Bolstered by the SC order, trans bureaucrat now plans marriage

BHUBANESWAR: Aishwarya Rituparna Pradhan, deputy commissioner in charge of GST in the Paradip circle of Odisha’s commercial tax department, said she is all set to marry her boyfriend with whom she has been in a live-in relationship for two years.

“My boyfriend wanted me to get married to him for over a year, but I put off the decision only due to Section 377. Now that the Supreme Court has decriminalised it, I have decided to marry him. The marriage would happen next year,” said Pradhan, 34, who made her identity as a transgender public in 2015, a year after the Supreme Court recognised the fundamental and civil rights of transgender persons.

In a historic judgment last Thursday, the Supreme Court had decriminalised same-sex relationships between consenting adults.born as Ratikanta Pradhan in Kanabagiri village of Odisha’s Kandhamal district, Aishwarya entered the Odisha Financial Services in 2010 with her gender identified as male.

But she was uncomfortable with the identity and always wanted to declare her transgender identity till the Supreme Court judgment — Nalsa and Others versus Union of India, which declared transgender identity as the third gender and granted wide ranging rights to several gender identities under its rubric— came out in 2014. She underwent sex reassignment surgery in 2015, following which she officially declared her new identity and assumed the new name, Aishwarya Rituparna Pradhan.

Pradhan said when her boyfriend, an entrepreneur, first proposed to her three years ago, she had laughed it off thinking it to be a case of infatuation.

“I have never encountered such things in my life as all that I have faced is humiliation. I told him that he was much younger to me. I had forgotten all about it till we met in Bhubaneswar some months later... We have been in a live-in relationship for two years now,” said Pradhan, who plans to get married in court under the Special Marriages Act.

THE SUPREME COURT LAST THURSDAY HAD DECRIMINALISED SAMESEX RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONSENTING ADULTS