A recent petition filed by a women’s group before the Supreme Court of India has challenged the legal recognition of transgender women to be recorded as “females” in official documents. It framed its objections arguing that recognising trans women within legal categories of cis-women potentially affects sex-based reservation, sporting categories, access to women-only spaces and safeguards available to women.AdvertisementAt a time when the transgender movement in India is already struggling with the aftermath of the Transgender Amendment Act 2026, trans women being recast as a threat to cis-women’s rights has serious real-life implications, especially for those facing multiple layers of vulnerability. The suggestion that transgender women’s claims to legal recognition encroach upon the rights of cisgender women deserves serious scrutiny, particularly when it is advanced in the language of women’s protection.This petition once again brought an old and consequential question to the centre of India’s gender politics: Who gets to claim the political category of woman, and who has the authority to determine its boundaries?Historical Ground of Feminist SolidarityFeminist movements and scholarship have, at a fundamental level, questioned the social institutions, legal arrangements and relations of power through which bodies acquire political meaning. They have contested the assumption that reproductive capacity determines women’s social position, anatomy exhausts the meaning of sex, or that a singular experience of womanhood can stand as the universal basis of feminist politics. This eventually facilitated the transgender movement and scholarship.Caslin’s (2025) archival study, ‘Trans Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, c. 1970-1980,’ offers an important framework for understanding this relationship. Caslin documents how trans and cis feminists worked together during the 1970s to advance feminist positions on bodily autonomy and challenge the authority of medical institutions. Their collaboration unfolded amid debates over trans participation in women-only spaces, and acceptance was neither consistent nor guaranteed. This account showed that transgender interventions were part of the development of feminist critiques of gender, embodiment and medical power and both cannot be treated as historically distinct political projects.In 1997, the National Organisation for Women (NOW), one of the largest feminist organisations in the United States, adopted a resolution recognising the systematic oppression experienced by transgender and transsexual people. It called for education and dialogue within the organisation and reaffirmed its commitment to challenging sex and gender stereotypes. In 2017, the Women’s March in the US articulated a feminist political vision that explicitly affirmed the rights of lesbian, queer, transgender and gender-nonconforming people, locating gender justice within a wider struggle against racial, economic and institutional inequalities.AdvertisementAlso Read | We, the transgender people of India, reject the erasure of our identityThe Indian feminist movement has its own history of such solidarity. A particularly important solidarity effort came to the fore in November 2019, when a broad group of Indian women’s organisations and feminist groups issued a statement titled “Women’s Groups Seek Gender Justice for Trans and Gender Non-conforming Persons”. The signatories included feminist organisations such as The Feminist Collective, Jagori, Saheli, CREA, Nirantar, All India Network of Sex Workers and others. Their statement opposed provisions in the then-proposed transgender legislation that made legal recognition dependent upon certification by state authorities and medical documentation. It drew upon feminist struggles for bodily autonomy and self-determination to argue that transgender persons must be able to determine their own gender identity.These histories of solidarity are worth recalling because they widened the terrain on which gender and sexuality were understood as relations of power, institutional control and social regulation.The Shared StakesThis is not to suggest that transgender women and cisgender women inhabit identical social conditions. Their experiences of gendered violence, institutional regulation, reproductive politics, economic exclusion and public recognition are differently constituted. Feminist analysis has always recognised these differences. However, they cannot be resolved by treating transgender recognition as a threat to women. Nor should the structural inequalities experienced by cisgender women be mobilised to deny the legitimacy of transgender lives.you may likeThe petition before the Supreme Court raises questions about the relationship between gender identity, sex-based classifications and access to particular legal protections. These questions require reasoned constitutional and policy debate. But such debate must be premised on recognising transgender persons as equal rights-bearing subjects, rather than radically positioning their legal recognition as a presumptive threat to women. The constitutional guarantee of equality cannot be upheld by a politics in which one marginalised group’s protection is secured at the expense of another.There is also a deeper feminist issue at stake here. When the political category of women is defined through a narrow biological criterion, it risks obscuring the experiences of womanhood that do not neatly fit into the normative classifications of gender roles. Feminist scholarship has long interrogated this and how legal and institutional categories produce particular understandings of gender, determine whose experiences become legible, and distribute rights and protections accordingly.The petition in this case, therefore, calls for a feminist analysis of how legal categories are constructed and whose experiences they make visible, rather than a retreat to biological determinism as an adequate account of gendered life. The long history of feminist struggles against the regulation and policing of gendered bodies offers a ground to question those politics that seek to secure women’s rights by narrowing the category they depend on. The defence of women’s rights loses its feminist force when it depends upon the exclusion of other gendered lives.The writer is a human rights lawyer and sociologist