ABSTRACT
Essentialism is a concept that can be applied to just about any category to indicate that the various members of that category all share specific properties that unite them with one another, while simultaneously differentiating them from everything else. Essentialism entails that those characteristics defined as women’s essence are shared in common by all women at all times. Feminism has a complex relationship with essentialism: Anti-essentialists of the third wave repeatedly argued that such universalizing claims about women are always false, and function oppressively to normalize particular – socially and culturally privileged – forms of feminine experience. In addition to people who identify as women and men, regardless of which biological sex category they are associated with, there are also people who identify as hijra, two-spirit, mahu, genderqueer, nonbinary, gender fluid, androgynous, agender, and so on. In India, hijra refers to those who reject a male designation by undergoing surgical castration, dressing as women, and occupying an intermediate gender category.
