When India's student protest movement erupted after Chief Justice Surya Kant compared young people to cockroaches, most of the commentary focused on education policy, judicial accountability, and the NEET exam scandals that had been boiling over for months. The students who filled the streets of Delhi were angry about paper leaks, about a system that felt rigged, about a political class that seemed indifferent to their futures. It was, on the surface, not a trans story at all. And yet Harshit Singh, a queer rights activist, was there from the beginning, and on 20 June took the stage at a Cockroach Janata Party demonstration to talk about a law that most of the crowd had probably never heard of.

I find that kind of courage genuinely moving. It would have been easy to stay in the crowd, to decide that this was not the moment, that the audience had not come for this particular conversation. Instead, Harshit chose to use a platform built on one injustice to name another. That is what solidarity actually looks like in practice, not a statement of principle posted online, but a person standing in front of a crowd and saying: this matters too, and so do we.

What the 2026 Trans Amendment Act does

The law Harshit was speaking about is the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act 2026, and it is a serious piece of harm presented as administrative tidiness. The original 2019 Act already had significant problems, but it at least preserved the right of trans people to self-identify their gender. The 2026 amendment removes that right entirely. In its place sits a system of government medical boards whose job is to decide, from the outside, who legally qualifies as trans.

Think about what that means. A person who has lived their truth for years, perhaps decades, must now present themselves before a government panel and seek permission to be who they already are. And if those boards approach their work with the same bureaucratic hostility that trans people encounter across public institutions in so many countries, the permission will simply not come. The amendment also introduces provisions that could criminalise the community structures that have historically supported trans people in India, the networks of belonging and mutual care that have kept people alive when the state offered nothing.

Doctors are already scared, according to Sanjay Sharma, head of the Association for Transgender Health in India, who warned in April that gender-affirming care had already been disrupted nationwide. The chilling effect is real and it is happening now.

Why trans rights belong in every justice conversation

One of the things I hear most often from trans people in India, and in countries facing similar legislative rollbacks, is a version of the same exhaustion: the sense that trans rights are always treated as a niche concern, a specialist sub-topic to be addressed once the more important things have been sorted out. The more important things are never quite sorted out. And so trans people wait.

What Harshit did at the CJP protests is a refusal of that deferral. The student movement coalesced around something real: a system that felt arbitrary, opaque, and indifferent to the people it was supposed to serve. The government medical boards of the 2026 Amendment Act are exactly the same thing — arbitrary, opaque, and indifferent to the lived reality of the people they will adjudicate. The students angry about NEET should be able to recognise that pattern, because it is the same one they came out to oppose.

Harshit met Queerbeat at the protest site on 25 July, the day Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. That resignation was the culmination of weeks of sustained, visible, organised anger. It was a demonstration that showing up, staying present, and refusing to be moved can shift something. The trans community in India is watching that lesson closely, and activists like Harshit are making sure that the lesson is not learned in isolation.

The shape of solidarity

There is a version of movement politics in which every group protects its own lane, in which coalition feels like a compromise and visibility at someone else's protest feels like an intrusion. I have never believed in that version. The people most harmed by unjust systems are rarely harmed by only one injustice at a time. A trans student navigating a corrupt examination process is dealing with both of those things simultaneously. Harshit's presence at the CJP protests named that overlap out loud.

What strikes me most, reading about this, is the ordinariness of it alongside the rarity. Harshit simply went to a protest they believed in, kept going, and eventually spoke. They were not parachuted in by an organisation or given a slot in a carefully managed programme. They showed up as a queer person in a public space, and claimed it. That should be ordinary. For too many trans and queer people, it still takes considerable nerve.

The 2026 Amendment Act is not a distant threat. It is already disrupting care and already frightening doctors away from supporting their patients. The students who filled Delhi's streets this summer showed that organised, sustained presence can produce results. Trans activists in India are drawing on exactly that same energy, and they deserve the same solidarity in return.