With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India

Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex is an ethnographic study of hijra identity and community in Hyderabad, South India, based on extended fieldwork and published by the University of Chicago Press. Reddy is an anthropologist and the book is widely cited in gender and South Asian studies for its close attention to how hijra identity is actually lived, negotiated and understood within its own community context rather than filtered through Western transgender categories imposed from outside. Its authority rests on that sustained fieldwork and direct engagement with hijra communities themselves. Its limit is that it is a study centered on one specific city's community at a particular period, so a claim about hijra communities elsewhere in South Asia or about more recent legal and social developments needs a source addressing that different place or period directly.