The Rajasthan High Court has deleted its own critical remarks on the transgender rights amendment bill, saying they were added by mistake. The Court clarified that paragraphs from its March verdict were unintended and have now been removed.
The Rajasthan High Court retracted certain remarks it had earlier made that were viewed as critical of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, which Parliament approved last month.
In its March 30 judgment, a Bench comprising Justices Arun Monga and Yogendra Kumar Purohit had warned that the new law could transform “an inviolable aspect of personhood” into a State-mediated entitlement for transgender people.
The Court had observed in an epilogue to that judgment,
“It is now proposed that legal recognition of gender identity shall be conditioned upon certification, scrutiny, or other forms of administrative endorsement. What was recognized by the Supreme Court as an inviolable aspect of personhood now risks being reduced to a contingent, State-mediated entitlement,”
On April 2, however, the Court issued an order saying those observations were neither necessary nor intended and were included “by mistake.”
The Bench stated,
“Upon our re-reading of the epilogue, it appears that by mistake the following text was included, and ordered the deletion of several paragraphs from the epilogue.”
The March 30 remarks arose in a case brought by a transgender petitioner challenging the absence of reservations for transgender persons in educational institutions and public sector employment.
In that judgment, the Bench reaffirmed the foundational principle from the NALSA decision that the right to self-identify one’s gender is an essential element of dignity, autonomy and personal liberty protected under Articles 14, 15, 16 and 21 of the Constitution.
The Court had also emphasized that, even after changes to the law, state policy must be crafted carefully to preserve constitutional guarantees and, where appropriate, include affirmative measures such as reservations.
The Bench had written,
“The State, as a constitutional actor, is expected to adopt an approach that harmonises statutory compliance with constitutional congruity, ensuring that the rights of transgender persons are not rendered illusory by procedural constraints. The true measure lies in the tangible dismantling of systemic marginalisation that transgender persons continue to endure,”
Those observations were welcomed by many, particularly within the transgender community.
Nevertheless, the Court has removed these passages from the version of the judgment now available on its official website.
The deletion followed an application submitted to the Court. While the Bench declined to accept the contention that the epilogue should be excluded from the judgment, stating it should be read as part of and carry precedential weight with the rest of the March 30 ruling, it nonetheless ordered corrections that excised most of the epilogue’s comments.
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