The International Bar Association’s conference at Tokya later this month will see Karnataka activist Akkai Padmashali addressing legal luminaries from the world over on ‘Mr., Ms. or Mx.? Legal issues facing transgender persons’ at a special session on October 21. She is the lone transgender representative from India.
IBA is the world’s leading organisation of international legal practitioners, bar associations and law societies. The organisation, set up in 1947, has recently been focusing on LGBT issues.
The conference, to be held between October 19 and 24, is expected to be attended by 5,000 legal professionals. Federico Godoy, who co-chairs the LGBT Issues Committee of the IBA, has said in a letter to Ms. Padmashali that the session would focus on “key differences and tensions” between laws and the political considerations behind them.
Ms. Padmashali told The Hindu that her talk would focus on the violence and human rights violations faced by transgenders in India as well as issues of civic identity. “I will also talk about the recent Supreme Court judgment on transgenders that is very radical in the way it defines the community and elucidates its rights,” she said.
Ms. Padmashali is especially excited because this is the first international trip she is making after getting a visa as a “female” in September last year.
