GENDER RIGHTS VS PERSONAL LAWS: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES transgender communities, families that include the very old and the very young, single women headed households. Similarly, can partnerships be understood as going beyond marriage as a sacrament? In this connection, in the wake of the debate on UCC opening up following the Triple Talaq judgement, the Law Commission of India in 2018 hurriedly invited detailed submissions from citizens on formulating a Uniform Civil Code (Ohri, 2018). While the debates over the years as well as the emerging voices from the margins had complicated the situation for claiming rights, the landmark NALSA judgement of 2014 with its verdict that upheld the transgender persons’ right to self-identified gender and directed the Central and State governments to grant legal recognition of gender identity such as male, female, or third gender, was extremely useful to bring a coherence to the debate on gender justice. Several women’s rights and queer rights organisations made submissions that proceeded from existing laws, such as the Special Marriage Act, inheritance and succession laws, and adoption regulations. In addition, within the present context, due to its absence within existing law, civil partnership contracts and a proposal to define different forms of familial/living arrangements was also proposed. Some versions of these are also circulated for public discussion (Orinam, 2019). The criticality of these debates on intimacies and families gaining strength was evident in several recent judgements of the Supreme Court. In holding that privacy is a constitutionally protected right, the Court states that it includes at its core the preservation of personal intimacies, the sanctity of family life, marriage, procreation, the home and sexual orientation. Also making clear that privacy was not an elitist construct, but a powerful guarantee for the sanctity of marriage, the liberty of procreation, the choice of family life and the dignity of being for persons irrespective of social strata or economic well-being. In another judgement on granting maternity leave for a woman’s biological child when she had already availed maternity leave for non-biological children of her husband, the court said that the predominant notion of a family as an unchanging unit with a father, mother and children, neglected the varied circumstances that can result in change of people’s familial structures, where several such families do not fit this expectation. They further defined families that assume the form of domestic unmarried partnerships, queer relationships and single-parent households (Bhaskar, 2017; Rai, 2022). These observations from the highest court of the land 95