Hurdles before the LGBT Community by Muskan Jain

Every person is entitled to basic rights like education, employment, healthcare, and most significantly, self-identification. However, the LGBT community has been denied these rights numerous times in our beloved anti-discrimination India. ‘LGBT’ is an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. A woman who is attracted to another woman is a lesbian. Gay means sexually or romantic attraction towards same-sex, often used for men. Bisexual means sexual attraction for more than one sex or gender. The word Transgender can be referred to as people whose gender identity or expression contrasts from their birth sex.

We’re living in a world where LGBT people are still afraid to come out of the “closet”. Every year, the LGBT community would raise issues related to discrimination at the workplace, poverty, violence, and bullying. On top of that, acceptance still remained a constant struggle for them. However, the freedom to love and to marry whoever you want is in fact accepted by many countries in a way of legalizing homosexuality.

Under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), intercourse between same-sex is given under ‘unnatural offenses’, which was punishable under the law. There was an urgent need to provide justice to this community after witnessing such inequality. Let us look at the issues which opposed the decriminalization of Section 377:

• If we look back at our history, Lord Rama gave significant power to the transgender community to bless important ceremonies like childbirth. So, the argument that transgender is against our CULTURE shall be considered invalid because our history doesn't agree to it.
• Another issue was that homosexuality is UNNATURAL. We live in a society where thousands of species are having intercourse with same-sex and this fact contradicts that it is an unnatural offense as given under Section 377.
• Others claim homosexuality to be a DISORDER whereas in a statement The Indian Psychiatric Society said: “Homosexuality is not a psychiatric disorder. It recognizes same sex sexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality much like heterosexuality and bisexuality.” It evidently suggests that homosexuality is not a disorder.

Most legal experts unanimously state that Section 377 of IPC goes against the principle of equality, non - discrimination, and dignity defined under Article 14, 15, and 21 respectively. In a Supreme Court Judgment, the petitioners said: “Section 377, if retained in its present form, would involve the violation of, not one but, several fundamental rights of the LGBTs, namely, right to privacy, right to dignity, equality, liberty and right to freedom of expression”. After numerous such judgments, the Apex Court finally decriminalized Section 377 of IPC in 2019. It was long overdue for a developing country like India to protect the rights and establish some laws in favor of the LGBT community. Although, the said community has not attained full justice as same-sex marriage is still prohibited in India but as they say ‘slow and steady wins the race’ and someday soon, the LGBT community will win this race of personal rights.

About Author 

Muskan Jain

BBA.LLB (HONS)

FIMT - School of Law

GGSIP University, New Delhi

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