PESHAWAR: Pakistan's transgender community, known as khawajasiras or hijras are now fighting for change. Usually shunned by their families, the victims of beatings and rapes, they are often condemned to a life of begging or prostitution.
The situation is complicated by the deeply conservative, traditional Muslim country's views of sex and sexuality.
Farzana draws all eyes when she dances, with the twist of her hips and hair -- but today she is above all the voice of a Pakistani community with an ambiguous status: the khawajasiras. The 30-year-old is a guru, a matriarch at the head of a "family" of several hundred khawajasiras, an umbrella term in Pakistan denoting a third sex that includes transsexuals, transvestites and eunuchs.
She is co-founder and president of TransAction, rights organisation launched in 2015 in Peshawar, capital of deeply conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.
Faced with brutal aggression and daily humiliation, this solid Pashtun, whose hoarse voice betrays her birth sex, filed complaints in almost every KP police station-- but in vain.
"More than 50 khawajasiras were killed in 2015 and 2016 in KP alone," she says, recounting with fatalistic calm how she was repeatedly raped and blackmailed by police.
Pakistan became one of the first countries in the world to legally recognise a third sex. They number at least half a million people in the country, according to several studies -- up to two million, say TransAction.
Since 2009, they have been able to obtain an identity card as khawajasiras, and several have run in elections. A Lahore court has ruled they should be counted in the next census, set to be held this year.
Like Farzana, many earn their living by being called upon for rituals such as blessing newborns or to bring life to weddings and parties as dancers -- and, sometimes, in more clandestine ways. But despite these signs of integration they live daily as pariahs, often reduced to begging and prostitution, subjected to extortion and discrimination.
How do hijras see themselves?
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Almost all hijras claim they have been born in a man's body with a woman's mind. They say they are cultural heirs to a glorious past as eunuchs during the Mughal dynasty, when they were part of the elite -- as harem guardians, artists, but also generals, like Malik Kafur in the fourteenth century.
Some Hijras use hormones and silicone to enhance their feminine features, often injected without proper medical supervision, to shape their bodies -- but full, expensive sex-reassignment operations cannot be done in Pakistan.
Their effeminate behavior can cause families to reject them, and they often end up in the power of a so-called guru, with the risk of commercial sexual exploitation that implies.
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