Will Caitlyn Jenner change the world for transwomen?

For over a year, Bruce Jenner - known to some as the 1976 world-record-setting Olympic hero, and known to some as everyone's punching bag from that Kardashian reality show - was hounded by the paparazzi. They followed him everywhere, from neighbourhood restaurants to doctors' appointments, catcalling and shoving cameras in his face. He was the subject of ridicule on television shows and stand-up acts.

In April, he sat down to a two-hour interview with Diane Sawyer, a tell-all piece in which this former athlete - winner of the decathlon in the Olympics, no less, and therefore a paragon of male sporting achievement - frequently broke down, as he spoke of his struggle with his gender identity. It was unthinkable - a sporting hero, brand ambassador for various health foods and fitness products, father to six biological children, a man who was often pictured hoisting his children above his head - had come out as a woman.

And when Bruce became Caitlyn Jenner, she did so in grand style - breaking the internet with her Vanity Fair cover, which showed this stylish sexagenarian posing seductively in a white basque, and prompted former basketball star Dennis Rodman's declaration that he would like to take Caitlyn out on a date. When Caitlyn Jenner took to Twitter, she set another world record, this time for the fastest to reach one million followers - it took her only four hours.

Jenner's story has suddenly drawn the world's attention to our collective insensitivity towards transgender and intersex people.

Yes, there have been significant successes - there are transgender models, transgender talk-show hosts, and hell, actor Laverne Cox graced the cover of TIME magazine last year - but there have also been ugly stories of transgender children being bullied in schools, transgender teens committing suicide, and transwomen being attacked in restaurants for using the women's restroom.

In India, the situation is even bleaker.

It was only in April this year that a Supreme Court ruling accorded recognition to trans people as "the third gender". Ironically, the US visa of activist Amruta Alpesh Soni, who received her passport with her gender marked "T" after the ruling, was put on hold, since the US consulate did not have the "T" option on its visa application form.Worse is our treatment of athletes whose gender has been cast in doubt.

Take the case of Santhi Soundararajan, the silver-medal-winning athlete at the Asian Games in Doha and gold-medal-winner at the South Asian Games in Colombo. She underwent several gender verification tests, and was finally determined to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. More than two decades before she was tested, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martinez-Patiño had challenged the prevailing norm of compulsory gender tests for all female athletes at competitive games. When South African athlete Caster Semenya faced a similar situation, her entire country got behind her, providing her with lawyers to argue her case and get the ban against her lifted. In Santhi's case, not only was she stripped of her medals, but the Indian sports federations washed their hands of her. The Tamil Nadu government gave her a television set and a sum of Rs 15 lakh for her services to the nation. But neither the state nor the central government would give her a job, or take her on as an athletics coach, and the last that was heard of her was that she was earning a daily wage at a brick kiln near her home. She had earlier been recruited by the Tamil Nadu police, only to be rejected after the results of the gender test were known.

And then, there was the case of Pinki Pramanik, the Asian Games gold medal-winning track and field athlete who was accused of rape, and whose gender test was uploaded online.

The video went viral, and calls were made for the arrest of the person responsible, but no action was taken. Pramanik had to spend 25 days in jail following the accusation. At a press conference following her release on bail, she told reporters she was "treated like an animal" at the hospital that administered the gender test and alleged sexual harassment and torture in police custody. Pramanik too lost her job with the Railways.

For decades, with the odd exception, our films have been typecasting trans people. The latest of these was Shankar's bilingual I, which drew flak for its portrayal of a transgender makeup artist.

The Tamil Nadu government has been relatively progressive in its treatment of trans people, issuing voter identity cards with gender marked "T" more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruling. The government also allocated land for trans people to build their own houses, purportedly to spare them from prejudice and the difficulties of finding houses to rent. However, the allocated land was in Natarajapuram, more than three kilometres from the nearest town, and its future residents were given only Rs 30,000 to build homes from nothing. The idea of separate housing for trans people by the government could just as easily be seen as segregation and ghetto-isation.

Transgender rights in India have a long way to go, as they do in the rest of the world.

Among the issues we need to sort out range from accommodation in hostels and use of public toilets, to the recognition and legalisation of their relationships.India claims to be progressive on this front, and we often speak of talk show host Rose, author and actor "Living Smile" Vidya, and actor-dancer Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, all of whom are high-profile activists for the transgender cause.

But we have been as unsuccessful as the rest of the world in integrating trans people into our society.

As a community, trans people have rarely found acceptance, even in countries that claim to be liberal.

One wonders whether a celebrity gender transition such as Caitlyn Jenner's can change the world for trans people.