The Many Rapes Of India's Transgender Citizens

On the day of her arrest in Ariyamangalam, Kanmani (name changed) was wearing a black shiny sari with gold stars embroidered along its length. After the police cut her hair, they handed her a veshti, shirt and warned her to answer “male” when asked for her gender in court.

Three days after her remand to Trichy Central Jail, a warden raped Kanmani in her cell.

Yet Another Rape Story

An Enquiry Report, filed in a Trichy court by District Legal Services Authority (DLSA) Deputy Chief Counsel S Subburaj, says the prison authorities “checked the CCTV footage of the occurrence date… and found it (her allegations of rape) was true.”

Kanmani’s alleged rapist roams free. Her story is not an unusual one.

A 2015 report by the National Integrated Biological and Behavioural Surveillance (NIBBS), the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare states that 31.5 per cent of transwomen said their first sexual encounter with a man was non-consensual/forced.

Most of the women reported being minors at the time of the sexual assault—30 per cent were 15 to 17-years-old and 26 per cent were under 14-years-old.

“The warden said no one will believe me”

Kanmani’s earliest memory is when she was four years in an orphanage in Chennai. Declared male at birth, she’d been given boys’ clothes to wear. Most of her childhood experiences are of abandonment, alienation and abuse—emotional and violently physical.

She never met her parents. The orphanage told her to move out when she came out as transgender at 18. Rendered homeless, she sought refuge with the elder transgender people (naiks). She was soon forced into prostitution. Even the naiks beat her with iron rods if earnings fell short.

“Sometimes I think, what else could this world have in store for me? It’s a scary thought,” she says.

When a 24-year-old Kanmani arrived in Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) in March 2024, she was looking for a fresh start, friends, and a home to call her own. She alleges that, instead, police arrested her in a false theft case. When K Mareeswaran, a warden in charge of her cell block expressed interest in her gender identity, Kanmani initially thought he was showing her kindness. However, when the next day, the warden let himself into her jail cell—without prior permission or notification to any other officer—she understood his motives.

“I asked him not to misbehave because he as an officer would get into trouble, but also because I too would be punished for doing such things inside the jail,” she said.

“The warden said no one will believe you; what I say is the final thing,” said Kanmani. Seeing her rapist’s self-assuredness, Kanmani said, “I stopped protesting and decided to accept what was happening to me.” She could not scream during the ordeal; Mareeswaran covered her mouth with his hand.

After the assault, a distraught Kanmani grew increasingly depressed, and attempted suicide. Eventually, she confided in the jail’s counsellor about what had happened, and the counsellor told the Director General.

CCTV footage shows the warden entering Kanmani’s jail cell with no prior permission or reason, and leaving after an hour, thus corroborating the transwoman’s allegations.

When Kanmani engaged a lawyer to compel the authorities to file an FIR, the DG Prisons came to see her. “He asked me to say that this incident happened with my consent and sign on that,” she said. Kanmani refused.

The next day, a police inspector and an SI she did not know came to the jail and “threatened me that if I don’t sign the letter, they’ll file another case against me.” When she refused again, Kanmani was thrown into solitary confinement, a dark, windowless room.

Subburaj’s Enquiry Report dated July 15 says, “Nobody conducted any enquiry regarding the occurrence.”

Section 18 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, says physical, sexual, verbal and emotional abuse of a transgender person is punishable by imprisonment of up to two years.

As a police officer accused of raping a person in his care—a crime which would have meant minimum 10 years jail time had Kanmani been a cisgender woman—Mareeswaran got a suspension. At the time of writing this story, Trichy jail authorities and police had not registered an FIR against the warden.

Kanmani considered herself fortunate to have met her lawyer C Balakrishanan through another inmate. Through Balakrishanan, Kanmani moved a bail application on July 7. This was granted a few weeks later. “From the day I met this lawyer, people started watching out for me and I felt secure,” she said.

Authorities tend to ignore transgender persons’ pleas for help, says Grace Banu, a transgender woman and Dalit activist.

Uncounted Citizens

As per the 2011 census, there are 4,88,000 Indian citizens who identify themselves as transgender. In 2020, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded only 236 crime victims who were transgender. The most recent NCRB report (2022) registered nine transgender murder victims, and no rapes involving transgender people.

The Transgender Protection Act, meant to protect transgender people, is rarely invoked. In 2020 and 2022, NCRB reports show all Indian states or union territories, except Tamil Nadu, registered zero cases under the Act. In Tamil Nadu, only one case was registered in 2020 and 2022. In 2021, NCRB registered seven cases across West Bengal, Assam, and Kerala.

The transgender community comprises 0.53 per cent of the country’s population yet they constitute 0.006 per cent of all crime victims.

The transgender community is “facing a particular kind of discrimination in the public sector, by the government officials,” says Banu.

These numbers are not a reflection of safety, but rather failure of law enforcement to register crimes against transgender folks. “Government officials are not always trans-friendly; rather everywhere we see transphobia,” says Banu.

“What will it take for the cops to file an FIR: my death?”

For months, Banu has been the target of a violent hate campaign. Her dairy farm, which is also a work-shelter for transgender people in Thoothukudi district, has been repeatedly broken into and vandalised. She receives threatening calls daily.

The campaign against her began, she says, because she helped a gender non-conforming minor emancipate themselves from their abusive family.

CCTV footage shows a large group breaking into her home, roughing up residents. Recordings of the phone calls she received reveal threats to her life, in which the callers tell her that being a Dalit transwoman, her murder would “be easy.”

Banu shared both video and audio evidence of these threats to her life with her local police, who didn’t register an FIR under the Transgender Protection Act, the SC/ST Act, nor under Section 506 IPC/Section 110 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (threat to injure or kill.)

“They told me they would call the numbers and speak to the people threatening me and give them a warning,” she said.

Only after approaching higher officials did the local SP of police acknowledge Banu and other residents of her farm could be in danger. “Now they’re saying we are patrolling around the trans-village (the local name for Banu’s farm), and they’ve told me to call them when I receive more threatening calls.” At the time of writing this story, Banu had received several such calls—the perpetrators had shown that they are monitoring her movements. The police had still not registered an FIR on her complaint.

“Doesn’t my case show why transgender people don’t go complain to police often?” she asks.

Her voice hoarse, Banu says, “I am relatively well-known in this city for my work, and these people are openly threatening my life while the cops have given me no support.”

After a brief pause, she adds, “Are they waiting for my death? I don’t know!”

“The stereotype is that a transgender person does only begging and sex work.”

G Kajol walks into her corner shop in the Trichy District Collector’s office wearing a flower motif dress and freshwater pearl jewellery. She’s particularly proud of the way she looks. “Everything I’m wearing I bought with my own money without doing begging or sex work.”

A member of the Tamil Nadu Transgender Welfare Board, Kajol also runs the Social Action for Emancipation (SAFE), an NGO working towards self-sufficiency in the transgender and other minority communities.

She notes that Kanmani had no transgender identification card, which is why the police could put her in the male prison.

Transgender ID cards are issued by the state governments after medical examinations. In Tamil Nadu, the examination was recently made oral. In other Indian states, transgender people report the examination itself is a form of humiliation. “There are male doctors only and one must strip in front of them. It is dehumanising,” said Kajol.

However, an ID card can be a lifesaver for transgender people, literally. This is why, according to 2023 data made public by the Ministry of Social Justice, 24, 115 transgender people applied for the ID the previous year. However, data also shows that only 15,800 were granted their ID, and another 3,200 applications were pending for months as of December 2022.

“Without an ID card, it is a struggle to find work, or even move through society. Without this, it feels like you cannot assert your rights and you’re half a citizen,” said Kajol.

Kajol came out to her family in the 1990s. She says it took them time to accept her gender identity because “all they knew of transgender people was begging and sex work.” She adds that this is a default stereotype for the community in society, and “it’s hurting us as well.”

She still lives with them. This is unlike the 98 per cent of the transgender people in India, who according to a 2018 report by the National Human Rights Commission, leave their biological families.

Killed by Family

Banu’s collective conducts studies every year on crimes against transgender people. “From November 2022 to November 2023, we found 33 trans people were killed by their own family members, particularly in Tamil Nadu,” she said.

Among those murdered, Banu found that three of the transgender persons were above 30, and two of them were transgender men. “Just imagine in one year 33 transpersons are killed, and most of them are trans women and under 30 years old!” she added.

The study also found two suicides in the same time period. “Those incidents were also due to harassment from family members. All the others were killed by their own family members and relatives,” said Banu.

One way to harass transgender people, according to Banu, is a family or relatives taking them for conversion therapy— what she calls conversion torture. Though conversion therapy was banned in India in 2022, Banu contends the practice is alive and well in rural areas. “There are also priests— Hindu and Christian— who will perform exorcisms on these people, saying they will cure them, which is very traumatic,” she added. “If any other community was facing these kind of situations, there would be a hue and cry. But here, nothing has happened.”

(This appeared in the print as 'An Uncounted Rape')