The Bombay High Court directed all educational institutions in Maharashtra to support transgender individuals in changing their names and identities on official documents, with retrospective effect.
The ruling eliminates the need for transgender individuals to go to court to modify their names and identities on official documents. The High Court held that an institution cannot force a petitioner to accept a name, identity, or gender that they have declined in favour of another.
Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale ruled that educational institutions cannot prevent a transgender individual from amending their identification papers.
“This is a case of a denial of a human being’s self-identity and self-identification. That cannot be done and cannot be permitted. Nor can an institute be permitted to force upon the petitioner a name, identity or a gender that the petitioner has chosen to reject in preference to some other,” the Court said in its order.
The court acknowledged that the petitioner was born as a female but presently identifies as a transgender person. The petitioner holds a Masters of Arts (MA) degree from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and desires to pursue a career in law under a new name and identity as a transgender individual. However, the institution refused to reissue the petitioner’s certificates and other documents under his new name and identity.
“We see no impediment to the grant of relief and we would be entirely remiss if we did not issue that mandamus. Clearly, the petitioner has demanded justice in accordance with law but has not received it,” the Court said.
The bench observed that apart from TISS, various other educational institutions in Maharashtra do not permit transgender individuals to modify their names and identities on official documents.
“There is absolutely no reason why the online forms on the website of the institution (TISS) and indeed every other educational institution that is or are subject to our writ jurisdiction should not have a form for precisely such changes, i.e., noting a change in name and a change in gender. It is for TISS to make this change on its website and for the State government to issue the necessary instructions to all similar educational institutions across Maharashtra,” the Court ordered.
The bench was strongly opposed to TISS’s requirement that the petitioner produce new documents, including a birth certificate, to change his name and identity.
The Court highlighted that TISS’s approach was “simply wrong” since it fails to acknowledge that questions of identity, self-identification, and gender perception do not occur at a biologically defined moment.
“These are matters of self-realisation without predictable time frames. That does not mean that every person who, in exercise of these Article 21 rights, desires the necessary changes to be made must be put through the additional trauma of having to get reissued every single document from birth onwards,” the bench asserted.
The bench concluded that what is necessary is recognition and acknowledgement of the petitioner’s rights, and that TISS’s insistence on modifying other records and presenting older documents was an impediment.
“To our mind, it is in and of itself nothing short of a denial of the Petitioner’s fundamental rights under Article 21. What has to be acknowledged is a movement forward in point of time and in life, that is to say, what is required to be provided to the petitioner from a particular point onwards without having to go back in time,” the Bench observed.
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