“Sent Back, Sent Again”: Bureaucratic Apathy and the Slow Violence of Transgender Recognition in Uttar Pradesh, India

During my fieldwork in a Chief Medical Officer’s (CMO) office in Uttar Pradesh, I was shown a file concerning a transgender applicant who had undergone gender affirmation procedures and sought a transgender identity card listing her gender as “transgender female.” The file had been forwarded from the District Magistrate’s (DM) office for verification. Yet, despite the clear provisions of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (2019), the staff were unable to determine why the file had been sent to them or what verification they were expected to perform. There was no cover letter, no procedural template, and no institutional memory to orient them. The file simply sat on a table, accumulating dust and uncertainty, until it was returned to the DM’s office without action; only to be resent three weeks later with equally ambiguous instructions. When I pointed to the relevant clauses of the 2019 Act that placed responsibility for verifying gender-affirmative intervention on the CMO, staff members expressed confusion and discomfort. Soon after this encounter, the office stopped allowing me to follow up on the case. The paper uses this encounter to argue that democratic erosion in India is enacted not only through explicit majoritarian politics but also through bureaucratic apathy: the refusal, inability, or unwillingness of state institutions to implement legally guaranteed rights. Drawing on feminist and queer political theory and on scholarship on bureaucratic violence, I conceptualize bureaucratic apathy as a form of slow, accumulative violence as a mode of governance where inaction, confusion, and procedural gaps erode citizenship as effectively as overt discrimination. The CMO’s uncertainty was not benign. It delayed the applicant’s ability to access welfare, mobility, and legal personhood, and transformed a straightforward statutory right into a maze of institutional confusion. I show how bureaucratic ignorance becomes a gendered technology of rule, producing democratic erosion through everyday paperwork, inter-office miscommunication, and discretionary silence. By foregrounding bureaucratic apathy, this paper contributes to global conversations on gender, democracy, and LGBTQI rights, showing how citizenship can be undermined not only by authoritarian intentions but by the state’s profound incapacity to recognize those it claims to protect.