Judge Swati Baruah is taking on India's government for excluding trans people in its citizen registry. Without her parents’ knowledge, at age 21, Swati Bidhan Baruah booked her flight from Guwahati, Assam state, to Mumbai in 2012. She had saved enough money from her part-time job of tutoring schoolchildren and was now ready to take the big step: get her gender confirmation surgery. “I grew up with gender dysphoria and it was alienating,” she says. Having suffered estrangement and discrimination, Baruah made up her mind to make life a little easier for other transgender people in her home state. Now Baruah, 28, is Assam’s first transgender judge, and the third in all of India. In recent months, she’s been consumed with fighting the Supreme Court of India on behalf of at least 2,000 trans people who were left out in the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) list. She’s filed an intervention before India’s Supreme Court — using her prominence and legal acumen to lead a fight that has been largely overshadowed in the heated debates. |