Have you ever seen a corpse deformed by physical violence? With burns over 80% of the body? I did. When I was sixteen. I can’t describe the horror. It was a transgender woman whose identity had been reduced to just another number. Her skin no longer hid her bones and the cruelty her body revealed made me look away. Her crime had been refusal of the lascivious advances of her harassers. Even more horrifying was the fact that the culprits walked away without consequences. The undocumented existence of the victim slipped through the cracks left wide open by the state; for the crime of being born different is deemed far worse than barbarianism.
Her story is indicative of many stories I hear. Whether her or Aashi—another transgender whose story symbolizes the plight of the transgender community in Pakistan—the struggles are sadly similar. From being forced to leave their homes as children, to making their living singing, dancing, or worse; life is never simple for them. Aashi found respite through the kindness of a locally-run NGO, which helped her get work as a tailor in a stitching facility at Fountain House, which is a shelter home for the Khawaja Sira (transgender) community of Lahore.
Who is to be blamed for banishing an entire faction of our society into the darkest corners? A secret so well-concealed that even I went for fifteen years of my life without knowing that a third gender existed! From the state sponsored census to the citizenship records - the stats are always reported in binary genders. This discrimination doesn’t have a single cause or a specific point of origin; it’s a toxic cycle of intolerance and denial that keeps tightening the noose against the entire transgender community.
It starts at the top where until recently, transgender people were not recognized as citizens of the state. They lived without an identification card, their presence never making its way into the government records because they couldn’t identify themselves as simply ‘male’ or ‘female.’ From there it trickles down to the denial of equal opportunities – from health to education to employment – transgender persons find each door sealed tightly shut. Compounded by social taboos, the question mark that it puts on the prestige of families, the fate of a transgender child gets sealed in abandonment. With no one to raise a voice for them and no one to teach them that they too have rights, this vicious cycle keeps on repeating itself.
The efforts of NGOs and people who have been able to rise above the stereotypes have stepped up the process of integration and acceptance for transgenders, with the biggest breakthrough being the recent legislation introducing a ‘third gender’ on national identification which paved the way for the transgender community finally being issued identity cards. Taking strength from this first ray of light, these efforts need to be continued, even though we still have a long way to go before this marginalized faction becomes a part of mainstream society.