I started Gaysi Family in 2008.

I was in my late twenties. The internet felt like the first place I could breathe. India didn’t have a word for what I was—not one that felt like mine. So we made one. Gay. Desi. Gaysi. And we built a small, stubborn corner of the internet where people like us could exist without apology.

That was eighteen years ago.

In that time, I have watched Section 377 fall, return, and fall again. Read down in 2009, recriminalised in 2013, and finally struck down in 2018. I watched queer Indians weep in the streets like something had been returned to them that they hadn’t realised had been taken. In 2014, the NALSA judgment affirmed the right to self-identify gender, full of possibility. In 2019, the Transgender Persons Act followed, promising protection but introducing control. I watched the marriage equality case build and fail in 2023. And now, in 2026, I have watched Parliament pass a bill on trans lives that even a Supreme Court-appointed committee said violates a Supreme Court judgment.

And then this week, I watched the Solicitor General of India stand before a nine-judge Constitution Bench and argue that Navtej Singh Johar—the 2018 verdict that decriminalised same-sex relationships, the judgment that told us our love is not a crime and was based on a “subjective” application of constitutional morality and should be declared “not good law.”

He was not asking for Section 377 to return. He was doing something in some ways more precise: asking the court to dismantle the constitutional doctrine that produced Navtej in the first place. Not just the outcome. The foundation.

I have watched the pendulum swing my entire adult queer life.

What I want to offer here is not despair, but clarity. I have not given up. I will not. But I have been here long enough to know that there are things no one tells you when you are young and queer and full of possibility. Things I wish someone had told me plainly.

So here is what I would tell you now.

The first is this: the people in power are not losing sleep over us.

I watched Parliament debate a bill about trans lives. I watched Members of Parliament make thoughtful, well-reasoned arguments citing judgments, presenting data, naming lived realities. And I watched the bill pass anyway.

This is not new. This is the pattern.

Rights are extended when they are convenient and withdrawn when they are not. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it does not bend on its own. It bends because people pull it consistently, often without seeing the results in their own lifetime. The majority in those rooms are not thinking about what we deserve. They are thinking about votes, alliances, and power. We become a talking point, a symbol, a gesture—invited, acknowledged, and then regulated.

For a long time, I believed that if we made the right arguments, told the right stories, and built the right coalitions, the system would respond.

And sometimes it does.

And sometimes, it passes the bill anyway.

Understanding this changes how we engage with power.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing is a reminder of how layered that engagement must be. Even as the Solicitor General argued that constitutional morality is “a sentiment, not a doctrine,” Chief Justice Surya Kant pushed back from the bench, stating that “equality cannot be taken away on grounds of sex” and that “biological traits or gender identity cannot be used as a tool for exclusion.” The court is not monolithic. The fight inside that building is real. And it matters that we understand the difference between the government’s position and the court’s—they are not the same thing, and yesterday, they were visibly in tension.

But courts are slow. And in the meantime, there are trans people in India attempting to get identity documents under the new Act who will be turned away. Real lives are shaped by whatever law is currently in force. The legal fight is essential and it is not enough on its own.

Which brings me to the second thing: start close. Start with your own life.

For many queer people, home is not a place of safety. Family is not uncomplicated. I understand that. And yet, the most practical advice I can offer remains the same: study, work, save money, and move out when you can.

Economic independence is not a compromise. It is protection.

The most vulnerable queer person in India is the one who cannot leave, cannot refuse, cannot say no because they have no alternatives. Safety is built on foundations that may not seem extraordinary: a steady income, a skill, a place of one’s own.

For queer people, these are not small achievements. They are the conditions that make choice possible.

The third, and perhaps more uncomfortable, truth is this: some of you need to go into politics.

We have been taught to see politics as something corrupt, something that demands compromise, something that is not meant for people like us. Much of that may be true. But the decisions that shape our lives are being made in those spaces often by people who have never had to live what they are legislating.

We need people in those rooms who understand what is at stake.

And it is important to say this clearly: entering politics is not only an act of service. It is also a career. You are allowed to want power. You are allowed to be ambitious. You are allowed to build influence, to stay, and to lead. The idea that queer people must only enter politics to serve, and not to succeed, is itself limiting. It is another form of containment.

To do this work, however, requires preparation.

It requires learning the language of power—law, policy, economics. It requires understanding how decisions are made, how coalitions are built, how elections are won. It requires collaboration across disciplines (between organisers, lawyers, writers, and policymakers) so that the work is not fragmented. And it requires patience.

You may not win immediately. There will be setbacks. Laws will pass that should not. Cases will fail that deserved to succeed. The pendulum will swing against you.

This week, the government asked the highest court in the land to erase the legal reasoning that freed us. That is the pendulum swinging. The answer is not to step away from the room. It is to fight harder to get more of us into it.

The work is to stay.

Because the alternative—stepping away and leaving decisions to those who do not consider us at all—is not acceptable. I often return to where this began. In 2008, I started a blog because there was no space for people like us. I did not know what it would become. I only knew that the space needed to exist.

That remains the work.

To identify what does not yet exist and to build it.

Whether that is a platform, a legal intervention, a community network, or a political campaign, the principle is the same. We make the spaces we need. We have seen the pendulum swing before. It will swing again. But it will not do so on its own.

It will move because people push it.

I will not tell you that this work is easy, or quick, or fair. It is none of those things.

But I will tell you this: we are still here.

The Supreme Court bench that heard arguments yesterday also heard, from its own Chief Justice, that equality is not a concession to be withdrawn. That biology cannot be made into a wall.

Hold that. It is not a victory—it is a signal. And signals matter when you are building for the long run.

We are still building, still arguing, still showing up. And that is how change happens—slowly, persistently, collectively.

So here is what I would tell you now:

Study. Work. Save. Move out.

And if you can, enter the room where decisions are made.

We need you there.

Not symbolically. Not eventually.

Now.