A He or a She?
Nothing sets Bajaur apart from the the other six tribal agencies along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The endless stream of bad news pouring out of the border regions torn by militancy and conflict has curdled that mass of people and places into something malignant, in popular imagination.
Journalists like me have come to expect and grown used to news of violence from the tribal agencies. We cover the shadowy conflict as it plays out in the rest of the country, and the entire region. I saw it last December in my own town, Peshawar, when 147 school children were massacred.
But we don’t directly see much of what life is like in places like Bajaur, because journalists, local or international, are not allowed to report on the region.
So when I recently edited a story on Mussarat, a transgender woman who ran away from home in Bajaur, I was fascinated and a bit mystified. In the welter of stories about death and displacement from the region, I had only been hearing voices of men and women, gendered in the way we know it. I wouldn’t have thought Mussarat could even exist in such a macho, male and now militant-dominated milieu.
It never occurred to me that Mussarat and her community may be living as “invisibles” in the tribal areas — the way they have always lived among the rest of us, here in mainland Pakistan. Invisibles because we choose not to see them; invisibles because they choose not to be seen, because with visibility comes humiliation. And persecution.
And that’s only for the transgender women or the cross-dressing hijras or khwaja Saras, as they are known in South Asia. What about the transgender men? While hijras exist in a twilight world where colours drain and forms becomes featureless silhouettes, the transgender men just don’t exist at all. If there were degrees to invisibility, here is the order in which things go for men and media: Women are less, hijras more and the transgender men completely invisible.
Then again, in a place where horrors routinely visit men, women and children, could you really blame a male-dominated media to stop in its race for breaking news, in order to spot and dig deep for the invisibles?
And so, because I am a part — and a product– of the same society and media, I used the pronoun “he” for Mussarat when I edited her story.
It was only when the story was picked by one of Pakistan’s leading English language newspapers from News Lens — the online news service I work for — that I realized I had done something offensive and hurtful.
It was bad enough that the newspaper had retained the appellation “he” and “him” I used for Mussarat. What was worse was that now my stereotypes were out there, reinforcing everyone else’s in the society.
And through mainstream media, no less.
Is Mussarat a him or a her? I was taught to be fair, to transcend biases in reporting, and to avoid stereotypes about women, who are often portrayed through the dominant male lens in media as weak and witless. Why didn’t I stop to think about the identity Mussarat might want to assert or reinforce?
Mussarat used the words “woman” and “daughter” for herself in the story. She clearly identifies with and defines herself in terms of the feminine gender. And does so in the context of a macho, male-dominated culture that denies her the choice of gender.
Why did I conveniently, and lazily, pick up the term that the society wants to foist on transgender people — an identity that they have been trying to escape from, often at a great cost, both physical and psychological?
Take the example of Mussarat herself. Here are excerpts from the story that our reporter Izharullah filed from Peshawar (the “he” and “him” are all mine):
“I left my home because my parents did not accept me the way I was,” said Mussarat as he sat applying make-up, getting ready for a performance at a wedding in the old city. “I don’t miss my parents but I loved my aunt who would try and protect me every time my father beat me up.”
Mussarat sends his aunt money every now and then. He lies to her about his whereabouts: “I told her that I am working as a waiter at a hotel in Rawalpindi.”
As a child, Mussarat was molested time and again by boys and men in the village and he had to leave because of the “social embarrassment and hurdles” his presence created for his parents.
It came to a point when his father would beat him up for anything that went wrong in the house. “My father considered me a curse for the entire family,” he said. “Whenever something went wrong, my father held me responsible.”
Kashish, another transgender in male clothes sitting next to Mussarat, said he was molested by men who had forced sex with him, thrusting bottles in his backside so hard they broke inside.
“I have been through a major surgery to remove glass shards from my rectum,” Kashish told News Lens. “I want to have an operation to change sex, to remove the male organ because I want to be a woman. I am done with all the abuse men and the society piles at us.”
In using “he” for Mussarat, I had denied her the appellation she and other transgender women used for themselves — the very identity whose pursuit made her want to leave her home and her family.
Mussarat is a women’s name. Even though Mussarat was a boy as a child of 15 when she ran away from her home in Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas, she now dressed as a woman.
She and many others like her leave their homes to be with other transgenders. They do so to find acceptance for their aspirations — to be known and treated as women — that society denies them. They are ostracized by families and the society, looked upon as freaks and pariahs, and forced to beg or prostitute themselves for sustenance.
Even their own supportive network, where they are taken in by an aging guru who looks after them, is based on an exploitative premise: The old need the young to dance at weddings and circumcision celebrations, to beg, to solicit sex — the only means of living available to them. These professions make them subjects of contempt and persecution, pushing them further back into alienation that feeds the cycle.
It was not always like this for the Hijras. Once they were the esteemed Khawaja Saras, confidantes of the royals with access to inner sanctums of empires in Ottoman Turkey and Mughal India. Because they posed no threat to the women in harems — they were often castrated — the term Khwaja Saras was collectively used for the transgender people, transvestites, hermaphrodites or eunuchs employed as caretakers, art and etiquette instructors for princes and princess and royal messengers in the harems.
With the fall of the empires in Turkey and India, the transgender Khawaja saras held in high esteem in the courts and harem fell from grace, their status reduced to lowly beggars and sex workers. From respectable workers in royal palaces to objects of social scorn and persecution, theirs is a sad story of fall from riches to rags where they now find themselves living invisibly at the margins of society.
Mussarat and others in the marginalized and persecuted transgender community would never confront me or the rest of the media for denying them the identity they seek. She and her community have been reduced to silent invisibles by attitudes and stereotypes that the society wields as weapons against those who are different.
In ignoring the identity with which she identified, in tagging her with the “he”, in my own way I fed the confusion that the society feels towards the transgender people because it refuses to see beyond the appearances and bodies where their real souls are trapped. And in doing so, I chose to side with everyone else in refusing to recognize their right and struggle for identity.
I could say I was lazy, that I didn’t think hard, but there are no excuses. Not when the potential and lives of so many are hostage to our collective biases and attitudes.
More so, in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that Amnesty International calls a “human rights vacuum” — where in the presence of an active conflict and militancy, and absence of courts and constitution, they have no hope to assert their rights, to protest and campaign, to push for legislation.
That support, if it comes, will have to be from the rest of Pakistan, the world and the media. Instead of bringing our own biases to the story we must learn to stop and ask: Mussarat, what is your choice of gender?
