Breaking down the question
The keyword is entitlement — the socially and legally recognised claims a person can make on resources, rights and belonging. Placing transgender persons under the heading of kinship signals that the examiner wants you to see how entitlements in India flow through kinship and gender structures organised around a rigid male-female binary. Transgender persons, who fall outside that binary, are therefore structurally excluded from the very channels through which entitlements are ordinarily secured.
Read entitlement broadly. It covers material claims — property, inheritance, employment, welfare — and symbolic claims — recognition, dignity, family membership and citizenship. The transgender experience of denial cuts across both.
Because this is a ten-mark question, be economical: define the terms, locate the exclusion within kinship and gender norms, enumerate the concrete issues, and note the direction of change.
How to approach it
Frame the answer around the mismatch between a binary kinship order and non-binary lives. Open by noting that Indian kinship allocates entitlements through gendered roles — son, daughter, husband, wife — leaving no recognised slot for transgender persons, who are consequently denied inheritance, marital and family entitlements.
Then move to the specific issues: exclusion from family and property; discrimination in education and employment that pushes many into begging and sex work; barriers to healthcare and identity documents; and the everyday violence and stigma that erode dignity. Serena Nanda's ethnography of hijra communities shows a culturally recognised yet socially marginalised third-gender space, while Nivedita Menon's critique of the naturalised gender binary explains why recognition has been so hard to secure.
Conclude with the shift toward recognition — the judicial affirmation of a third gender and the framework of legal protection — while noting that formal entitlement has not yet translated into substantive inclusion.
Model answer
In Indian society, entitlements — claims to property, livelihood, welfare, dignity and belonging — are distributed largely through kinship, and kinship in turn is organised around a binary of male and female roles: son and daughter, husband and wife, father and mother. Transgender persons, whose identities do not map onto this binary, are structurally excluded from the channels through which entitlements are ordinarily transmitted. The core sociological issue is therefore not individual prejudice alone but the design of a kinship and gender order that offers no legitimate position from which transgender persons can claim what others receive as a matter of course.
The concrete consequences are severe. Within the family, transgender persons are frequently disowned, losing rights of inheritance and the security of the household; property and succession norms recognise sons and daughters but not those who fit neither. Excluded from family, many are also excluded from education and formal employment through discrimination, which forces a large number into begging, ritual performance and sex work, reproducing their marginality. Access to healthcare is obstructed by insensitive institutions, and the absence of appropriate identity documents blocks entry to welfare schemes, banking and voting. Underlying all of this is pervasive stigma and the threat of violence, which denies the most basic entitlement of dignity.
Sociological work helps explain this predicament. Serena Nanda's study of hijras documents a third-gender community that is culturally acknowledged, even ritually significant, yet socially and economically marginalised — recognition without entitlement. Nivedita Menon argues that the male-female binary is naturalised rather than natural, and that this naturalisation is precisely what renders non-binary lives illegible to law and kinship. Entitlement, on this view, requires dismantling the assumption that only two genders exist.
Recent change has been significant but incomplete. Judicial recognition of a third-gender category and subsequent legal protections have affirmed transgender persons as bearers of rights and dignity, opening claims to identity, non-discrimination and welfare. Yet formal recognition has not dissolved the deeper kinship and social structures that withhold substantive inclusion. The gap between legal entitlement and lived entitlement remains wide.
In sum, the issues surrounding transgender entitlement in India arise from the exclusion of non-binary persons from a kinship order built on gender binaries. Addressing them requires not only legal recognition but a transformation of the social and familial structures through which entitlements are actually realised.
Examiner's perspective
For a ten-mark answer the examiner rewards precision and structure over length. The distinguishing move is to read the question through kinship — showing that entitlements flow through gendered family roles and that transgender exclusion is structural, not merely attitudinal.
Candidates who marshal both material and symbolic dimensions of entitlement, and who cite Nanda and Menon to ground the argument sociologically, stand out from those who offer a generic list of hardships. A brief closing note on the shift toward legal recognition, tempered by the observation that recognition has not yet produced substantive inclusion, gives the answer analytical balance.
You can extend this theme through the linked note on patriarchy, entitlements and the sexual division of labour, which situates transgender exclusion within the wider gender order.