduce themselves within the capitalist society.

This must not be understood as a mere moral or ideological failure of the ruling party, but as a reflection of capital’s tendency to discipline, classify, and fragment labour to keep itself intact.

Capitalism does not simply exploit labour; it requires constant organisation and regulation of the labour. The state plays a central role in forcing identities into stable categories that can be documented, surveilled, and governed. The insistence on certification reflects this structural need. For the state, self-identification poses a problem not simply cultural but administrative, since populations that resist stable classification cannot be easily processed, regulated, or incorporated into the management of labour, and are thus treated as anomalies to be corrected, contained, or erased.

Capitalism relies on the reproduction of social divisions – gender, caste, religion, sexuality, etc, to fragment the working population, and we must understand that these divisions are not remnants of the past but are constantly reproduced because it serves a function that prevents solidarity by posing capital’s exploitation as isolated experiences rather than a shared condition. The juridical fixation of transgender identity must be understood within this process, too. It isolates trans people as a distinct administrative category, subject to specific regulation, while incorporating them into the broader system on unequal terms, which results in conditional inclusion.

As a response to this bill, many organisations have come up to demand recognition, condemn and oppose this. While these struggles are necessary, they remain limited as they are confined to appeals for state recognition. The problem is not only that the state defines identity incorrectly, but that it delegates to itself the authority to define it at all.

Even self-identification, while appearing emancipatory, remains mediated by the same structures of regulation, it seeks autonomy through recognition by the institutions that govern and discipline identity.

What is required is a shift from recognition to material analysis. As long as social life is organised through systems that demand classification and control, all identities remain subject to regulation, and this is why trans oppression cannot be understood in isolation from these broader relations.

This does not mean ignoring specific forms of oppression, but instead situating it in the totality of the broader class struggle. The oppression of transgender people is real and materially grounded, but its persistence is inseparable from a system that constantly produces and manages divisions within the working class. Trans liberation cannot be seen as an isolated struggle; to do so risks reproducing the very fragmentation that capital depends on.

Only by confronting the material conditions that necessitate classification, regulation, and division can genuine emancipation emerge.

Workers of the world must unite, rejecting the fragmentation of identity which obscures the fundamental division of society into classes, and reasserting their solidarity on shared common material interests.

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