The created order reasserts itself

Following the Obergefell decision in 2015, there was widespread belief that transgender ideology, like acceptance of same-sex marriage, would eventually achieve broad cultural acceptance. This conviction was not unreasonable, given how efforts to normalize homosexuality and same-sex marriage succeeded faster than even the most energetic supporters could have imagined. Although it once appeared that transgenderism’s march through America’s cultural institutions would proceed in much the same way, a growing number of observers now believe that the transgender movement has stalled.

Given the ideology’s rejection of the created order, some degree of resistance was probably inevitable. In the United States, that resistance has centered on issues such as women’s sports, compelled pronoun usage, and medical procedures on minors. In Britain, similar concerns intensified after the Cass Review concluded that the evidence supporting puberty blockers and other medical procedures on minors was weak and uncertain.

Notably, similar concerns are now emerging outside the West. Recent developments in India suggest that skepticism toward the claims of transgender ideology may be emerging as a global phenomenon.

In March, India’s Parliament approved the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act (2026), which significantly revises a 2019 law governing the legal recognition of people who identify as transgender. Whereas the 2019 law recognized a right to “self-perceived gender identity,” the amended law requires a more formal recognition process involving medical review and government certification.

In practical terms, individuals can no longer rely solely on self-identification to obtain legal recognition as transgender. As expected, LGBTQ activists have sharply criticized the legislation, arguing that it represents a rollback of rights and violates principles of self-determination.

Supporters of the law, however, argue that the previous framework created significant practical challenges. Because eligibility for the law’s protections and benefits was tied to an individual’s self-declared gender identity, lawmakers concluded that the law lacked a meaningful objective standard for determining who qualified under it. In response, Parliament replaced self-identification with a process requiring medical review and government certification before an individual may legally identify as transgender.

The amended law appears to contradict a 2014 ruling by India’s Supreme Court that provided an expansive definition of gender identity. According to the court, gender identity refers “to an individual’s self-identification as a man, woman, transgender, or other identified category.” Citing this precedent, Amnesty International condemned India’s new law, arguing that it undermines the principles of dignity, autonomy, and self-determination.

Whether the amended law ultimately survives judicial review remains to be seen. Nevertheless, its passage is significant. India, now the world’s most populous nation, is overwhelmingly non-Christian. According to Pew Research, approximately 80% of Indians are Hindu, 14% are Muslim, and only about 2% are Christian. In other words, the growing resistance to gender self-identification cannot be explained simply as a reaction driven by conservative Christians.

The development is even more noteworthy given India’s longstanding recognition of third-gender categories. For centuries, many South Asian societies have recognized communities such as the Hijras as a distinct socio-cultural third-gender category.

Yet a majority of India’s lawmakers concluded that legal gender recognition cannot rest solely on an individual’s self-declaration. While many Indians may accept the existence of a third gender, the amended law reflects the government’s view that legal recognition requires more than a subjective claim of identity.

For Christians, this development is instructive. Christians reject both transgender ideology and the concept of a third gender because Scripture teaches that God created humanity male and female (Genesis 1:27). At the same time, India’s response suggests that concerns about gender self-identification extend beyond the Christian world. The significance of the law is not that it reflects a Christian understanding of sex and gender, but that it demonstrates how a society shaped by very different religious assumptions has nevertheless recognized the practical limits of self-identification as the basis for legal recognition.

The law also lends support to the natural law insight that certain truths about human nature are accessible through reason and observation. Across cultures and religious traditions, most people still recognize that biological sex is not merely incidental to human identity and cannot be rendered irrelevant by personal declaration alone.

To no one’s surprise, progressives in India, Great Britain, and the United States have condemned the elimination of self-identification as the sole basis for legal gender recognition in India. Yet the more significant development is not the criticism the law has generated, but the fact that such legislation emerged in a predominantly Hindu nation.

The lesson is difficult to miss: resistance to transgender ideology cannot be dismissed as merely the product of conservative Christianity or Western politics. Rather, it reflects the growing recognition that attempts to sever identity from biological reality ultimately collide with reality itself. Clearly, the created order has a way of reasserting itself.