A Study of Socio-Legal History of Transgenders in India.

The community of people known as hijras has existed in India for a long time and is well known to students and observers of Indian society. These people are often described in various ways in both scholarly and popular literature, including eunuchs, transvestites, homosexuals, bisexuals, hermaphrodites, and more. They are also referred to as being intersexed, emasculated, impotent, transgendered, castrated, effeminate, or somehow sexually abnormal or dysfunctional. Within the hijra community, there is a distinction between those who are born with ambiguous genitals and those who are made such through castration, although other distinctions have been proposed. A recent anthropological study, with the enticing title of "Neither Man nor Woman," supports the view that “hijras may reasonably be described as an institutionalized third gender.”1 Through this paper we will look into the history of transgenders in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]