Daily Times

LAHORE: Multiple community-based organisations working in the country for extension of constitutionally guaranteed rights to transgender persons have rejected the transgender population reported in the sixth census.

They have noted that the census team had allotted a separate code (3) for enumeration of transgender people on directives of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. But, they have complained, the form used for documentation of data during the census carried no separate box for keeping a count of those who picked the new code for their gender identity.

The population census has counted 10,418 transgender persons in the country – 0.005% of the population. Speaking to Daily Times, Qamar from Trans Action Pakistan (TAP) stated that their organisation had reached out to alliesnationwide and held a session on Wednesday to extensively deliberateon the issue.Qamar said the participating organisations included Trans Action Alliance (TAA), Sindh Transgender Network and Balochistan Alliance for Transgender and Intersex Community. The allied organisations are due to make a detailed media statement on Thursday, they said.

“The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has betrayed the community by not facilitating registration of transgender persons’ data as originally promised. There wasn’t even a separate box on enumeration forms to keep a count of transgender persons,” they said.

They protested that data collectors had been asked to record details of transgender persons on plain paper.

Code 3 had been allotted for enumeration of trangender persons following favourable rulings of High Courts of Peshawar, Lahore, and Islamabad.However, the TAP representative noted that this still did not resolve the issue. “Only one code was allotted to represent transgender men, transgender women and intersex persons. Data collectors did not have enough training to understand the sensitivity and difference of these terms, effectively compromising the data collected,” they said.

Seeing the glass as half full

Meanwhile, the TAP said that while they were disappointed, they are not hopeless. Qamar said they’re optimistic because Pakistan still was a ‘world leader’ when it came to pro-transgender legislation. “It’s clear that there is will on the government’s part,” they said. “Even the Parliamentary Standing Committee has noted its concerns about census results so there are other inaccuracies in the data as well,” they said.

“Number does not matter”

The TAP said that even though they rejected the results it didn’t matter if we they 10,000 or ten hundred thousand. “We deserve equal rights as any other citizen of the country,” they said.

Published in Daily Times, August 31^st 2017.