Sukkur’s Sanam Faqeer determined to give rivals a tough time

Transgender candidates stake claim in upcoming elections.

SUKKUR: The seven transgender candidates contesting the elections out of 23,000 candidates have little chance of getting elected, but they have livened up an otherwise lacklustre campaign.

“People don’t believe we can be corrupt because we don’t have children and families,” says independent candidate Sanam Faqeer in Sukkur. “We don’t need to collect wealth and build villas for our next generations by stealing people’s money as other politicians do.”

When the Supreme Court in 2009 recognised them as a ‘third gender’, ordering they be issued separate identity cards, it was hailed as a landmark decision. Now Faqeer has given up dancing to focus on campaigning for the May 11 polls, saying that the world of politics is more serious.

“My aim is to give justice to the poor, welfare to the old, promote meritocracy and the lives of cleaners and remove unemployment. Once elected, I will make my city cleaner and end the traffic chaos,” she said in her office.



Born in 1975 as Essa Gul, the son of a radical prayer leader, she has overcome immense personal pain. Her strict father kept his children at home to be taught only the Quran and she was bullied by her brothers for ‘girlish’ tendencies. After her father died, her brothers forced her out when she was only 15 and she was taken under the wing of a prominent member of the transgender community.

She changed her name, grew out her hair, dressed permanently as a woman and spent the next decade dancing and working as a prostitute. She became popular and earned good money, but her ambitions spread wider.

She invested in a textiles business and started supplying bed sheets and ladies clothes door to door, allowing her to make new contacts in the city. Then she branched out into welfare, providing care to elderly eunuchs and registered her own charity in 2009.

Today, her two-room apartment serves as a home, an institute offering transgender people computer training and therefore the prospect of more respectable work, the headquarters of her charity and as a campaign hub.

Having won the hearts of Sukkur’s transgender community and hundreds of poor people, she says her community asked her to contest the elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2013.