The Psychology of Institutional Erasure

This post is written by T. Roy, Junior Research Assistant at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala, Mumbai, India.

Social approval: a familiar concept in social psychology. Multiple theories suggest that humans derive their self-worth, in part, by seeking validation from the social world. As we enter adulthood, there comes a time when we stop seeking validation and just start being ourselves – you get the haircut you want, you wear clothes you feel confident in, you live as you want, and eventually stop making life decisions based on social approval – well, you try.

But somewhere in India, a non-binary individual, stripped of their identity, now requires bureaucratic approval to live and exist as they do. They need government approval, and proof of their identity reviewed by a board of strangers. Queer and transgender individuals have a long history of fighting for social recognition, and now their identity is subject to state validation as well. This is institutional gatekeeping.

This is what the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill brought to the Indian queer community in March 2026. Before we think it is just an alteration of legal status, it isn't. It strips self-identifying non-binary and transgender people of their right to self-identify; it strips their basic autonomy and self-concept. The Bill has been passed by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, signed by the President of India, and is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The amendment revises the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act and removes the right to self-identify as the basis of legal recognition. In 2019, the right to self-identify came out of the case – NALSA v. Union of India (2014) – where gender identity was defined as psychological and self-declared, needing no verification or surgery. The 2026 bill gives a tightly-knit definition of “transgender,” requiring mandatory medical examination by government officials. Hence, the government decides where you “fit”. One's identity is not a legal category; it never was, and it is a psychological reality to be reflected by legal categories.

According to developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts, the formation of identity and self-concept is not an individual but a social, cultural, and relational process, shaped by the society in which one resides. It depends on what roles are prescribed to you, what language your community offers you to understand yourself, and who all accept and reflect your identity back. This is where law and psychology come hand in hand. When a legal framework withholds the right of a person to self-identify with a certain gender, it essentially says, “The way you understand yourself has insufficient evidence; what you think you are is not who you are.” This erases the autonomy of the individual.

According to Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000), autonomy is not just independence but how one engages with the world on one’s own terms. Similarly, the Yogyakarta Principles urge countries to allow individuals to change legal gender markers through self-determination alone, without medical diagnosis. The 2026 amendment violates autonomy, placing medical authority between a person and their freedom to be who they are. Ironically, gender was never a medical concept but a social construct – now a legal one and a human rights one.

Source: Pexels/Derek French

In the past, India had gender plural communities like the hijras, kothis, kinnar, and more. They had their own terminologies, social roles, identities, and cosmologies. The British created a forensic medical discourse around it and called such identities ungovernable. In 1871, legislation was passed by the British for the extermination of these communities as a social-cultural category. So, state-appointed medical validation of gender identity is not a new idea – it is a colonial one.

Unfortunately, India is not the only one. From 2024 to 2025, almost 15 countries have proposed or enacted restrictions on trans, non-binary, and intersex rights, such as limiting gender affirming care or rolling back gender recognition laws. Trans Rights Index and Maps 2025 reveals an unexpected reversal of the human rights of trans individuals for the first time in 13 years. Anti-discrimination protection was rolled back in Georgia and Hungary, and legal gender recognition is entirely banned in Georgia, including the criminalisation of trans-specific care. The UK saw its Supreme Court rule in 2025 that “sex” in anti-discrimination laws means biological sex, stripping trans people of the protection provided by the same law. The legislative playbook is being shared across the world.

What’s important to point out here is that the same law does not cause the same psychological harm everywhere. Cross-cultural psychology tells us how individualistic and collectivistic cultures see self and identity. The former treats identity as self-constructed. So, even with legal non-recognition of identity, the harm stays bounded. The person remains safe in chosen families and communities that accept their identity. In fact, the word “chosen family,” coined by Kath Weston, denotes bonds that are explicitly individualistic and assume a degree of independence from biological families.

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In India individualistic and collectivistic orientations coexist. Chosen families exist too but self-identity here is relational. When a state refuses to accept your identity, it doesn't stay just within the legal system; it travels. It becomes a language communities and families use to justify their rejection. Studies on family honour systems have shown that queer identities were equated with not just individual shame but with the entire kinship unit. So, when the law refuses to accept you, it endorses the family’s rejection and tells them that “the state agrees with us, and our doubt about queer identities is correct”. Therefore, in a country like India, where identity is relationally anchored, the 2026 amendment removes the scope for social acceptance.

In 2019, ICD-11 removed gender incongruence as a mental and behavioural disorder, recognizing that distress was never inherent in queer individuals; it came from entrenched stigma, invalidation and discrimination. In 2024, a study from Columbia Psychiatry found that identity invalidation, different from discrimination and violence, is its own form of chronic stressor that many trans and nonbinary individuals experience daily. Global psychiatry identified the problem and stepped out of it; India and many other countries seem to be stepping back in.

This amendment will not change anything. All queer people woke up the same person after the bill was passed. The one they’ve always been, a bit tired maybe. There are only so many times a queer person can be told their existence requires approval – from family, society, and now the state - before the weight of this list stops feeling like injustice and starts feeling like the truth. That’s the thing about institutional erasure: it's gradual. The exhaustion of fighting it doesn’t seem like a crisis anymore. It just feels like a random Tuesday.