The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), India today organised a day long National Conference on the ‘Rights of Transgender Persons: Revamping Spaces, Reclaiming Voices’ at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Chairperson, Justice Shri V. Ramasubramanian inaugurated in the presence of Shri Amit Yadav, Secretary, MoSJE, Shri Bharat Lal, Secretary General, NHRC, senior officers, representatives of key Ministries, experts, judicial and legal experts, policy makers, civil society organisations, UN agencies, law enforcement agencies, academicians and community leaders among various stakeholders.
Invoking Isavasya and Chandokya Upanishads, Justice Ramasubramanian said that India is a country where discourse on equality was taken to such great heights by the Upanishads that every unit of creation is God’s manifestation. Therefore, he questioned how can some units of such creations be discriminated by others. He said that these are the pivotal questions around which the NHRC has organised this conference.
He said that if we have a look at the history of evolution of human rights in modern times, everything is in a binary. The mere change of terminology from ‘men’ to ‘human beings’ in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 has not actually transformed our stereotypical thought processes and the society continues to think that men and women alone constitute the human race. There could be and there are human beings, who do not fit into this binary of men and women. This is something that the societies all over, are still grappling to accept. He said that the consequences of this is that Trans people experience wide spread discrimination and stigma in the health sector, schools, employment and housing as well as in accessing washrooms.(S-PIB)
