The Quiet Grammar of Delay: A Reflection from a Transgender Law Graduate

“The Constitution is not a document of conquest, but of conscience.” — Hon’ble CJI B.R. Gavai, Oxford Union Address, 2025

I write this as the first openly transgender woman to graduate from the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. That fact is not a badge but a reflection: that I had to survive, not merely study, law, that others before me had to choose between law and their truth. For three years, I had to live in a boys’ hostel. Not due to a lack of policy, the NUJS to its credit has, on paper, one of India’s most well drafted Transgender inclusion policies. But that policy met no infrastructure or serious implementation. The lived implication was clear: my recognition was official, but not spatial.

This is where constitutional promises falter, not in black-letter law, but in hallway logistics, hostel forms, untrained committees. Dignity, I learned, does not vanish through cruelty. It dissolves through procedural omission.

In his recent address at NALSAR, Chief Justice Gavai struck a rare note, not one of reformist appeal, but of institutional tenderness. “Many lawyers hide their mental health struggles,” he observed. It was a moment of acknowledgement that not all injuries are justiciable, but all are constitutional.

It is in the warmth of that speech that I find the legal courage to speak now. Not to accuse my university a space I hold in complex esteem and deep regard, but to submit a record of erasure that is not malicious, merely perennial. What I endured was not antagonism but institutional amnesia.

In law, delay has doctrine. Justice delayed is justice denied. But there is no corresponding doctrine for dignity delayed. And yet, that delay is what defines many trans lives. Paperwork pending. Housing unresolved. ID cards reissued. Each procedural gap becomes a philosophical chasm. Each silence, a pause long enough to wound.

What do we call this? Not illegality. But perhaps, a legal forgetting.

The Constitution gave me identity. The university gave me education. But no one gave me space. Not a room. Not a process. Not a pronoun.

And so, this article is my lived experience, of what happens when the law recognizes you, but the system misplaces you.

On the Architecture of Absence

At NUJS, the academic block is shaped with deep thought which reflects in it’s very architecture. But if you walk a few hundred meters to the hostels, that architecture disappears. There is no infrastructure yet for those who do not fit a binary.

We often forget that architecture, too, is a language of inclusion. Our Constitution whose very design is built around dignity, made me quietly ask: Why did the building where I studied it forget to house it?

Because in institutions, it’s not always what’s written that reveals our priorities - it’s what gets built. And what is not built is too often treated as if it were not real.

The university has a Transgender Policy, aspirational, carefully worded, one of the first among National Law Universities. But when I arrived in 2022 after two years of online college, that policy was a myth and my existence posed a logistical question the system hadn’t learned to solve

There was no deliberate cruelty. But there was a steady, procedural confusion. The kind that requires you to send one more email, one more representation. To repeat the same explanation in one more meeting. As if your existence needs constant re-documentation. I was not unwelcome but was a question.

Every morning, I walked through male corridors not out of choice, but because I had nowhere else to go.

You realize, over time, that invisibility is not passive. It is actively sustained by delay. Delay is what happens when an institution wants to do the right thing, but not urgently.

I say it with great clarity that I do not blame individuals. Most staff, most students, tried. They offered sympathy. But sympathy is not structure. And in law school, where everything, from internships to hostel allocation, runs on structure, sympathy does not suffice.

There were no gender-neutral washrooms when I first entered. No trans-inclusive housing. No formalized response procedure. I was a legal subject, not a logistical one.

And herein lies the constitutional dilemma: How can rights be real when they have no room?

When CJI Gavai said, at the Oxford Union, that the Constitution is a document of conscience, not conquest, I felt something shift. Because that’s what this has always been about, not conquest, not demands, not institutional complaint. But conscience.

And conscience requires that we ask: what does it mean to teach NALSA but never implement it in your own hostel policy? What does it mean to quote Puttaswamy on dignity, but make a trans student live in a boys hostel.

If the law is taught in theory but denied in infrastructure, we are breeding two forms of constitutionalism, aspirational and actual. And the cost of that gap is borne, always, by the most vulnerable

On Silence, Jurisprudence, and the Audacity to Speak

There is a kind of violence that does not bruise. It does not scream. It files no complaints. It simply waits, in administrative delays, in unchanged templates, in committee minutes that move slower than life.

It wasn’t a moment but a pattern. Not an event to contest, but a condition to survive. It unfolded quietly, through unsigned forms, missing infrastructure, delayed replies, the kind of harm that doesn’t shout, but reconfigures your sense of what the law can reach.

I graduated from NUJS this June but I also carried something that won’t appear on transcripts: the knowledge that even the most elite legal institutions can structurally misgender their own students, not always with words, but with forms, hallways, and absence.

That silent absence has a jurisprudence of its own.

Because law schools don’t just train us in statutes, they train us in atmospheres. And if those atmospheres forget the very people NALSA was meant to include, then the crisis is not just one of policy, but of pedagogy.

I write this now, not in defiance, but in faith. Not to indict NUJS, but to honor the very constitutional spirit it taught me to believe in. The same Constitution that CJI Gavai quoted at Oxford. not as an instrument of power, but as an act of conscience.

I want to speak not as a mere transwoman, but as someone who is a lifelong student of law. I want to tell the legal fraternity this:

You may admit a trans student. You may pass a policy. But if you do not hire transgender lawyers, train your forms, staff, housing, and rituals to reflect that policy, you do not have inclusion. You have documentation.

Because epistemic violence is when an institution recognizes your identity legally but cannot locate it in practice.

I never sought special treatment but only asked the institution to meet its own policy. I only waited for infrastructure to meet recognition and only wanted the right to brush my teeth in a corridor that didn’t question my right to be there.

And still, I chose the law.

Because I believe the law can remember what institutions forget.

To live as a visibly trans woman in a legal ecosystem still learning to see us is not a project of survival but a constitutional performance. It is daily proof that law, in its fullest sense, is not what is taught, but what is endured, implemented, and finally, remembered.