Nepal Quietly Stopped Letting Trans People Change Their Legal Gender

In 2007, Nepal’s Supreme Court did something almost no other country’s top court had done: it ruled, in Sunil Babu Pant and Others v. Nepal, that trans and third-gender citizens had a right to legal recognition based on self-identification, and ordered the government to issue identity documents reflecting it. The ruling drew praise from the UN as “truly ground-breaking,” and courts in the US, India, and the European Court of Human Rights have since cited it. By 2011 Nepal had a third-gender option on its census; by 2015, three-gender passports and constitutional protection for LGBT people.

Nearly two decades later, that legacy is stalling out — quietly, administratively, and with no public announcement.

According to Human Rights Watch, Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs has, in recent months, paused processing all applications for legal gender change, including cases where applicants already have support from district officials or favorable court rulings. For people in the middle of the process, some of whom have been waiting years, the message came informally: a phone call, a rumor, a news story, rather than any formal notice.

What it looks like for the people stuck in it

HRW interviewed 11 trans Nepalis in late 2025; more than half had applications stalled in the system. Their accounts, documented under pseudonyms, describe a process that was already inconsistent before the pause and has now simply stopped.

Rashima K., a 31-year-old trans woman in Kathmandu, started her application in a district office in 2022 and still hadn’t received documents three years later — first denied by a local official who said only the district court could decide, then left waiting on a court date. In the meantime, she’s had to run her import business under her brother’s name because customs officials, seeing a citizenship certificate that lists her as male, accused her of fraud.

Aneesh L., a trans woman raising a child with her partner, underwent gender-affirming surgery in India in 2016 but didn’t pursue legal recognition until 2023 — and still hit a wall. A local officer demanded a medical certificate that isn’t actually required under Nepali law; when she produced one anyway, he told her the case now had to go to the ministry because “the media know about this issue now.” She submitted her application in July 2025. Months later, she got a call telling her the entire process had been paused because, the caller said, someone in the community had complained to the ministry that “all trans women are biological males.”

Ratika T. did everything the system nominally asks: applied in 2022, was denied locally, won a favorable district court ruling in mid-2025, and filed it immediately with the ministry — only to learn from a news article, not a government notice, that her application and everyone else’s had been frozen. Without corrected documents, she’s been turned down for jobs after interviewers see her legal sex doesn’t match her presentation. “Once they get confirmation that I’m trans, they just seem to lose interest in me,” she told researchers.

How a legal right became optional in practice

Nepali law has never required medical proof or surgery for legal gender recognition — the 2007 ruling and everything since have rested on self-identification. But over the years, individual officials began informally demanding medical exams anyway, a practice HRW documented as far back as 2013 and again in a detailed 2024 report. That ad hoc medicalization is exactly what the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has told governments to avoid, on the grounds that tying legal recognition to medical gatekeeping violates people’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy.

The current freeze traces to organized “anti-gender” advocacy that escalated through 2025, with at least one advocacy group formally lobbying the ministry against recognizing trans women and trans men under their correct legal sex, and a news outlet accusing trans rights activists of being “foreign agents.” Alex Müller, HRW’s LGBT rights director, put it plainly: “Trans people in Nepal are being abandoned by authorities who appear to be listening to anti-gender ideology talking points.”

HRW wrote to the Home Affairs Ministry in April 2026 asking about the halted process. As of publication, the ministry had not responded. The organization is now calling on Nepal’s new prime minister, Balen Shah, to order pending applications processed and to finally write a clear, rights-based policy — something the country has never had, despite nearly 20 years of case law establishing the right itself.

For a country that once positioned itself as a regional leader on trans rights, the gap between that reputation and the current reality is stark: the legal right to be recognized still exists on paper, but for now, nobody in Nepal can actually exercise it.