Nalsar Hyderabad has possibly granted India’s first ever graduation certificate with the gender-neutral honourific “Mx”, instead of “Mr”, “Ms”, “Miss” or “Mrs”.
Nalsar convenor of the academics and examinations committee Prof Amita Dhanda commented: “We as a university of law, under a progressive vice chancellor, interpret rules in harmony with social and scientific understanding.
“It is due to this perspective that the request of the student was accepted by the exam department as a matter of fact everyday decision.
“Our progressive approach has helped us take this small step to recognise gender fluidity and self identification.”
Legally India reached out to Nalsar 2015 graduate Anindita Mukherjee to ask about the process involved in getting the Mx honourific official on the graduation transcript.
Mukherjee explained:
'Mx.' is an honorific that does not disclose the gender of the person it is used for. Those who do not gender identify, or those who do not wish their gender to be discernible from the way in which they are addressed prefer to use it.
I asked the NALSAR administration to use Mx. because I did not see any reason why my transcripts or academic records needed to carry markers of my gender identity, especially given that I am still uncertain as to how I wish to identify.
Answering about the process of convincing the administration to use the Mx honourific, Mukherjee said:
It is almost anti-climatic, given one would think there'd be strenuous struggle involved in getting an administration to make such a decision, but the way in which it all happened was very matter-of-fact.
The university sent out emails with our provisional transcripts and asked us to mail back with any corrections we might desire; I replied asking for the honorific before my name to be changed from 'Ms.' to 'Mx.' and it was done.
The department even called me up to check if I would like the change to be reflected in other certificates, and what pronouns they should use instead of 'she' (most commonly, 'ze' or 'they', in case you're wondering)!
I'm glad the university took this decision, and did it without any heartburn.
“While this is all, at one level, rather superficial,” noted Mukherjee, “absent any concrete efforts to increase access for trans* students, it is nonetheless a recognition of gender fluidity, and that's a good place to begin.
“I am hoping more students who feel uncomfortable with the gender binary will start to make similar demands upon the systems within which they function. Moving forward, it would be great if NALSAR (and all other organisations, actually) would ask students what pronouns and honorifics they prefer, without leaving it to individual students to make specific requests.”
The honorific Mx has seen widespread use in the UK in recent years, according to Wikipedia, and Oxford University in the UK, for instance, has a formal procedure to request a gender title, stating on its website:
The titles Mr, Miss, Ms, Mrs are social titles and have no legal status. If you do not wish to use the title assigned to your record, please contact your College Office to have your title amended from this list. You may also choose NULL (no title) or Mx (a gender-neutral title). You do not need to provide any documentary evidence to support your request. You may choose any of these options, regardless of your legal sex or preferred gender.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) this year reportedly considered adding Mx to its pages.
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This is indeed excellent, though
Seriously, do you ever move beyond the useless competition and futile comparison? I'm sure the majority of the people at NLSIU don't give a shit about their college rank. Neither does the majority at NALSAR. It's just people like you with nothing better to do who start such unwarranted slug-fests.
get a like..have a beer..!!
Also, way to go NALSAR.. hope other instiutions follow the same. small steps towards making big changes. kudos.
Sir,
I can not bear this anymore. All am learning is jurisprudence. NO LAW. [...] Spare Nalsar. Is it a crime to love tax law. Is it a crime to love corporate law? We have no GUEST LECTURES/3 DAY COURSES ON CORP LAW. NO Conferences. Mooting takes a hit because we get free at 4Pm. No research papers. The Corp law culture of Nalsar has vanished.
Guest faculty and Commercial courses are discarded like anything.
You are the best teacher in Nalsar currently. Please understand that while am learning law and poverty, a student in NLS is doing an arbitration course in his first year.
STOP WITH THE JURISPRUDENCE AND TEACH LAW
where are the corp law courses and seminars?
where the conferences ?
where are the guest lectures?
I also don't see how an emphasis on legal philosophy precludes anyone from pursuing their interest in corporate and taxation laws. Those courses are taught in the 3rd year and in recent times there have been quite a few guest courses in those areas as well. In fact, we hosted Allen & Overy's 3-day programme on corporate and financial laws in March 2015. We have offered one-credit courses in areas such as private equity, the law of patents and securities regulation among other fields. Some of the best transactional lawyers among my immediate peers were also keen students of jurisprudence during their undergraduate years. Furthermore, NLSIU has its regular courses on corporate laws and commercial arbitration in the 3rd year, so you appear to be misinformed on that count. I would be happy to discuss your concerns in person if you are interested.
Given that your resources (and goodwill) are limited, yes - the two are mutually exclusive.
It is not in my place to advice you on where that hour might be better spent. However, in the context of grave issues such as the inaccessibility of law schools due to high fees, exclusionary architecture of CLAT, marginalisation of students along caste lines, etc etc - I submit that the propriety of the honorific used in our certificates is not newsworthy.
Just a friendly suggestion.
Just because you don't understand why such issues are important, doesn't mean that they're not important to others whose voices are often under-represented in the media, just as gay marriage probably wasn't an important issue to the majority of people only a decade ago.
I stand by my decision to cover this and you always have the option not to read this or other articles if you don't like the article. In the bigger picture, this one article doesn't make any difference to our larger editorial priorities, and on some of the issues you mention we do cover though we could admittedly do more.
Potentially exclusionary architecture of CLAT, only recently we did a lot of data journalism, including:
www.legallyindia.com/Pre-law-student/girls-did-less-well-in-clat-2015
Diversity & exclusionary structure of online CLAT and Hindi CLAT proposal:
www.legallyindia.com/tag/diversity
High fees we've covered from time to time, though could do more:
www.legallyindia.com/tag/tuition-fees
Caste issues would absolutely love to cover, though those are actually really tough to do for a variety of reasons.
If you think there's something specific worth covering, let us know, but you have to understand that a vague brief of 'write about diversity' is hard work to take action on. If there's a newshook or the like, it becomes much easier to write about...
Also, who initiated this? Mukherjee or Dhanda?
The article explains that Mukherjee requested it.
Dhanda, I believe, is on the academic council, and was part of the (I assume brief) discussions about whether Mx should be permitted or not...
007's boss.
Foreign trend includes Mr/Ms/Mrs (traditional sense) and Mx/[no honorific] (in some places now). So no matter what you put, it would be following a foreign trend.
Awith even indian passports allowing for a third gender, law schools are a bit late to react.what do people think of women who write Dr.(Mrs) Mukherjee? the medical council should discourage or van that. if Maggi can get banned, anything can.
And Kian, for months we've been trying to get you to cover the mess that Dhanda and Faizan have created in NALSAR. It takes you 30 mins to run this story but months apparently to write of a) student unrest on campus regarding increasing authoritarianism inside faculty meetings and with students perpetrated by the duo and b) our friggin MPL points for Jessup and Man Lachs. You're something, really.
1. We write negative stories about a college, you complain. We write positive stories and you complain we don't write enough negative stories.
2. I really don't remember you telling us about any of that, not sure how or if you did. I'm pretty sure we'd have been happy cover it... Send us an anon message or a WhatsApp or Fb message in confidence :)
In terms of accounts, what's wrong at nalsar? They're actually more transparent than any other law school I know, publishing fairly full accounts in the RTI section on the website.
Also, we filed RTIs for accounts of all NLUs a few years ago and got GNLU and one or so others, most were a pain in the ass about it. Might be a project worth doing again though.
a. Check how much money NALSAR has spent on preparing its infra for MBA Course & advertisement and how much was the return?
b. BALLB are cross subsidizing the useless MBA courses which is a great drain on NALSAR resources.
c. Why was Mr. [...] given permanent appointment even when his reviews have been pretty scathing. Mercy was not shown to other prof. who got much less critical reviews.
d. Class strengthen has been increased to 120. Why has the college not recruited new faculty members to ensure that teacher: student does not go down.
e. [...] Most senior faculty members have expressed their frustration in the manner in which faculty meeting is conducted
You want more...pick any random 4-5 year or past two years graduate and they would be happy to tell you more...
It is a bit depressing that this is the best any university does though and I get excited about it - is NLS publishing full accounts?
NLS on the other hand has this -
www.nls.ac.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35&Itemid=21
Transparent, no ? I think they are the only law school that does this, no other law school publishes its accounts. As I mentioned above, time to dig out those RTI templates, dude.
This is just another example of the distance between NALSAR's pretensions and its achievements. A well reported story, and newsworthy. But probably not for the reasons NALSAR intended.
www.livemint.com/Politics/tlanaZBAUmGahCL1GfK5WO/Nalsar-goes-gender-neutral-with-Mx.html
You're the closest thing to our NLU tabloid (with admirable research and dedication)
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