At his concert in Chicago last week, musician Diljit Dosanjh did a gender reveal for a couple. “Mubarak ho, tuhade ghar Lakshmi aa rahi hai. Congratulations, it’s a girl,” he had said. The crowd cheered; the couple was delighted.
There were more cheers in the media when CBSE declared in its official statement that the “pass rate for girls reached 88.86%, surpassing boys (82.13%) by a significant margin of 6.73%.”
These women may some day go on to be assaulted by their husbands. The National Crime Records Bureau’s 2024 report shows that of crimes against women and children, 42.3% were under the “cruelty by husband or his relatives”. And in Haryana, the sex ratio for the first four months of 2026 has fallen to 895 girls per 1,000 boys, reports say. Another by The Tribune says that 14 of Punjab’s 23 districts see a decline in gender ration. On Delhi’s roads, women who cycle to work say they are harassed by men in cars and on bikes. One woman said the only way she felt safe was to wear her son’s clothes.
This year, the International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel She Who Remainsrevolves around the theme of “sworn virgins”, women who take a vow of chastity so they can live as men, so they are not forced into marriage.
Books reflect the reality of the time, and while the 4B movement — where women in Korea said no to dating, sex, marriage, babies — seemed extreme, it was not a reaction, but a response to years of misogyny.
A section of people believe that the real gender problem is men discriminating against women. That with the questioning of the gender binary and the emergence of gender fluidity, the real problem is being ignored. Now, they feel, we are focussing on the peripheral: rights of those who do not conform to the female-male binary. In reality, the fight for rights, recognition, and bodily autonomy has been the same as that of the feminist movement.
The breaking of the binary has opened up conversations on gender, marginalisation, and different forms of discrimination. It has given more people the liberty of expressing themselves in the way they want to, helping people of all genders to show vulnerability. So when Q. Manivannan, who identifies as non-binary, is elected to the Scottish Parliament, it is not just a victory for the gender fluid, but for all those who have been fighting to be seen and heard: women, men, and everyone in between.
TOOLKIT
Kerala is in the process of introducing a gender-based ticketing system in the State’s bus service, paving the way for free travel for women. This was a promise in the Congress-led United Democratic Front’s election manifesto. The Electronic Ticketing Machines (ETMs) have been updated, to record gender.
WORDSWORTH
Frail male
The theory that male foetuses are more susceptible to stressors than female. As temperatures rise, who survives gestation better: females or males? This is a question that has been asked for almost two decades now. New research published this year shows that with an increase in temperature, fewer male babies were born. A paper titled ‘Temperature and sex ratios at birth’ published in the journal Demography, concludes that in India and sub-Saharan Africa, found that higher ambient temperatures during pregnancy are associated with changes in the natural sex ratio at birth.
OUCH!
Unless a man gives his woman’s identity a chance to bloom, no matter how loudly we scream feminism, it’s not possible
Rubina Dilaik
WOMEN WE MET
On episode 41 of The Hindu’s Women Uninterrupted podcast, host Anna Thomas speaks to Vandana Suri, founder of the women’s mobility services company Taxshe and the single women homestay company SingleSisterz. Vandana remembers being sexually molested as a child, and says most women move through the world mitigating risk. “I am not anti-men; I am pro-women,” she says. Many of the women drivers who are part of Taxshe have dropped out of school: “Many of them would have dropped out because of lack of sanitation in schools,” she says, adding that all women must learn to drive.