Abstract
Transgender women in Pakistan, or khwaja siras, continue to suffer human rights abuses that cause many to become Internally Displaced Persons, despite legal protections in their favor. The chapter poses a twofold question to explore this inconsistency. Firstly, it draws from illustrative case study research to identify the discrimination that informs transgender perceptions of persecution and forces them from their homes. Based predominantly on qualitative data, it presents a 5-part typology of cumulative forms of discrimination against khwaja siras in terms of family, employment, housing, education, and healthcare. Importantly, police act as key agents of persecution for them, permitting and participating in their oppression. Secondly, this sociolegal study asks how such widespread discrimination against transgender women can persist notwithstanding legal reforms—a problem of social progress failing to result from legal progress. It finds that human rights protections for the transgender population lack actual implementation due to inaccurate legal wording, low level of trust in legal institutions, and generalized social stigma against the LGBTI community. This analysis revealed not only that mainstream social conservatism mitigates enforcement of LGBTI-friendly laws, but also that such conservatism creates an environment in which their persecution qualifies khwaja siras for, but yet impedes their ability to gain, UN protection as refugees at the international level. The empirical data from this research draws heavily on four comparative life histories of khwaja siras, two who gained refugee status and two who did not, which demonstrate the patterns of persecution against the transgender community in Pakistan.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The UNHCR’s Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (1998, Introduction) defines IDPs as, “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border”. It is a descriptive definition and not a legal one.
- 3.
Matter of Toboso-Alfonso, 20 I. & N. Dec. 819, 820-23 (BIA 1990) (interpreting the term “particular social group” to include sexual orientation).
- 4.
It is not my intent to create a binary between these two groups, as sexual minority status intersects with gender identity minority status in complex and visible ways. This is especially true when the two groups share behaviors, e.g. choice in sexual partners or dress, that receive discriminatory responses.
- 5.
At their requests, interviewees are cited according to the first names they use as transgender women rather than their surnames, to help maintain anonymity and respect their gender expression identities.
- 6.
Most broadly, transgender people can be understood as those who do not conform to traditional gender norms for men and women, with the term referring to gender identity distinctly separate from sexual orientation in the West (Potter et al. 2008, p. 15). They are also people who live as social men or social women, regardless of sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) status, because they feel some degree of discomfort at least some of the time with the sex designation they received at birth (Fee 2010, p. 215).
- 7.
“Hijra” derives from the word “to migrate”. It comes from the notion of migrating in the body, from one gender to another (Hadid 2017). Many mistakenly term khwaja siras, the individuals, as “hijras.” All interviewees clarified that “hijra” refers to either a community of khwaja siras or the culture of that community, not the people who comprise it.
- 8.
Initially, I was concerned that my cisgender, Western status would impede data collection. Nonetheless, I found my outsider status helped because it forced interviewees to answer questions “from the ground up” with ample detail and explanation.
- 9.
These cases were based on replication logic (as opposed to sampling logic) to predict similarities among the life histories of the participants.
- 10.
Stemming from the field of psychology, the idiographic perspective focuses on individual-centered, naturalistic environmental contexts in qualitative research (Luthans and Tim 1982).
- 11.
I initially intended to code interviews for experiences of religious discrimination among khwaja siras. However, my participants didn’t personally express concerns about their diminished access to religious services, mosques, or Islamic education. Some are atheists, some are believers who do not practice, and some pray at home because they are not allowed in gender-segregated mosques.
- 12.
- 13.
There was widespread opposition to two anti-domestic violence bills in particular, the federal Women’s Protection Bill in 2006 and the Women’s Protection Act in the Punjab region in 2016, because making DV a state rather than a family matter was seen by many as “unIslamic” (Burki 2013, p. 88; Khan 2016).
- 14.
If qualified, hijras are now officially to be given preference for civil service jobs to further affirmative action efforts. A transgender job applicant with a 10th-grade education is now deemed to have the same qualifications for government work as a non-transgender person with a bachelor’s degree (Baig 2012).
- 15.
Moreover, in a recent survey, 34% of transgender sex workers who use injectable drugs did not use a condom during intercourse with their last client, and also have intercourse with other drug users (Ming et al. 2016).
- 16.
The word “castrated” is used purposefully because that is the term Pakistani interviewees used for SRS. Some also refer to castrated transgender women as “eunuchs”.
- 17.
The largest hurdle to approval of their asylum cases is providing evidence of their SOGI. Legal practitioners and scholars find that evidence standards in the asylum process are based on transgender practices which are common only in the West. These include: telling family, friends, and colleagues, changing one’s name or sex on legal documents; dressing, behaving or living as a different sex; hormone therapy or surgery. This notion of evidence neglects the reality that outward transitioning is often not a social, medical, financial or legal option in the country of origin, and thus is cannot be depended on as an indicator of self-conceived gender (Bach 2013; Wayne 2016).
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Munir, L.P. (2019). Fleeing Gender: Reasons for Displacement in Pakistan’s Transgender Community. In: Güler, A., Shevtsova, M., Venturi, D. (eds) LGBTI Asylum Seekers and Refugees from a Legal and Political Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91905-8_4
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