Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju 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.^[1][2]

Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju was born on 17 June 1997 in Bangalore, Karnataka into a Telugu/Bengali-speaking family.^[3][4] 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.^[3][4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6] She experienced gender incongruence and depression tracing back to her younger years.^[3][4]

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.

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.^[7] She is reportedly Karnataka’s first transgender doctor.^{[8][3][9][10][11]} After coming out, her content focused on mainstream representation of LGBTQIA+ people and brought awareness around transgender rights.^[5] Her work has highlighted the lack of queer-inclusive information in medical education and transphobia in medical curricula and colleges across India.^[12][13]

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.^[14]

In 2022, she was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 - India as well as Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia - Media, Marketing & Advertising.^[15][8] She was on the Forbes Top 100 Digital Stars Lists in 2022 and 2023.^[16] She was enlisted under the GQ 25 Most Influential Young Indians List in 2021^[17] and GQ 30 Most Influential Young Indians List in 2022.^[18] She has featured on the covers of magazines likes Forbes India, Femina and Elle India.

Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju is one of India’s first transgender people to digitally document her medico-socio-legal transition from male to female.^[8][19] She extensively documented^[3] 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.^[12] 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.^[20] Haldar Gummaraju was among those from the community he consulted to seek information.^[21] He stated that Vidya Dinakaran, a psychotherapist, and Haldar Gummaraju became his “gurus” and “pulled (him) out of darkness.”^[20][22] 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^[21][12] 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.^[23][24][25] “Medical practitioners who claim to be able to “cure” homosexuality should have their licenses revoked,” he said.^[20] The National Medical Commission went on to deem conversion therapy “professional misconduct”^[26][27] 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^[28] 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.