Gopi Shankar Madurai:

Understanding LGBTQIA Rights in India

TEDxNITKSurathkal

Gopi Shankar Madurai is one of the youngest and first openly intersex and genderqureer politicians in India. Ze uses neopronouns and was instrumental in outlawing forced selective sex surgeries on infants in Tamil Nadu, India, with India being home to an estimated 20 million intersex people. Notably, ze discusses how these surgeries were actually started in the U.S. around the 1960s and quickly became recognized as the “accepted” way to do things, regardless of being a gross violation of one’s bodily integrity (a right understood to be conferred by the Constitution). By striking down the use of forced selective sex surgeries, Madurai discusses how India became the first country in the world to have legal protections explicitly protecting intersex individuals from having to undergo this surgery.

“In Bharat Varsha, in our Dharma, it is about the atmanya [soul] a person possesses.
It is not about male/ female.”