Two days. Two Houses of Parliament. Dozens of speeches about transgender lives.

Zero transgender people in the room making the decisions.

I watched the whole thing. And the moment that will stay with me is not the bad speeches, those were expected. It is the moment I realised I was grateful that some MPs got the pronouns right. Grateful that the opposition cited NALSA. Grateful that at least two ruling party members expressed concern. Grateful. For the minimum. About our own lives.

This is what it means to have no representation in the spaces where power is exercised. You become the subject of other people’s generosity. You depend on allies to carry arguments you could make better, with more authority, with the full weight of having actually lived them. You sit outside the room and hope that someone inside remembers you exist.

I am not interested in that anymore.

The queer community in India has produced extraordinary leaders. People with the intellectual rigour, political sharpness, constitutional knowledge, and lived experience to be in those rooms, not as tokens but as forces. The question is not whether those people exist. The question is whether we are doing the work of getting them in.

Political power is not glamorous work. It is long, unglamorous, often demoralising work. It means running candidates. Building coalitions. Learning the language of institutions we have every reason to distrust. It means doing this in alliance with every other community that is equally absent from Parliament, equally disenfranchised, and subject to decisions made without them.

But it is the work. The only work that ends the cycle of watching.

This bill will be challenged in the Supreme Court. It may be struck down. And then another version will be drafted. And debated. By the same room, without us in it. Until we change that.

We resist this bill. We resist it loudly. In every court, every newsroom, every street, every comment section, every conversation at the dinner table that someone is too polite to have. We push back hard, and we do not stop pushing. We make it impossible to ignore. We make the cost of erasing us higher than the cost of including us.

And then we do something harder. We get in the room. Because resistance from the outside keeps us alive. But power on the inside changes what is possible.

I want us in the room. I want us writing the bills.

I want us to be done watching.