India’s conservative ruling party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi moved this week to roll back the right of self-determination for transgender and other gender nonconforming people in the world’s most populous nation.

New legislation would omit any individual with “self-perceived gender identities” from the current definition of “transgender person,” and determine trans identity only through a state-mandated medical board of “experts.”

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While traditional socio-cultural identities such as “kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta” are included, a transgender definition “shall not include, nor shall ever have been so included, persons with different sexual orientations and self-perceived sexual identities,” proposed legislation from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reads.

Activists and lawmakers in opposition to the bill say it runs counter to a landmark 2014 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the right of transgender people to self-identify. The 2019 law, which the new legislation seeks to amend, codified that right.

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The amendment must still clear both houses of Parliament and could be referred to a committee for further debate before passage.

Additional provisions include a requirement for trans people and healthcare providers to notify the government after a gender-affirming surgery, and provide identifying information; and a mandate to punish persons who “kidnap or abduct” any adult or child and “cause them to undergo any procedure to impose a transgender identity against their will or consent,” Live Law India reports.

The recommended sentence for exerting “undue influence” on trans youth is life in prison.

The proposed legislation, turning back some of the world’s most progressive gender-identity law, is an about-face for India, which coincides with the Trump administration’s own anti-trans crusade and its attempts to impose a Christian nationalist-inspired gender binary worldwide.

“This Bill is nothing but trashy colonial legislation,” said Saket Gokhale, an Indian Parliament member with the opposition political party, All India Trinamool Congress.

“I will tell you how the government makes a bill. They don’t listen to the people who are going to be affected by it. They look at social media, and what’s happening in America, because we have surrendered to Donald Trump,” Gokhale told his colleagues. “If Donald Trump says there are two genders, our government will say there are two genders. We don’t mind if we are going back in time. This country has a glorious history allowing people to recognize their gender identify, but if now Trump has said it, he must have thought it through.”

“All of us are gathered today and have the privilege of sitting in the Parliament, in Rajya Sabha, having been selected by the Council of States,” said Indian National Congress party parliament member Renuka Chowdhury. “I want to know: when we enter, we fill out a form where we are identified by our gender. All of you have been self-declared; you have declared whether you are a man or a woman. Has any medical board endorsed that?”

Proposed gender legislation in at least two other law-making bodies in the last week testifies to the viral influence of Donald Trump’s malign policy around the world.

In Portugal on Friday, the far-right, Trump-aligned Chega party advanced legislation turning back the same kind of gender self-determination rights that India’s Parliament is debating.

In Tennessee, the state Senate passed legislation on Monday allowing “de-transitioning” patients to sue doctors for “coercing” them into seeking gender reassignment, with a 30-year statute of limitations.   

“I am very scared,” one trans student in India told Agence France-Presse, their voice just above a whisper. “If the state decides who you are, what happens to who you know yourself to be?”

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