In the 2019 general election, less than 2% of the total adult transgender population of India exercised their right to vote, making them one of the most electorally excluded social groups in the country.
This paper attempts to understand how the transgender communities’ desire to be understood and recognised as a right-bearing and socio-economically vulnerable group is negotiated within bureaucratic spaces. As a trans and gender non-conforming person, I situate this inquiry in my six years of fieldwork in Hyderabad. The essay provides an ethnographic account of power relations, knowledge production and intra-group dynamics that help us dissect the process of making a transgender person eligible in bureaucratic systems. The paper explores the paradoxes encoded in practices of bureaucratic assimilation to produce a democratic social order. Three questions guide this inquiry - first, what is the nature and programme of affirmative government actions in the absence of operable knowledge about transgender persons; second, what role do data and language play in constructing the government’s imagination of a commensurable social group; and third, what is the compatibility of non-traditional households with the present electoral system in India.
The research uses the consultative meeting held on 22nd November 2022 and attended by representatives of the State Election Commission (SEC) of Telangana, members of the Telangana Transgender Welfare Board and various transgender leaders from other districts of the State as an entry point to discuss the inclusion of transgender persons in the State’s electoral rolls. Using the conversation between SEC representatives and various trans persons as a site of bargain, I reflexively try to map the impact of a negotiated recognition on the social plurality embedded within the transgender communities in India and the role of the Indian State in mediating the act of ‘doing gender’.
