Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju

Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju (born 17 June 1997) is an Indian actress, medical doctor, content creator, and transgender activist known for her works in Television, and Hindi cinema. She began her career as a primary care physician and made her acting debut with Made in Heaven, an Indian web-series that premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 8 March 2019.

Early life
Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju was born on 17 June 1997 in Bangalore, Karnataka into a Telugu/Bengali-speaking family. She was assigned male at birth. She lived as a boy for the first 20 years of her life. Her father Suresh Gummaraju is an engineer, her mother Haima Haldar is an architect, and she has a younger brother Agastya Gummaraju who is a Computer Science engineer. Dr Trinetra completed M.B.B.S. in 2021 and her internship in 2023. She shot for her acting debut in Amazon Prime Original - Made in Heaven 2 entirely during her medical internship. She experienced gender dysphoria as a boy, and began presenting herself as female during college. She would dress up in drag for college fest fashion shows. She came out in 2018 as a transgender woman and changed her first name to Trinetra. She went through sex reassignment surgery in 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand. Her family eventually supported her through the process. She experienced gender incongruence and depression tracing back to her younger years.

Upon completing her internship at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, Haldar Gummaraju moved to Mumbai to pursue content creation and acting full-time in April 2023.

Career
Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju is a primary care physician and received her M.B.B.S. degree from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal. She received a government seat in 2015 via the Karnataka Common Entrance Test (CET), wherein her rank was 163. She is reportedly Karnataka’s first transgender doctor. After coming out, her content focused on mainstream representation of LGBTQIA+ people and brought awareness around transgender rights. Her work has highlighted the lack of queer-inclusive information in medical education and transphobia in medical curricula and colleges across India.

She began her acting career with the Amazon Prime Original - Made in Heaven Season 2, where she played the role of Meher Chaudhry, a wedding planner, becoming the first trans woman to play a main character in an Indian web series.

In 2022, she was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 - India as well as Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia - Media, Marketing & Advertising. She was on the Forbes Top 100 Digital Stars Lists in 2022 and 2023. She was enlisted under the GQ 25 Most Influential Young Indians List in 2021 and GQ 30 Most Influential Young Indians List in 2022. She has featured on the covers of magazines likes Forbes India, Femina and Elle India.

Activism
Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju is one of India’s first transgender people to digitally document her medico-socio-legal transition from male to female. She extensively documented her surgical processes and recovery on YouTube through a series of vlogs. Her Instagram contains information and timelines of her transition as a reference for younger queer and trans people. Her work has documented the lack of queer-inclusive medical education in India and the state of trans rights in the country. She has conducted many sensitisation and awareness sessions at educational institutions and in corporate settings alike.

Given the lack of queer and trans affirming healthcare in India, Haldar Gummaraju created a crowdsourced list of LGBTQIA+ friendly doctors in India called The Rainbow Pill List, accessible on her Instagram bio. It contains over 200 entries.

In Madras High Court case of S Sushma v. Commissioner of Police, Justice N Anand Venkatesh sought to educate himself on LGBTQIA+ issues. Haldar Gummaraju was among those from the community he consulted to seek information. He stated that Vidya Dinakaran, a psychotherapist, and Haldar Gummaraju became his “gurus” and “pulled (him) out of darkness.” In a report filed to the court by Haldar Gummaraju, she elaborated on the need for queer inclusive medical education and for archaic and outdated queerphobic texts to be removed  and spoke of the rampant practice of conversion therapy, whereby medical practitioners claim and attempt to “cure” LGBTQIA+ identities via unscientific and unethical means. Justice Venkatesh passed a series of orders, eventually directing the National Medical Commission to remove queerphobic information from medical curricula in India and to push for the banning of conversion therapy. “Medical practitioners who claim to be able to “cure” homosexuality should have their licenses revoked,” he said. The National Medical Commission went on to deem conversion therapy “professional misconduct” and constituted a working committee to look into queer inclusive medical education.

Upon being denied a girls’ hostel in college despite having changed her legal documents, Haldar Gummaraju via the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru filed a Public Interest Litigation asking the Karnataka High Court to direct public and private institutions to create gender neutral accommodation for trans people, and house according to changed legal documents.