Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Sarah Gill, who is Pakistan’s first (known) transgender doctor. An articulate spokesperson for her community, the one thing she doesn’t want is for detractors of the transgender rights movement in Pakistan to write it off as a ‘Western Agenda.’ Nothing could be further from the truth, she says, while pointing out that historically Hijras/ Khwaja sirahs (the terms themselves are fluid) were not relegated to the social fringes and even served prominently in positions of relative power (often in royal courts) with a great deal more social acceptance than you see today. It was only with the advent of colonialism, she argues, that this community lost its status. 

This is not to say that pre-colonial South Asia was some kind of paradise for the gender-diverse, who were of course often stigmatized and subjected to discrimination and even violence. However, the systemic marginalization that we accept as a given today was certainly not the norm, and South Asia is by no means unique in that respect. The contemporary West-centric debate on gender fluidity and identity – with all the pronouns, politicization and polarisation - ignores that cultures around the world have addressed and acknowledged gender diversity in ways that are largely forgotten today. Native American traditions exalted such people, regarding them as possessing ‘two spirits” and thus being doubly blessed, and when colonisers arrived in the ‘New World’ they were aghast at ‘ungodly’ native traditions recording up to five genders. Similar practices are found among Central American peoples such as the Zapotec, the Incas and even the warlike Aztecs. Further back, millennia-old Sumerian and Akkadian texts refer to a class of transgender/ transvestite priests, a tradition that carried on into the Greek era and beyond. 

The bugis people of Indonesia took it to another level by instituting a class of spiritual leaders who were described by a Portuguese Bishop thus: “They grow no hair on their beards, dress in a womanly fashion, and grow their hair long and braided; they imitate [women’s] speech because they adopt all of the female gestures and inclinations.” Known as the Bissu, these transgender ‘priests’ were exalted because the bugis reckoned that “As the bissu bring together woman and man in one person, they can mediate between humans and gods through blessings.”

Such was their influence that they prevailed upon the temporal rulers of the bugis to accept Islam en masse, to the great chagrin of missionaries like the aforementioned Portugese priest.

Social and legal discourse from the Islamic world also point towards the awareness and relative acceptability of transgenders; the Persian encyclopedist Zakariya al-Qazwini (born 1283 AD) notes the existence of five genders : woman, masculine woman, khunthā (the Arab word from transgender), effeminate man or man. Much of this attitude sprung from the early Islamic strides in medical science, and the Ottoman historian al-Muhibbi writes of a case in 1545 AD Damascus of a boy named Ali who underwent corrective gender reassignment surgery to be legally declared a woman named Aliyya who was then allowed to marry a man.

In pursuance of equity and justice, we must take care not to present our arguments from a purely Western perspective while ignoring rich and varied local traditions.

Zarrar Khuhro

The list goes on and on, but now let’s return to South Asia and the British: with their brains hardwired to think only in binaries, and deeply indoctrinated in the ‘civilising’ white male supremacist complex that provides the ideological basis for European imperialism, the British viewed the Hijra community as abominations, as threats to the moral underpinnings of the Imperial order and a problem that must be solved. But elimination must first be preceded by demonization and registration and so Hijras (the accepted nomenclature at the time) were erroneously labeled ‘professional sodomites’ and accused of all manners of criminality, including the abduction and forced castration/initiation of children (a dangerous trope that survives even today). Then, authorities compiled ‘eunuch registers’ where the details of members of this community were noted on a district level. In 1865, R. Simson, the Raj’s most powerful bureaucrat in the (then) North-West Frontier Province, wrote a letter to the Inspector General of Police, making it clear that the agenda of his administration was “to prevent an increase in the number of Eunuchs and thus gradually lead to their extinction.” 

This process culminated in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 where the very existence of hijras was criminalized and restrictions were placed on their manner of dressing and means of livelihood. Taken together, this ensured legal, cultural and economic erasure. 

There were also those in the contemporary Indian milieu who supported draconian measures and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan notably called for Hijras to be confined to “certain localities… within which they must reside during the remainder of their natural lives, not going beyond the limits thereof.” The Indian Reform league’s Lala Badri Prasad also suggested that  “a certain island or hill should be selected where they [‘eunuchs’] may be inhabited, and all intercourse with towns or cities intercepted.” This is also when the coded language used by this community, known as ‘Hijra farsi’ (references to this can be found as early as the 1800s) developed into a ‘secret’ language, the structure and meaning of which remains a closely guarded secret.

After independence, writes historian Jessica Hinchy, attitudes in Pakistan and India have been shaped by “middle-class gender and sexual morality, which was constructed in the context of colonial rule, but was not simply a mimicry of colonial norms.”

The CTA was removed in Pakistan in 1948 and recently we have seen the passage of The Transgender Persons Act which has gone some distance to provide relief and rights to this community. But at the same time, as transgender activists become more vocal, violence against transgenders has also increased.

Particularly troubling is the case of Alesha, a 23 year-old transgender who was shot several times in Peshawar. Taken to the hospital, Alesha’s life could have been saved if not for the hospital staff wasting time in arguing over whether she should be taken to the male or the female ward. As this fruitless debate ensued, Alesha lost her life from the lack of medical treatment. That violence in turn sparks more impassioned activism and Dr Sarah, for one, remembers it as a moment that made her realise that it was important for her to not only pursue a professional career but to also raise her (relatively privileged voice) for the rights and protection of her community. 

Ultimately, we must realise that as societies evolve so do attitudes and laws. And in pursuance of equity and justice we must take care not to present our arguments from a purely Western perspective while ignoring rich and varied local traditions.

— Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News.

Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro