Noor Shekhawat Birth Certificate, Profession, Age, Home town

Noor Shekhawat Birth Certificate, Profession, Age, Home town

• Noor Shekhawat age : 31 years old (as on 2023).
• Profession: Runs NGO for the transgender community.
• Home town: Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.

On July 2023, Noor Shekhawat became the first transgender person in Rajasthan to be issued a birth certificate in which the gender is recorded as transgender. In her old birth certificate, her gender was marked as male. She said,” It is very Ironic that while society worships kinners and transgenders, we are also discriminated against and not accepted. There is a little representation of the transgender community in every sphere”.

Director Bairwa says his department is encouraging other members of the transgender community to come forward following the example of Shekhawat. Transgender rights activist Pushpa Mai, a member of the Rajasthan Transgender Board and founder and chairperson of the Nai Bhor Sanstha organization, says, “In the future, it would help the transgender community even more if such birth certificates can be issued when a child or adolescent first becomes aware of their gender identity.

However, as she was being handed her new birth certificate by municipal and state government officials, she felt like she had been born again, she said, this time in her “true gender identity”. Talking about the struggles she had to overcome, she said, “My family did not accept my gender identity as a transgender. I had to leave my house at a very young age and struggled for my sustenance. I also dropped out of college in the first year because of the constant ridicule and harassment I faced from other students.”

She says that it bothered her to see her gender marked as male in her class 10 and 12 mark sheets “when I have embraced my gender identity as a transgender “. Determined to officially change her gender identity, Noor Shekhawat applied for a new birth certificate earlier this month (July 2023). Bhanwar Lal Bairwa, director and joint secretary at Rajasthan’s Directorate of Economics and Statistics, says there is a provision in birth certificates to mark gender as transgender. “The birth certificate issued to Shekhawat is the first such birth certificate issued by us in Rajasthan where the gender is mentioned as transgender. After Shekhawat applied for the birth certificate at the Jaipur Municipal Corporation, officials from the corporation reached out to us for guidance and we completed the process in a short time. Shekhawat also furnished a medical certificate that said her gender is transgender,” he said. Shekhawat, who runs NGO for the transgender community, says she now wants to get the gender changed in her class 10 and 12 mark sheet as well. And she also plans to complete her graduation.

She said, “One day ago after I received my birth certificate, my aunt suggested that my family publish an advertisement in newspapers that they would hold my tiye ki baithak (rituals performed after death) because I am dead to them. I was sad that while many people were congratulating me, my town family did not accept me”. And when 31-years-old Noor Shekhawat called her family members to enquire about their well-being after the recent earth-quake in Jaipur, she says she was pained by their reaction. she said,” My family members told me, ‘Tum jaise log paida ho gaye ho iss dharti pe, toh bhukamp nahi ayega toh kya ayega ( Now that people like you have been born in this world, earthquakes are bound to happen)”.

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