How do I legally change my gender in India?

The process of changing gender identity

In India, for every 10,000 people, roughly 400 to 500 identify as a different gender than what they were assigned at birth. This happens when someone feels their birth-assigned gender doesn't match who they are inside. While many keep this hidden due to fear of family and social judgment, others choose to change their gender. This involves both medical procedures and legal steps. This blog will explain how that process works.

What steps do people take to change their gender?

Change gender is complicated. It involves both medical steps, like surgeries or hormone treatments, and legal steps, like changing documents. People do this when they feel their gender at birth doesn't match how they truly feel inside. As they grow older, this mismatch can become stronger. They use medical procedures to change their bodies and legal processes to change their official gender. So, they change both physically and legally. You can learn more about the medical and legal parts in this blog.

Procedures to help someone's body match their gender identity

People who want their bodies to match their gender identity might use hormone therapy or surgery.

Hormone therapy uses medicine to change the body, like growing breasts, facial hair, or changing body fat.

Surgery changes the outside of the body and organs to match how someone feels inside.

How to legally change your gender

If you want your gender change to legally recognized, you need to update all your official papers. To do this, you must publish a notice in the official government gazette. This gazette notice acts as legal proof of your gender change. Once it's published, you can use it to change your gender on all your IDs, legal documents, and other records. This officially changes your legal gender.

Choosing to change gender is a personal decision. However, you'll need to update your legal documents to reflect that change. This means officially changing your gender on your ID cards and other paperwork. Not doing so can cause problems later on.