In September, Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar announced Supreme Court will hire two transgender people in an effort to give equal rights to the transgender community. The CJP also directed the National Database and Registration Authority to issue national identity cards to all members of the transgender community, giving them the right to identify as a separate gender for the first time.
But the transgender community still faces many problems, getting brutally killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa and other parts of the country. Since 2015, some sixty transgender people have been killed in KPK.
In 2012, the Supreme Court of Pakistan granted the transgender people the right to have national identity cards and emphasized their inalienable right to education, but the provincial governments have not worked toward the transgender community’s education. School admission forms only have two gender options: male and female.
The parents of transgender people disown them. Due to lack of employment opportunities, they dance and sing in public spaces to earn a living. The police, who should protect the transgender people, beats them up when they go to a police station in Pakistan to file an incident report. In 2017, Saudia Arabia banned transgender people from performing Umrah and Hajj, coming between them and their God.
Pakistan must provide equal opportunities to the transgender community, allocating quotas for them in employment and educational institutions. They’re as worthy as the rest of us.
Raza Ullah Khan is a student of Law at Islamia College University, Peshawar. He can be reached at [email protected].