Amidst all the high-level news about terrorism, the internal war in Swat Valley, and various military/foreign-policy questions, other topics in the news sometimes get overlooked.

To wit, Basim Usmani has an informative column up at Comment is Free on a recent ruling by Pakistan’s recently re-constituted Supreme Court, regarding Hijras:

Pakistan’s supreme court recently ruled that all hijras, the Urdu catch-all term for its transvestite, transgender and eunuch community, will be registered by the government as part of a survey that aims to integrate them further into society. The ruling followed a petition by Islamic jurist Dr Mohammad Aslam Khaki, who said the purpose was to “save them from a life of shame”.Khaki’s petition was prompted by a police raid on a hijra colony in Taxila, an ancient city filled with some of the oldest Buddhist ruins in Pakistan. Two of the three judges on the bench that ruled in favour if the hijra petition, chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, were under house arrest for
the better part of the past three years. This, coupled with the clobbering the police gave the lawyers during their demonstrations against the suspension of the judiciary in 2007, makes it easy to regard the hijra ruling as being directed against the police. (link)

...It’s intriguing to me that until just a couple of weeks ago, homosexuality was a crime under Section 377 in India; meanwhile transgendered individuals had, for at least a short while before that old law was overturned, a level of official recognition that few other countries could match. The disparity is of course understandable — Hijras are an endemic part of South Asian culture, while the concept of homosexuality is only recently gaining visibility. Still: does anyone know whether transgender or intergender individuals in any western countries have the equivalent of an “E” (or better, “T”) designation?

Labels: culture, hijra, homosexuality, India, Pakistan, transgender issues

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