New Delhi, April 5 -- A petition has been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, contending that the recent amendments take away the fundamental right of transgender persons to self-determination of gender, according to reports on Saturday. The Parliament passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 on March 25, amending the 2019 Act. President Droupadi Murmu gave her assent to it on March 30. Opposition MPs had slammed the bill for excluding gays and lesbians from its ambit. The petition, under Article 32 of the Constitution, has been filed by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and Zainab Javid Patel, two transgender women, LiveLaw reported on Saturday. While the first petitioner is the Acharya Mahamandaleshwar of the Kinnar Akhara, Bharatanatyam dancer, author, social activist, and the Founder of the Astitva Trust, the second petitioner is the Director (Inclusion & Diversity) at KPMG India, and a Member of the National Council for Transgender Persons (Western Region), the reports said. According to the reports, the petition assails the Amendment Act, which received the assent of the President on March 30, 2026, as causing "irreparable constitutional injury" to the fundamental rights of transgender persons guaranteed under Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21 of the Constitution. It raises what it terms a crucial constitutional question: whether the State, through legislation, can define who a person is by substituting biological or socio-medical classifications for a person's lived and self-perceived identity. "Parliament has, by the stroke of a legislative pen, repealed the statutory right that this Court held to be a fundamental right under Article 21. The impugned deletion does not even require elaborate constitutional analysis to expose its unconstitutionality: a provision that directly codifies a right declared fundamental by this Court cannot be omitted by ordinary legislation without violating Article 21 and the doctrine of non-retrogression of fundamental rights," the news website quoted the petition as saying. The development comes amid opposition to the bill that redefines the category of transgender, removes the provision of self-perceived gender identity and excludes several socio-cultural identities from its ambit....