Let’s play a riddle today.
You laugh, your children clap,
Some people wink, some give a catcall
You let me do just three jobs, dance on weddings, beg on roads and escorting in darkness.
Who am I…?
Wow! Everybody guessed out, I am a transgender living in the land of pure deprived of all rights.
When a transgender baby is born he is welcomed to hell, where that child will burn till his last breath. The gender development decides for such children that they will be deprived of basic rights like living with parents, siblings, education and basic protection till adolescence.
In South Asia, transgender people’s only way of survival is in their communal living. They adopt children who have to leave home out of rejection. The very word ‘hijra’ derived from Arabic word ‘hijr’ means “leaving ones tribe”. They are generally born with male physiology very few are born with inter-sex variations. These children are identified at birth by their community and since at very early age face extreme hatred. Sending them to a school is out of question. They are generally out for adoption to the guru of a transgender community. Where they have to live with people stranger to them, in extreme poverty.
In 2009, the Supreme Court passed the order to include such people as third gender in the national identity card. In 2012, they were given the right to get registered on CNIC. A three-member bench of the Supreme Court had ruled that transgender people be entitled to rights guaranteed by constitution to all the citizens. However, the NADRA under the Ministry of Interior asked them to undergo a humiliating medical examination. It’s being more than four years that most of them are without any identity card. The reason cited was the cards would be issued to only those with biological parents or with full properly documented adoption.
Imagine the system is alien to the fabrication of our society! Are these children ever properly adopted with documentation or are they left at the door of transgender guru to live in seclusion for the rest of their life? Their rights just remained on paper.
The transgender people are facing HIV/AIDS due to null medical counselling, communal living and wider sexual network. Even for animals there are hospitals and vets, but the third gender of human race is deprived of medical care.
Alisha, 23, a transgender activist, was shot seven times on May 2016, left in critical condition needing emergency surgery at the Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar. While the hospital staff wasted hours in deciding over which ward she has to go. Her other friends who escorted her to hospital accused medics of sexual harassment. She passed away and left for a better place than this world.
The mindset of educated class is stuck centuries back into the whirlpool of humiliation and degradation of transgender people. Who decided that they are lesser human beings? How many schools are willing to accept these children? How many parents will let their kids to befriend with a transgender class fellow? How many of us will give jobs to them and how many of us will at least stop laughing at their sight and will tell our kids to treat transgender people with some respect?
Nobody else can pass the law to change our mindset; only and only we can change this spiral of humiliation towards them.
For the sake of being a human being treat them with respect, accept them as a part of our human clan. To bring a change be that change first.
According to an estimate 34% of transgender attempt suicide, some are bullied and some are harassed publicly (including physical abuses and insult) while others avoid going out in public due to fear. “Being a transgender isn’t a choice but choosing to hurt someone is”.
The writer is a children’s right activist and a former educationist