Pakistan Recognizes Third Gender
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Late on Wednesday, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered that the government officially recognize a separate gender for Pakistan's hijra community, which includes transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs. The court told the federal government to begin allowing people to identify as hijras when registering for a national identity card.
Such cards are necessary for everything from voting to more informal situations; patrons must present the card at cybercafes before surfing the Internet, for example. Not having an identity card, or having one with incorrect information, leaves a person vulnerable and easily excluded from society.
In India, voters are required to identify their sex both on their voter ID cards and at the polls. The insistence that they identify as male or female effectively barred many transgendered and transvestite people from the polls until late this year, when the government declared that for the purposes of voting it would recognize a third option.
The ruling in Pakistan, though, potentially reaches much further.
In addition to the order for government recognition, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry also issued a warning that the hijras' rights of inheritance, which are often informally ignored, would be enforced, and that police harassment would not be permitted, a sign, perhaps, of rulings to come.
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"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged,
and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air,
however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."-William O. Douglas
United States Supreme Court Associate Justice (1939-1975)
