Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections ANIRUDDHA DUTTA and RAINA ROY Abstract This essay is a set of reflections arising out of prolonged conversations in which we compared notes on our respective experiences as activist (Raina) and ethnographer (Aniruddha) working among, and to different extents belonging to, gender/sexually marginalized communities in eastern India. As we shall argue, the attempted universalization of transgender as a transnational “umbrella term” by the development (nongovernmental) sector, the state, and their funders tends to subsume South Asian discourses and practices of gender/sexual variance as merely “local” expres- sions of transgender identity, without interrogating the conceptual baggage (such as homo-trans and cis-trans binaries) associated with the transgender category. In the Indian context, this process bolsters the longstanding and continuing (post)colonial construction of hierarchies of scale between transnational, regional, and local levels of discourse and praxis, as evidenced in the relation between the hegemonic anglophone discourse of LGBTIQ identities recognized by the state and the devel- opment sector, on one hand, and forms of gender/sexual variance that are positioned as relatively regional or local on the other. H ow does the transnational expansion of “transgender” as a rubric of identity and activism appear when we look at the phenomenon from the vantage point of communities and social movements of gender-variant persons in the global South, specifically South Asia? This essay is a set of reflections arising out of prolonged conversations in which we compared notes on our respective experi- ences as activist (Raina) and ethnographer (Aniruddha, henceforth Ani) working among, and to different extents belonging to, gender/sexually marginalized com- munities in eastern India. If “decolonization” implies the ability to freely ques- tion, critique, and, if necessary, reject globalizing discourses or practices, this essay considers the conditions of possibility for such critical engagement with the expanding category of transgender. We do not intend to make a prescriptive argument regarding how to make transgender into a more cross-culturally inclusive term — indeed, as previous cri- tiques have pointed out, the imagination of transgender as an expansive category 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Number 3 * August 2014 320 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2685615 ª 2014 Duke University Press TSQ13_03Dutta_1pp.3d 05/29/14 10:03am Page 320