K-P creates dedicated burial ground for trans people

Members of the state’s clergy will lead the funeral prayers

PESHAWAR: People who are transgender have been under attack in the province. Even as law enforces grapple with the violence perpetrated against members of the third gender, the government has decided to give them a dedicated burial place to bury their dead in peace.

Ostracised by their families even in death, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government on Wednesday said that it would set sections of state graveyards aside for the burial of trans people - locally known as Khawaja Sira or Hijra.



"Until now, transgender people have been burying their dead in private graveyards, out of the public gaze," said Mushtaq Ahmad Ghani, who heads a provincial government committee on transgender rights.

"We are taking sincere steps for the resolution of transgender people's problems."

While the country is deeply conservative and homosexuality is illegal, laws have been approved giving transgender people better rights than in many other nations.

Last year, the first passport with a transgender category had been issued.

Yet, many continue to face discrimination, including verbal and physical abuse and are ostracised by their families.

"Transgender people's families refuse to own them and their bodies," Farzana Jan, president of Pakistan's Transgender Association, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"Nobody is ready even to lead the funeral prayers."

Ghani, who is also the speaker of the K-P assembly, said that the state’s clergy would now lead the funeral prayers of trans people.

According to the 2017 census, there are more than 10,400 people who are transgender in Pakistan — a number which campaigners contest.

Qamar Naseem, a trans-rights activist and a member of the National Taskforce and the Committee on Rights of Transgender Persons, said that there were around 45,000 trans people in K-P alone.

"They are estimated to be around half a million across the country," he said.

"Despite policies favouring them, the transgender people in the province are socially isolated and are stigmatised,” Naseem said, adding, "This poses a serious threat to their education, health, security, life expectancy, inheritance rights and employment prospects."



Pakistan's Transgender Association (PTA) estimates that as many as 62 trans people have been killed since 2015 in K-P.

Naseem said transgender activists had not called for dedicated graveyards with a number of other pressing issues such as employment and security, but nonetheless welcomed the move.

"It is a welcome step that the transgender people will have at least a place at last to bury their dead," he said.

In August, a trans person was brutally murdered in the provincial capital. Nazo had gone to visit Sadaqat within the remits of the Pishtakhara police when the latter shot her and then chopped her body using an axe.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2018.