The High Court directed the State government to frame a policy for the recruitment of transgenders to various posts within three months, while disposing of a petition filed in 2019 by M. Ganga Bhavani, a transgender (TG) from Rayalacheruvu village in Anantapur district.
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The grievance was that the lack of reservations for TGs resulted in the petitioner’s disqualification from the process of recruitment of sub-inspectors of police (civil), for which a notification was issued in November 2018. Declaring that the petitioner is not entitled to appointment as there is no clarity on reservations to TGs, Justice M. Satyanarayana Murthy made an oral observation that some States appear to have sanctioned 1% quota in all government services to TGs. Government pleader Y.N. Vivekananda argued that Bhavani was not entitled to be appointed because of failure to secure the minimum prescribed marks, and in the impugned notification, the reservation was caste-specific but not gender-specific.
Bhavani had stated in an affidavit that the act of non-inclusion of TG category in the website meant for submitting online applications to the said post, was in itself a blatant violation of the Supreme Court direction in National Legal Services Authority V/s Union of India & Others in a batch of writ petitions that date back to the years 2013 and 2014.
The petitioner claimed to have been forced to register as a female due to the non-availability of the option to identify as a TG, and disqualification happened in the first round of the recruitment process purportedly on the ground that there was no stipulated quota for TGs.
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Bhavani had argued that though there is reservation for various categories and castes, TGsdo nothave any quota. As a consequence, the TGs were not in a position to compete with male and female genders. The Supreme Court had laid down that apart from the binary genders, ‘hijras’ should be treated as the ‘third gender’ for the purpose of safeguarding their rights under Part-III of the Constitution and the laws made by Parliament and State Legislatures, Bhavani said.