From Hijra/Khusra to Transgender: Changing Language and Identity in Jammu (J&K)

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The words used to describe gender-diverse people in India carry more than description; they carry judgments about who belongs, who is respectable, and who is owed the protections of citizenship. This paper traces how the terminology or language used for transgender communities in Jammu has changed from Hijra and Khusra to the now officially recognized category as Transgender. This change has never been a simple substitution of one word for another. Combining historical discourse analysis with oral history, together with in-depth interviews with twenty-two transgender women in Jammu, conducted between 2023 and 2025. It shows how colonial law reshaped gender-diverse communities as objects of surveillance, postcolonial India inherited this suspicion informally, and the 2014 NALSA judgment introduced rights-based vocabulary that joined rather than replaced older terms. In present-day Jammu, Hijra, Khusra, Kinner, and Transgender circulate simultaneously; each carrying a different history, institutional home, and claim to legitimacy. I call this phenomenon “layered discursive coexistence”, wherein individuals navigate multiple naming regimes strategically. This coexistence has generated a class-inflected respectability discourse. “Transgender” signals education and independence, while “Hijra”/“Kinner” remain tied to ritual labour and economic dependency. The paper offers a regionally grounded history of gendered language in region typically read only through security and conflict.