A Woman Robbed: Bodies, Binaries, and the Banishment of Trans Femininity Across India and the West

This thesis dissects the Western digital discourse around the “divine feminine” and its presence on TikTok. It argues that its presence as a spiritual reclamation project to help women lean into their sacred feminine selves conceals an ideological project pursuing patriarchal, colonial, and anti-feminist ideas. Through a qualitative digital analysis of more than forty videos collected in February 2026, this piece of work showcases the aesthetics of the divine feminine and other forms of discursive choices concerning womb-centered spirituality, appraisal of reproductive domesticity, and its visual language of softness and whiteness. Using this, the thesis looks at how these elements, when operationalized, serve patriarchal gender norms under the garb of sacred truth. Furthermore, this thesis argues that this essentialist template materializes a structural exclusion of transgender and non-binary bodies from discussions of sacred femininity not through explicit hostility, but through redefining femininity, rendering gender diverse expressions inconceivable within the discourse’s metaphysics. This analysis is put in a dialogue with the scholarship studying the Hijra community of South Asia to reveal how the univocal vocabulary of the divine feminine space operates on the same register as colonial and patriarchal laws that criminalized gender-diverse sacred traditions. It also demonstrates that the exclusion of transgender bodies in this digital discourse runs parallel with the colonial methods that were used to incriminate the Hijra culture. The thesis contributes to feminist digital studies, transgender studies, and postcolonial gender scholarship.