This talk shares a fragment from my research with thirunangai activists in Tamil Nadu, South India, and some of their ontologies of sex, language, and activism that make productive and creative demands on the sex/gender distinction used widely in feminist and queer research. Thirunangai ontologies treat genital excision not only as a way to bring bodies into alignment with a psychic experience of gender, nor gender as a kind of discursive citation. Rather, an act of corporeal transformation is both a material and spiritual transition for which a person can be held to account by wider society and be asked to furnish proof. Analysing a poem by thirunangai activist Kalki Subramaniam alongside ethnographic vignettes, I offer new ways of considering gender and the body, and therefore the stakes of gender transition.