From hijra gharanas to pandemic flatshares, trans women across India have long built matriarchal families the law refuses to name. With the 2026 amendment threatening chosen family autonomy, three trans women speak about what motherhood really means.
Meena* was twelve when she fled a small town with nothing and no one. She found factory work in the city and, slowly, found herself, first through cross-dressing, then through conversation, then through the gradual understanding that some friendships, deepened over years, become something for which no adequate word exists. “Achanak se ek maa ban gayi thi,” she says: I had suddenly become a mother. She had not planned it. The role arrived quietly, like an understanding reached between two people who had each been looking, without knowing it, for the same thing.
For RudraniChettri, trans rights activist, actor and model, who also starred in Vikas Khanna’s directed The Last Colour, whose themes almost run parallel to this story on chosen families, and one of the most visible figures of India’s trans movement, motherhood arrived in much the same way. “I never really saw myself as a trans mother,” Chettri told Local Samosa. “I was simply there for people who needed love, care, and support. Over time, these relationships naturally evolved on their own.” Her closest bond is with a non-binary person who is son, sister, brother, mother, and father to her all at once, a bond that goes “beyond labels and traditional definitions of relationships.”
For trans women across India, this is what family looks like: not given, but built, through accumulated time and the willingness to stay.
The hijra gharana system is among the oldest surviving kinship structures in South Asia. Rooted in a guru-chela lineage, in which a guru takes on chelas, who may in turn take poti-chelas, it has for centuries provided trans women with shelter, sustenance, social standing, and belonging, functioning as a matriarchal institution documented by scholars including Gayatri Reddy and Serena Nanda.
But structure is not always warmth, and not every guru becomes a mother. Meena, who spent time within a gharana, recalls the hierarchy as legible but cold. “Guru aayi hai toh boss aayi hai,” she says, when the guru arrived, it felt like a boss, not a mother. What she had been given was a household; what she had been searching for was intimacy. Over time she found it elsewhere, in a friendship that slowly became something more. “Hum ek doosre ki life mein rehte the,” she says: we lived inside each other’s lives.
Meena is careful not to dismiss what the gharana gave her: a roof, company, someone who would come in illness. But the chosen family she has since built is held together by something the old system rarely offered, what she calls “mamtapan”, the quality of genuine, tender care.
Rudrani Chettri puts the figure plainly: more than ninety, perhaps ninety-five, per cent of India’s trans community is sustained not by biological family but by chosen family. Family rejection remains one of the most consistent and damaging experiences of trans life in India, beginning in childhood and persisting through every significant life transition.
The chosen family is not a romantic alternative to the biological one. It is the infrastructure of survival.
For 34-year-old Delhi-based trans woman and community organiser Sana*, chosen family emerged not through a traditional gharana but through shared precarity. During the pandemic, she began informally housing younger trans and queer people who had been pushed out of hostels, denied rental accommodation, or cut off financially by their families while in college. What began as temporary shelter slowly became permanence. “At first it was just, ‘Stay here till things get better,’” she says. “Then suddenly we were cooking together, fighting over groceries, helping each other through breakups and hormone appointments. One day someone introduced me as their mother and I realised the relationship had already become real before we named it.”
“None of us planned this structure,” Sana says. “But when the world keeps telling you that you do not belong anywhere, even small acts of staying become family.”
Chettri is precise: “For many of us, building a chosen family was never the first choice, it became necessary because the first priority was choosing ourselves, choosing our truth, and surviving as who we are.” For transmasculine people, she notes, the situation has historically been far bleaker, without comparable support structures, they remain significantly more isolated.
Indian law has not caught up with the families trans people have already built. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 made no provision for trans persons seeking to adopt and did not address chosen family bonds in any meaningful way. CARA, India’s central adoption authority, has issued no guidance for trans-led families, leaving prospective trans parents in a legal grey zone navigated through bureaucratic discretion and, more often than not, refusal. The NALSA vs. Union of India judgment of 2014 affirmed transgender personhood but left family law untouched. For trans mothers and their chosen children, the legal relationship remains, in most cases, invisible.
Sana has encountered that invisibility in ordinary bureaucratic situations, rental agreements, hospital paperwork, emergency contacts. “There is no column for the people who actually take care of you,” she says. “When one of the kids was hospitalised, I was the person speaking to doctors, arranging money, staying awake all night. But legally I was nobody.” The contradiction, she says, is exhausting: “The state keeps asking us to prove relationships that we are already living every day.”
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2025, signed into law in early 2026, sharpened these contradictions considerably. The legislation drew sustained criticism for expanding the role of biological families and state-run rehabilitation centres in matters of trans welfare, provisions that activists read as mechanisms for family-sanctioned confinement dressed in the language of protection. It retained requirements around institutional certification of gender identity, eroding the self-identification principle established by NALSA, while continuing to offer no recognition to chosen family bonds. Chettri names the consequence: “One of the biggest concerns is the possibility of biological families being empowered to intervene in ways that prevent trans people from accessing care, transition-related support, or even basic autonomy.” The state has declined to recognise chosen families. It may now arm the families that rejected trans people in the first place.
Meena does not speak in legal terms. She speaks in the language of presence: her daughter comes when she is ill, does what a daughter does, stays. “Kanoon kuch bhi bole,” she says, whatever the law says, “rishte toh ban jaate hain.” Relationships form regardless. The law may name them or not. They are there.
Sahil Pradhan
Courtesy : Local Samosa
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