Transgender couple undergoes sex reassignments — then ties knot for what may be India's first 'rainbow wedding'

A transgender couple who underwent sex reassignments got married recently in what may be India's first "rainbow wedding," The Guardian reported.

The bride, 38-year-old Tista Das, and the groom, 40-year-old Dipan Chakravarthy, took part in a traditional Bengali ceremony in Kolkata, the paper said.

'We are out of the gender box'

"We are feeling awesome actually," Das told the Guardian. "We are out of the gender box, and we love to be an exception, and we think this is a strong bond between us."

The bride also told the paper, "It's a bond of love. It's a bond of liberty also. And this is the solidarity of our souls."

Das noted to The Guardian of a lengthy battle for "identity as a woman" and that "I was not even considered as a human being in this brutal society."

A transgender friend of the couple, Anurag Maitrayee, told the paper that "despite all the oddities and all the atrocities, I have seen how Tista and her journey from a man into a woman and her relation, emotion, love with a person with a soul whose journey is from a woman to a man."

More from The Guardian:

India's supreme court recognized [transgenders] as a third gender in a historic 2014 ruling. On Tuesday, India's lower house passed a transgender bill to enshrine the rights of transgender people in law. The bill is being discussed in the upper house.

But the community as well as human rights activists have raised concerns that the bill's language is unclear over whether it allows transgender people to self-identify.

"The Transgender Persons Bill should be a remarkable achievement for a long-persecuted community, but the current draft fails on the fundamental right to self-identify," Human Rights Watch South Asia director Meenakshi Ganguly said last month, according to the outlet. "It's crucial that the law be in line with the supreme court's historic ruling on transgender rights."

Watch Kolkata's first transgender couple Tista Das and Dipan Chakraborty take their wedding vowsyoutu.be