Patchy implementation of laws, lack of awareness, and stigma leave genderqueer Indians vulnerable to violence in their battle to fulfil a basic human need.
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Neel, 23, wakes up early, often before the sun rises over the bustling streets of suburban Kolkata. In the hour or so that he has to himself before leaving for work, he follows a practised routine: he quickly exercises watching YouTube workout and yoga tutorials, freshens up, drinks water soaked with black chickpeas, and gets dressed, usually in comfortable pants and loose shirts. He then drives his electric rickshaw to one of the stands in Ballygunge, a 25-minute drive from his home, a room with a kitchen, where he lives alone. He has been driving the rickshaw, mostly in and around the Ballygunge area, for almost a year now.
Around 1pm he takes a break. He returns home, bathes, eats lunch, and rests briefly before heading back to the stand for the evening shift.
With most of his time spent on the road, Neel often goes 5 to 6 hours without urinating, even when he desperately needs to. Although there are public toilets in the area, he prefers to avoid them. Public toilets in India are typically segregated along the gender binary– for males and females. As a trans man, Neel feels unsafe using the men’s toilet and he is often denied access to the women’s toilet because his presentation is masculine.
About three months ago, when Neel attempted to use a women’s public toilet in Ballygunge, the guard at its entrance stopped him. Neel had to spend some time explaining that he is a trans man before the puzzled guard eventually let him enter. After using the bathroom, when he was washing his hands at a basin, a middle-aged woman shouted at Neel. "What are you doing here? This is a ladies' toilet," Neel remembers her saying. She wore a neatly-draped saree, and the id card of a large private sector bank — one which takes great pride in advertising itself as LGBTQIA+-friendly.
Neel responded hesitantly, "I am trans. I am using this toilet because I don’t have any other option."
"This toilet is for men and women. Go to your own washroom," retorted the woman, abusing and cursing loudly.
Encountering multiple such instances, Neel feels scared , helpless and sometimes angry. "I can still retort and fight back, but many trans people like me might not. Isn't going to a bathroom without any resistance our basic right?" sighed Neel.
It has been 10 years since the landmark NALSA judgement of 2014, where the Supreme Court of India directed the central and state governments to provide public restrooms for the transgender community. Since then, 'transgender toilets' have been established in a number of cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Mysore, Chennai, Imphal and Varanasi. However the reach of these initiatives is far from universal.
In a May 2019 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Durba Biswas, a researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, noted that while policies addressing trans people's bathroom rights now exist, their implementation remains weak.
In December 2022, Aneel Hegde, a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar, raised a question in parliament about the progress made in providing safe toilet access to trans people, as mandated by the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. The government dodged the question. In his response, A. Narayanaswamy, the Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, stated that the government has constructed a total of 6,36,826 community and public toilet seats under the Swachh Bharat Mission, but did not offer any data on the number of toilets that were specifically built for transgender people.
queerbeat has reached out to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to seek their responses on the current status of toilets for transgender and genderqueer people in India. We will update the story when we receive responses from them.
Neel, 23, wakes up early, often before the sun rises over the bustling streets of suburban Kolkata. In the hour or so that he has to himself before leaving for work, he follows a practised routine: he quickly exercises watching YouTube workout and yoga tutorials, freshens up, drinks water soaked with black chickpeas, and gets dressed, usually in comfortable pants and loose shirts. He then drives his electric rickshaw to one of the stands in Ballygunge, a 25-minute drive from his home, a room with a kitchen, where he lives alone. He has been driving the rickshaw, mostly in and around the Ballygunge area, for almost a year now.
Around 1pm he takes a break. He returns home, bathes, eats lunch, and rests briefly before heading back to the stand for the evening shift.
With most of his time spent on the road, Neel often goes 5 to 6 hours without urinating, even when he desperately needs to. Although there are public toilets in the area, he prefers to avoid them. Public toilets in India are typically segregated along the gender binary– for males and females. As a trans man, Neel feels unsafe using the men’s toilet and he is often denied access to the women’s toilet because his presentation is masculine.
About three months ago, when Neel attempted to use a women’s public toilet in Ballygunge, the guard at its entrance stopped him. Neel had to spend some time explaining that he is a trans man before the puzzled guard eventually let him enter. After using the bathroom, when he was washing his hands at a basin, a middle-aged woman shouted at Neel. "What are you doing here? This is a ladies' toilet," Neel remembers her saying. She wore a neatly-draped saree, and the id card of a large private sector bank — one which takes great pride in advertising itself as LGBTQIA+-friendly.
Neel responded hesitantly, "I am trans. I am using this toilet because I don’t have any other option."
"This toilet is for men and women. Go to your own washroom," retorted the woman, abusing and cursing loudly.
Encountering multiple such instances, Neel feels scared , helpless and sometimes angry. "I can still retort and fight back, but many trans people like me might not. Isn't going to a bathroom without any resistance our basic right?" sighed Neel.
It has been 10 years since the landmark NALSA judgement of 2014, where the Supreme Court of India directed the central and state governments to provide public restrooms for the transgender community. Since then, 'transgender toilets' have been established in a number of cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Mysore, Chennai, Imphal and Varanasi. However the reach of these initiatives is far from universal.
In a May 2019 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Durba Biswas, a researcher at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, noted that while policies addressing trans people's bathroom rights now exist, their implementation remains weak.
In December 2022, Aneel Hegde, a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar, raised a question in parliament about the progress made in providing safe toilet access to trans people, as mandated by the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. The government dodged the question. In his response, A. Narayanaswamy, the Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment, stated that the government has constructed a total of 6,36,826 community and public toilet seats under the Swachh Bharat Mission, but did not offer any data on the number of toilets that were specifically built for transgender people.
queerbeat has reached out to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to seek their responses on the current status of toilets for transgender and genderqueer people in India. We will update the story when we receive responses from them.
Three years after the NALSA judgement, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, in 2017, issued guidelines stating that members of the 'third gender' should be allowed to use public toilets of their choice, whether male or female or the ‘other’. Like many government guidelines, these too exist only on paper, show the everyday experiences of trans people like Neel.
When Neel was 19 and lived in Nadia district in West Bengal with his natal family, he said he was physically assaulted by a security guard and a few other men when he tried to use the men's washroom at the Ranaghat railway station. “They could gauge I am female bodied and kept asking intrusive questions”, shared Neel. Traumatised by that experience, Neel has ever since gotten into the habit of suppressing his need to urinate whilst in public instead of using men’s washroom.
"I am still afraid. People can often tell that I am a female-bodied person, which leads to unsolicited harassment and abuse," he explained. Although he feels dysphoric when using women’s washrooms, they remain his only option in emergencies.
Studies indicate that retaining urine can potentially lead to urinary tract infections (UTIs) as bacteria may accumulate in the bladder. Prolonged urine retention can pose severe health risks, including kidney disease.
For gender queer people , toilet access therefore becomes a constant, inescapable struggle that forces them to make the impossible choice of accepting either health issues or dysphoria and violence.
Daniella Mendonca, a person with intersex variations, who works as a senior executive for a large real estate company, has struggled to safely access toilets all her life.
She grew up in the chawls of Khar in Mumbai, where a visit to the community restrooms was always fraught with danger for her. “My mother would accompany me to the washroom to make sure I was safe,” she said. “That’s because I have been sexually harassed as a child by neighbours and people of the chawls in these restrooms.”
At school — an all-boys institution — Daniella was constantly teased for being effeminate and even molested by her seniors in the restrooms. “I never never really knew how to express or process this trauma,” she said.
In her teens, Daniella was forced to leave home, and resorted to begging and sex work to make a living. She remembers this time in her life with a lot of disdain. She recalls, “We [trans sex workers] could use the women’s loo during sex work days but the women would stare and pass snide comments at us, and the men’s washroom was out of question because of how ready they were to harass you.”
Despite the visceral violence directed at genderqueer people in restrooms, conversations around making toilets more accessible often end up centering the safety sentiments of cis gender people than genderqueer realities.
Megha, a cis-woman and mother of two, said, “I am all for gender inclusivity, but I once witnessed a trans woman adjust her tuck in a women’s washroom at a rest stop, and it made me visibly uncomfortable. I also had my 8 year old daughter with me. We quickly rushed out. I felt bad, but my conditioning got the better of me at that moment.”
Contrary to such popular perceptions around safety, a 2018 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that letting transgender people use toilets that align with their gender identity does not make the toilets a safety risk for cis gender straight people. In an interview with NBC, Amira Hasenbush, the lead author of the study, stated that opponents of laws and policies ensuring protection and access to public services, such as restroom access for trans and genderqueer people, often claim that such laws leave women and children vulnerable to attacks in public restrooms. "But this study provides evidence that these incidents are rare and unrelated to the laws," emphasised Amira.
While there are no similar studies in the Indian context, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of violence against genderqueer people in gender-segregated restrooms in India. Given this reality, does the solution India seems to be trying to adopt — separate ‘third gender’ restrooms — actually centre genderqueer realities or does it merely cater to cis sentiments?
Nisha is a trans woman who makes her living by begging at the signal across from Shaheed Tukaram Ombale Udyan in Goregaon, Mumbai. She moved to the city from Tamil Nadu in her teens. Now in her late 30s, she lives in the slums of Goregaon. Her daily routine involves begging from 10 in the morning until around 8 at night, with a short break in the afternoon.
Since Nisha spends most of her day at the signal, she is reliant on public toilets. While accessing gender-segregated washrooms in the past, she has encountered men who’ve threatened to beat her up, and women who have outright asked her to stay out. Often, she’d be forced to find clandestine spots to pee outdoors. This changed in 2022, when a toilet for transgender persons was set up in Goregaon. Now, she tries to stay within the vicinity of that washroom as far as possible.
Located just off the busy Western Express Highway, the Shaheed Tukaram Ombale Udyan, the park within which the trans-only restroom is situated, is a surprisingly spacious slice of quiet away from the honking vehicles outside. The toilet is right by the park entrance, clearly advertised in bold letters as a space reserved for transgender persons.
The security guard, Pramod, said that the washroom has 7-8 regular users who greet him every day.
Nisha was there from the day the toilet was installed. “My guru (leader of a Hijra group) and my entire clan of girls came to witness it. It’s one of the best things we have,” she said.
Trans individuals need to use washrooms to meet other needs too. For example, Maks, a 20-year-old trans man who is pursuing a masters degree in sports management, and has started transitioning three years ago said that he often needs to use the washroom to adjust his binder or deal with menstruation. Going to a male facility is just not a safe option for him, he said
For people like Maks and Nisha, a separate washroom for genderqueer persons is a pragmatic solution. However, other trans folks believe that such initiatives are isolating and perpetuate the notion that genderqueer individuals are somehow dangerous and need to be segregated. "We don’t need separate toilets; we need gender-neutral toilets," said Grace Banu, a Dalit trans woman activist from Tamil Nadu, in an interview to Hindustan Times.
Apart from the stigma of segregation, separate washrooms come with their own safety risks because they mark out the users. "Even when there is a separate washroom for genderqueer folks, I always prefer to go to the women's room. Accessing the separate washroom risks my safety, putting me under the gaze of people all over again," said Pratyay, a 27 year old trans-feminine educator and trainer from Delhi. For her, because she passes as a woman, accessing the women's washroom is easier.
Given the diversity of experiences that gender queer persons have when it comes to toilet access, what shape would potential solutions take, is a question that the trans community, researchers and queer activists have been grappling with for years.
When Raju, a public health professional based in Bengaluru, travelled in Europe in June 2023, they felt extremely affirmed by the experience of using stand-alone all-gender washrooms. In such washrooms, individual cubicles have their own entrance and are spacious enough for people to relieve themselves, refresh, change, and go about their day without interacting with others.
"The architecture of the washroom was very useful. You could pull up the commode if you wanted to use it standing or keep it down if someone preferred sitting," Raju remembers. They were also elated to see syringe disposal facilities in these washrooms, which could be a game-changer for trans-masc people needing to take testosterone shots or other medications.
Often, investing in standalone gender-inclusive cubicles is seen as an expensive and space-consuming affair, which is why it isn't widely adopted as an effective architectural model. “Nobody really wants to spend money on making good public restrooms including gender-inclusive cubicles,” said Kalpit Ashar, an architect and urban designer based in Mumbai. “We often get told, ‘It’s just a cubicle, not the Taj Mahal.’”
Another approach, which would involve less expense than individual chambers, would be to simply label toilets by function rather than gender. In April 2017, the Barbican performing
arts complex in London made its toilets gender-neutral. Interestingly, the Barbican didn't change the physical layout of the toilets, only the signage. The former men's toilets, which had urinals, and the women's toilets, which had cubicles, were simply labelled so that anyone could use either facility. After cis women started tweeting complaints about longer queues—since both spaces were crowded with cis-men and they couldn't use the gender-neutral toilets with urinals—the Barbican released a statement defending its decision to make its transgender and non-binary visitors feel more welcome. However, they admitted that a wider consultation could have been beneficial.
Most of the trans and genderqueer people queerbeat interviewed for this article said that there is a need for stand-alone bathroom cubicles in India, while acknowledging that the implementation of it has to be thought through. However, as Biswas pointed out in her EPW article, the trans community is not homogenous. “In reality, transgender communities are heterogeneous along the caste, age, and gender axes; all or some combination of these can determine a transgender person’s access to public sanitation," she wrote.
Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli, a Telangana-based transgender RTI and human rights activist, echoes the need for multiple solutions. “Gendered bathroom spaces will continue to exist, separate bathrooms for transgender persons are also necessary,” she said.
Neel vividly recalls the first time he encountered and used a separate trans persons' washroom, at an event organised by Sappho for Equality, a feminist organisation advocating for the rights of sexually marginalised women and trans men. He recalled, "I will never forget that day. I took a picture and kept it as a fond memory. It felt like I was respected."
Sudipta Das (they/them) is an anti-caste queer feminist practitioner, gender expert and writer, with experience of working on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), queer rights, communications & advocacy. They write on key issues of caste, queerness, health, GBV, and culture.
Navin Noronha is a writer-comedian-podcaster based out of Mumbai. He loves traveling around the world doing comedy and archiving stories of queer joy, resilience, and anarchy. He has his own youtube channel too - @navinnoronnha
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Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
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Visvak (he/they) is a writer and editor based in Goa.
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Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
