By Ayesha Bashir
Master of Arts (MA)
English Literature
Pakistan’s Transgender Community:
Disregarded Yet Forced Into Survival
:پاکستان میں خواجہ سراوٴں کی کمیونٹی
نظر انداز، زندہ رہنے پر مجبور
पाकिस्तान का ट्रांसजेंडर समुदाय:
उपेक्षित, जीवित रहने के लिए मजबूर होना
A Deep Investigation into the Lives, Struggles, and Resilience of Pakistan’s Khawaja Sira
There is a child somewhere in Pakistan right now perhaps eight years old, perhaps ten — who feels something that has no name in their household. They move a little differently. They speak a little softer. They reach for the wrong things, according to everyone around them. And slowly, quietly, the family begins to pull away. Not all at once. First the silence. Then the whispers. Then, one day — a door closed behind them that never opens again.
This is how the story of most Pakistani transgender individuals begins. Not with violence, not with law, but with something far more personal and far more devastating the withdrawal of love from the very people who were supposed to offer it unconditionally. And from that first rejection, everything that follows becomes a battle: for food, for shelter, for a kind word, for the right to simply be alive without apology.
Pakistan is home to an estimated 500,000 transgender people — though many advocates believe the real number is far higher, because when a community lives in the shadows, it is also uncounted. They are known as khawaja siras, as hijras, as moorat terms that carry history, culture, and in another era, even reverence.
In the crowded bazaars of Lahore, along the dusty streets of Karachi, and in the narrow alleys of Peshawar, there exists a community that has inhabited the subcontinent for thousands of years yet remains, to this day, one of the most systematically excluded groups in Pakistani society.
They are people who were born into a world that did not make room for them. They grew up in families that, in most cases, pushed them out. They were denied schooling, denied employment, denied housing, denied healthcare, and denied dignity. And yet, despite all of this, they survive. They carve lives out of the margins. They form their own families — gurus and chelays, teachers and students — and they build communities that provide the warmth and belonging the rest of society refused to offer.
A Community Rejected by Society
The story of Pakistan’s transgender community does not begin in 1947, nor even with the arrival of Islam in the subcontinent. The hijra community has existed on this land for more than a thousand years. Historically, during the Mughal era, khawaja siras held significant social roles — they served as guardians of royal harems, as trusted advisors to kings, as performers, as spiritual figures. Their presence was not shameful; it was woven into the cultural and social fabric of South Asian civilization.
The degradation of their status began during the British colonial era, when the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 classified hijras as a “criminal tribe,” effectively criminalizing their very existence. This colonial legislation accomplished something devastating: it transformed a recognized social group into a stigmatized, criminalized underclass. The communities that had previously shown them some deference even reverence were taught by colonial law and Victorian morality to see them as deviant, dangerous, and unworthy.
When Pakistan was created in 1947, the laws changed but the stigma did not. The new Islamic republic inherited both the British legal framework and a deeply conservative social culture that had little tolerance for gender nonconformity.
In Pakistan, the family is everything. It is the source of identity, protection, economic support, and social standing. To be rejected by one’s family is to be cut off from nearly every formal resource and informal safety net that Pakistani society offers.
A transgender child in Pakistan typically grows up masking their identity out of fear. When their gender identity becomes impossible to hide whether in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood the consequences are swift and brutal. Parents routinely beat their transgender children. Siblings disown them. In many cases, particularly in rural areas, family members threaten violence or death to “protect” family honor. Even in cases where outright violence is not threatened, the message is clear: you do not belong here.
The result is that most khawaja siras in Pakistan leave or are forced out of their homes at a young age. Many are teenagers, sometimes younger. Alone in a world that has already decided they do not matter, they gravitate toward one of the only institutions that will accept them: the dera, or household, of an established khawaja sira guru.
The guru-chelay (teacher-disciple) system is the primary social structure of the transgender community in Pakistan. A guru takes in young, homeless khawaja siras, provides shelter, food, training, and protection. In return, chelays give a portion of their earnings to the guru and follow the household’s rules. This system has both its strengths and its profound flaws it creates community and belonging, but it can also enable exploitation, with some gurus extracting excessive earnings from their chelays or using their authority in coercive ways.
Still, for countless transgender individuals, the dera is the only home they have ever known. It is the place where they were finally, for the first time, called by the name and pronoun that matched who they actually were.
A History of Legal Invisibility
Before the landmark Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018, Pakistan’s transgender community existed in a legal void. They could not easily obtain CNICs (Computerized National Identity Cards) that reflected their gender identity. Without a CNIC, a person cannot open a bank account, register to vote, own property, get a SIM card, access most formal employment, or enroll children in school. In effect, they were citizens without citizenship present in the country but invisible to the state.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan’s 2009 ruling was a turning point. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry ordered that khawaja siras be registered as a “third gender” by NADRA (National Database and Registration Authority), that they be included in the census, and that their rights to inheritance and social protection be recognized. This ruling was genuinely significant — it was one of the first times the Pakistani state formally acknowledged the existence and rights of the transgender community.
The 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act went further. It allowed individuals to self-identify their gender, prohibited discrimination in employment, education, and healthcare, and called for the establishment of special protection cells. On paper, it was landmark legislation.
But laws on paper and laws in practice are two very different things in Pakistan. The community celebrated the 2018 Act, and then waited for its implementation waiting that, in many cases, continues to this day.
Limited Access to Employment: When Every Door Is Closed
One of the most concrete expressions of societal rejection is economic exclusion. Pakistan’s transgender community faces discrimination at virtually every level of the formal employment market.
It begins, for most, with education. Many khawaja siras are forced out of their families and therefore out of school before they can complete their basic education. Those who remain in school face relentless harassment from classmates and, often, from teachers. The psychological toll of daily humiliation causes many to drop out voluntarily. The result is that a large proportion of Pakistan’s transgender community has limited formal education, which further restricts their access to skilled employment.
But education alone would not open most doors. Even highly educated transgender individuals face blatant discrimination in hiring. Employers routinely reject transgender applicants. Those who are hired often face hostile workplaces harassment from coworkers, humiliation from managers, and pressure to hide or deny their identity. Many are fired when their gender identity becomes known. Others find that the formal workplace is simply not a viable option; the daily degradation is too heavy a price to pay for a salary that often is not sufficient anyway.
Video Courtesy: DW Documentary/YouTube
Banks deny transgender individuals loans and accounts or subject them to such harassment that they avoid financial institutions entirely. Landlords refuse to rent to them. In markets and shops, they are frequently followed, accused of theft, or simply asked to leave. Even basic public spaces parks, restaurants, transport can become sites of harassment and violence.
This leaves the community with a narrow set of economic options, all concentrated in the informal and often dangerous margins of the economy.
The Tradition of Badhai and Performance
The most historically rooted livelihood of Pakistan’s khawaja sira community is badhai the tradition of performing and collecting donations at celebrations such as weddings, births, and other auspicious occasions. For centuries, the arrival of a group of khawaja siras at a wedding was considered auspicious, even spiritually significant. Their blessings were believed to carry special power; their curses were feared. This gave the community a form of social leverage that, while not equal to mainstream respect, at least constituted a recognized role.
Today, badhai still exists, but its character has transformed. The spiritual reverence that once accompanied it has largely dissolved, replaced by a mixture of grudging tolerance, entertainment-seeking, and often naked contempt. Khawaja siras are invited or arrive uninvited at weddings and birth celebrations to dance and perform. They clap in the distinctive rhythmic style known as thaali, they dance to popular music, and they accept money from the hosts and guests.
The wedding circuit performing at shaadis, mehndis, and birth celebrations remains one of the primary incomes of Pakistan’s transgender community. But it is irregular, seasonal, often dangerous, and rarely adequate.
Begging as Survival
When the income from badhai is insufficient and it often is many khawaja siras turn to begging. This is not a choice; it is what remains after everything else has been taken away. They beg at traffic signals, at shrines, at bus stations, and in markets.
The experience of begging for transgender individuals in Pakistan is layered with particular humiliation.
Society’s Hypocrisy on Full Display
A significant proportion of Pakistan’s khawaja sira community engages in sex work. This is not a secret; it is well documented by researchers, health organizations, and advocacy groups. But the conversation that Pakistani society has about this reality is almost entirely dishonest.
Sex work is not a choice that transgender individuals in Pakistan make freely and joyfully. It is, for the most part, what remains when every other door has been closed. When you cannot get a formal job, when your family will not help you, when education was denied to you, when housing is denied to you, when banks will not serve you — what is left? The body. It is the one thing that belongs to you and that you can offer in exchange for survival.
Transgender sex workers in Pakistan typically operate in the most dangerous and informal segments of the sex trade. They work in dark streets, in rented rooms, in the margins of cities where law enforcement either ignores them or actively exploits them.
The intersection of transgender sex work and public health in Pakistan is a critical and deeply neglected issue. Khawaja sira sex workers in Pakistan face extremely elevated risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Studies by organizations have found HIV prevalence among transgender in Pakistan to be among the highest in Asia somewhere between 7% and 11% in various studies, compared to a general population prevalence of well under 1%.
It is at this point that the conversation usually turns dishonest. When this data is raised in public discourse, the framing is typically one of blame: transgender individuals are portrayed as vectors of disease, as threats to public health, as people who spread HIV to “innocent” people. This framing is not only cruel it is epidemiologically backwards.
HIV does not spread because transgender women exist. HIV spreads through unprotected sexual contact and needle sharing. The question is not why transgender carry HIV; the question is who they are having sex with and the answer, for the most part, is the men of Pakistani society.
Video: Courtesy Cricket Pakistan/YouTube
The clients of transgender sex workers in Pakistan are, overwhelmingly, cisgender men. These men engage in sex with transgender under cover of darkness and social denial. Pakistan’s deep cultural shame around sexuality means that men who have sex with transgender rarely identify as gay or bisexual; they maintain heterosexual identities while seeking out transgender sex workers on the side. They even refuse to be tested for HIV because testing requires confronting a reality they are not prepared to face.
The result is a transmission dynamic in which the burden of disease is placed almost entirely on the transgender sex worker through stigma, through blame, through denial of healthcare while the clients who form the actual bridge between the transgender community and the general population are protected by social denial.
This structural hypocrisy must be named clearly: Pakistani society, particularly its men, is far more responsible for the health crisis within and around the transgender community than the community itself.
The Everyday Terror
No account of the lives of Pakistan’s transgender community would be complete without a sustained engagement with violence. Violence is not an exception in their lives; it is the background condition against which they live every day.
Physical assault is common. Transgender women are beaten on the streets, in their homes, by clients, by police, by strangers, and sometimes by family members who feel their existence is a stain on family honor. Reports compiled by organizations like Trans Action Pakistan and Blue Veins have documented hundreds of cases of violent assault against transgender individuals in recent years. The actual number is certainly far higher, as the vast majority of attacks go unreported.
The police who should be the first responders to violence are themselves frequently perpetrators. Transgender women report routine extortion by police officers, who demand money or sexual favors in exchange for being allowed to live and work without arrest. In many documented cases, police have arrested transgender women who came to file a complaint, charging them under vague public nuisance provisions.
Sexual violence is endemic. Transgender are among the most likely populations in Pakistan to be raped. police do not take such reports seriously, medical facilities are rarely trained to deal with transgender assault survivors with dignity, and the legal system provides no meaningful recourse.
Healthcare and Social Challenges
Healthcare in Pakistan is a challenge for most of the population but for the transgender community, accessing even basic medical care involves a gauntlet of humiliation, discrimination, and outright refusal of service that makes illness significantly more dangerous.
The first barrier is economic. Most transgender individuals in Pakistan live below or near the poverty line. Formal healthcare is expensive, and the public health system, while theoretically free at the point of access, is chronically underfunded and understaffed. The community has very limited ability to pay for medication, specialist consultations, or hospital stays.
This has a predictable and devastating impact: transgender individuals avoid healthcare until their conditions are critical. What would be a routine infection becomes a serious illness. What would be a manageable chronic condition becomes an emergency.
Mental health consequences are severe and largely unaddressed. Research consistently shows that transgender individuals who face high levels of discrimination, family rejection, and violence experience elevated rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal ideation. The psychological trauma of being rejected by one’s family, beaten on the streets, and denied basic dignity accumulates over a lifetime.
There are no specialized clinics for transgender health in most of Pakistan’s public health system. The few organizations that have tried to establish such services primarily NGOs have faced threats and harassment from conservative religious groups and local authorities.
HIV care is a particular crisis. Despite very high HIV prevalence in the community, antiretroviral therapy (ART) is difficult to access. Stigma at treatment centers means that transgender individuals often cannot access treatment without disclosing their identity in ways that expose them to discrimination.
Rights on Paper, Not Always in Practice
The 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was, by any measure, a piece of progressive legislation. It was described at the time as among the most comprehensive transgender rights laws in the world. But the gap between the Act’s provisions and its implementation has been massive.
Registration with NADRA, while improved, remains complicated. Many transgenders remain unregistered because they lack the documents, the knowledge, or the physical access to registration facilities Identity cards that accurately reflect gender identity are still not universally available.
Employment protection clauses exist in the Act, but no enforcement mechanism has teeth. No employer has, to public knowledge, faced meaningful legal consequences for discriminating against a transgender employee. The Act’s requirement that government and private employers create quotas for transgender workers has not been implemented in any meaningful way.
This backlash reflects a wider cultural reality: legal reform, however well-crafted, cannot by itself shift deeply held social attitudes.
Children and Education
One of the most troubling aspects of the exclusion of Pakistan’s transgender community is the way it perpetuates itself across generations. The denial of education to young transgender individuals is not simply a problem for those individuals it is a mechanism by which the community is kept permanently vulnerable.
Several NGOs have attempted to run alternative education programs for transgender individuals, with some success. Literacy classes, vocational training programs, and computer skills workshops have been offered in various cities. The results, where programs have been sustained, are encouraging — transgender individuals who gain marketable skills can and do find employment in salons, as tailors, as makeup artists, in NGO work, and in other sectors. But these programs are small, underfunded, and unable to reach the full scale of the community’s
The community has made its choice. It has chosen to survive, to organize, to demand, and to persist. The rest of society must now decide what its choice will be.
You can merge both sections into a stronger concluding section that moves from solutions to the broader moral responsibility of society:
From Inclusion to Justice: The True Test of Society
Justice for Pakistan’s transgender community does not require extraordinary solutions; it requires the consistent application of rights, opportunities, and protections that should already be available to every citizen. Meaningful justice would include equal access to employment, education, healthcare, legal protection, and social welfare. It would mean enforcing anti-discrimination laws, creating safe and inclusive schools, providing respectful healthcare services, ensuring protection from violence, and recognizing transgender individuals as full participants in the nation’s economic and social life. Most importantly, it would require a cultural transformation that replaces exclusion and prejudice with dignity, respect, and understanding.
Yet these reforms represent more than policy changes—they represent a test of Pakistan’s collective values. The way a society treats its most vulnerable members reveals its true character. For generations, Pakistan’s transgender community has faced systemic exclusion despite legal recognition and historical visibility. The gap between constitutional promises and lived reality remains wide, leaving many transgender individuals vulnerable to poverty, violence, discrimination, and social isolation.
Pakistan’s khawaja sira community has never been invisible. They are present in public spaces, workplaces, courts, advocacy movements, and cultural traditions. Their lives, struggles, and contributions are woven into the fabric of society. What they seek is not special treatment but equal recognition of their humanity, dignity, and citizenship.
The challenge before Pakistan is therefore not whether transgender individuals deserve inclusion they unquestionably do. The real question is whether society, its institutions, religious leaders, policymakers, and citizens are willing to confront longstanding patterns of exclusion and choose a different path. There is no neutral position in this struggle. Every policy that excludes, every act of discrimination that goes unchallenged, and every opportunity denied reinforces injustice. Conversely, every effort to include, protect, and empower transgender individuals strengthens the principles of equality and human dignity upon which a just society must be built.
Ultimately, the future of transgender rights in Pakistan will not be determined solely by legislation but by the willingness of society to translate legal recognition into lived equality. Justice will be achieved when transgender individuals are no longer forced to fight for basic acceptance, but can live, work, learn, and thrive as equal members of the communities they have always belonged to.
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