Impact of gentrification on transgender safe spaces in Bengaluru, India

This paper examines the socio-cultural impact of gentrification on transgender safe spaces in Bengaluru, India. Based on an intergenerational ethnography, it finds that the gradual erosion of transgender safe spaces due to gentrification-led redevelopment has caused a distinctive socio-cultural, moral, and spatio-political dispossession from established ways of life among diverse transgender communities. This is experienced through displacement of daily practices, economic insecurity, and disruption of vital kinship ties as well as solidarity networks through which these communities have sustained themselves across generations. The paper contributes theoretically by integrating trans-spatiality into gentrification discussions, and empirically through an ethnography of how urban redevelopment alters the dynamics of safety, belonging, and survival for transgender communities.