In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court delivered a discriminatory judgement that stated that a woman is defined by her biological sex (Brocklehurst, 2025). Although the court ensures that transgender people will still be protected against discrimination by law, trans people are expected to face increased transphobic and queerphobic violence (Garcia & McCarthy, 2025). Similarly in India,  the BJP-dominated (Bharatiya Janata Party) parliament passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 which undid the historic judgment on the 2014 National Legal Services Authority vs the Union of India (hereon NALSA) case that recognized transgender and intersex people’s right to self-identify their gender (Gowalla, 2019). As fundamentally right-wing judicial institutions across the globe deprive trans people of their space to exist and their rights to self-identify, they do so by posing transwomen against cisgender women. The war on who gets to be trans is ultimately being fought on the grounds of the biology of a woman, which compels us to question: Is biology the only destiny for humans?

Donna Haraway (2004) argued that one is classified as human when one is “a member of a biological species” i.e. Homo sapiens which automatically situates them within an institution of knowledge  (2). Following the Darwinian formula of the survival of the fittest, humanism became heavily dependent on gender essentialism, with a person of marked and readable gender at the centre of the discourse. The materiality of a human is inherently related to the performativity of their gender. This determines their humanity by promptly distinguishing them from animals. This pedagogic understanding of the human and thus sex/gender binary proves  “humanity’s intraspecies evidence” and separates humans from non-human animals like “fish whose gonads shift from male to female” (Chen, 2010, 290). The human genitals, unlike those of animals, bear the loaded symbolism of being more than just an organ. It instantly signifies not just gender and sexuality but race, class, and religion. 

The discourse of genitals ascribing meaning to one’s humanity where it determines not just the sex/gender but attributes the human with its own geopolitical and social positionalities in the form of class, race, religion and caste, seems hypocritical when transgender and queer people are vilified for corrupting the bourgeois ideas of sexuality and modesty (Chen, 2010, 290). The recent paranoia regarding gender identity that has overtaken the political discourses in the Global North depicts how power has shifted from dictating the standards of humanity through subtle “identity-marked subjects” (Luciano & Chen, 2015, 188) who could be easily otherised by weaponizing differences. It now controls the subject by directly permeating “material bodies” and demanding a readable signification where the queer idea of lucidity and aqueousness threatens the binarized existence of humanity (Luciano and Chen, 2015, 188). 

Trans-ing or transness thus is an existence that is phantomised by the constant need to be read as human. In recent political discourses where institutions of power are openly fighting to regulate queer bodies, it is evident that the readability of one’s gender and sexuality is the only way one is read as human which is not only queerphobic but also ableist. The rejection of inclusive language used to attribute signification to humanness is representative of how the sheer existence of queer bodies threatens the institutions that have created the normative standards of humanness. Imagining the trans against the dictated human then is to reimagine humanness in the way where the racialized body has historically survived the constant prejudiced dehumanisation, where the queer body is time and again posited as the opposition to the standard human form. Transing is not a human construct that is solely related to the sex/gender binary. Transness beyond gender then signifies a trans-ing that itself isn’t transfixed but is something that is continuously emerging. It in no way denies trans-ing of its gender possibilities. Instead, it insists on “the complex, multi-factored cultural contingency of transgendered actualizations and affirms that gender is omnipresent” (Chen, 2010, 292).  The prefix “trans-” then opens up multiple possibilities.

The transhuman then simultaneously refuses any preconceived notions of humanity by challenging the system that decides and deciphers humanness. Transness positions queer becoming as something that has always existed in the in-between; in the imagined vast horizon that separates the human from the animal. The queer human or as bourgeois discourses label it- the queer nonhuman- emerges as an all-encompassing term that includes everyone and everything that has been otherised at any point of their existence for being unreadable to the racist, ableist queerphobic standards of European humanness. Deconstruction of the idea of the human through the celebration of transgender bodies is the only way to transgress the rigid boundaries of the European pure human and the boundaries of global right-wing authoritarian governments that have grown powerful in recent history.

References

Brocklehurst, S. (2025, April 16). UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t 

Chen, M. Y. (2010). Animals without genitals: Race and transubstantiation. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 20(3), 285-297. 

Garcia, D., & McCarthy, P. (2025, April 18). Understanding the Implications of the UK Supreme Court’s Ruling Defining ‘Sex’ in the Equality Act. Harvard Kennedy School. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/our-work/carr-ryan-commentary/understanding-implications-uk-supreme-courts-ruling 

Gowalla, R. (2019, August 13). Has the Transgender Bill 2019 failed to strike a chord with … The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/has-the-transgender-bill-2019-failed-to-strike-a-chord-with-the-community/articleshow/70643015.cms 

Haraway, D. J. (2004). The Haraway Reader. Routledge.

Luciano, D., & Chen, M. Y. (2015). Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2-3). 

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Udhriti Sarkar is a trans-masculine non-binary researcher. Their formal academic training includes a Master’s in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a Master’s in English from Calcutta University. They explore the placement and representation of queer identities within nationalist politics, seeking to unpack how these identities are shaped, contested, and navigated in contemporary contexts.