NALSAR Hyderabad gives out India’s first Gender Neutral Degree

The University of Law, NALSAR, respected Anindita Mukherjee’s request when she asked for a gender neutral degree.

​NALSAR Hyderabad is possibly the first university in India that has granted a graduation certificate with the gender neutral honorific ‘Mx” (pronounced as ‘mux’ or ‘mix’) instead of Mr., Ms., or Mrs. The degree was conferred on law student Anindita Mukherjee who did not wish her transcript to reflect her gender.

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The honorific Mx has seen widespread use in UK in recent years and Oxford University in particular has a formal procedure to request a gender title.

Mukherjee told The Indian Express, “The university sent us our provisional transcripts and asked us to email back within a week with any corrections we might want in them. I responded with a request for the honorific to be corrected. I felt that there was no reason why my transcript needed to mention my gender. Besides, a law university is a space where we are constantly discussing justice, rights and identity, so I wanted to see if the university would walk the talk on that point. Mx being a gender-neutral honorific that has been gaining traction, I asked if my transcript could refer to me as ‘Mx Anindita Mukherjee’ instead of ‘Ms Anindita Mukherjee’.”

The University did not see any reason to deny the request. NALSAR Convenor of the Academics and Examinations committee, Amita Dhanda, told The Indian Express, “We as an institution have also not taken a policy decision yet but we found nothing objectionable in the student’s request. In the near future, the university will also be exploring formulation or implementation of such a policy.”

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