How Karnataka’s – and India’s first – survey of trans persons failed the community it aimed to count

In September, Karnataka made history by conducting India’s first state-wide baseline survey of gender minorities. The Department of Women and Child Development, in collaboration with the Karnataka State Women’s Development Corporation, launched what was heralded as a landmark initiative to document the lives of transgender persons across 31 districts.

By January, the results were in: 10,365 transgender individuals had been identified in a state with a population of approximately 6.87 crore.

The survey’s stated objective – to rehabilitate gender minorities and ensure their access to governmental welfare benefits – was admirable. Yet beneath this progressive veneer lies a troubling reality: the survey has grossly undercounted Karnataka’s trans population, turning a potentially transformative exercise in data collection into a missed opportunity for advancing gender justice.

The survey’s published figures reveal an unsettling statistical anomaly. According to official data from the 2011 Census of India, Karnataka recorded 20,266 transgender persons – nearly double the 2025 survey’s count.

This raises an immediate question: how has a state’s transgender population apparently halved over 14 years, during a period when social acceptance has grown, legal protections have expanded following the landmark 2014 National Legal Services Authority judgement that legally recognized transgender people as a third gender and global transgender visibility has increased?

The answer lies not in demographic reality but in...

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