A small victory for Pakistan’s transgenders

Mark Magnier, LA Times

Published 03/03/2010

Reporting from Rawalpindi, Pakistan — Wearing a red knit bonnet, matching lipstick and a shawl over her large shoulders and muscular forearms, Nanni gently sought to clear up some confusion as the call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque.

“I’m a ’she-male,’ ” said Nanni, a kind of den mother for a dozen or so fellow hijra, or transgender people, in a rundown neighborhood of Rawalpindi. “We all are.”

Sharing two small rooms halfway along a dark dirt alley and up a steep flight of steps, Nanni’s family is one made, not born: a community of outcasts forced together after their families abandoned them, their indeterminate sex unnerving this patriarchal society — especially the ascendant Pakistani Taliban.

“We are God’s creatures,” Nanni said. “Even if many people don’t accept us, we feel the same here in the den as if we are of the same blood. We do everything to take care of one another.”

Dominating one room was a rough-hewn double bed that the dozen or so hijra, some more than 6 feet tall, use in shifts. The walls were covered with pictures of hijra beauties of the Mughal era that ended more than a century ago, a time when transgender people were not only accepted but also enjoyed significant power and prestige.

Asked whether the hijra family members were all congenital eunuchs and hermaphrodites, Nanni, 35, insisted that they were all born that way. To prove the point, she ordered Akri, a hermaphrodite whose broad face was softened by mascara and a scarf, to drop her traditional outfit and show her private parts.

Hijra have long been stigmatized and subject to discrimination and abuse in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with its rigorously defined roles for men and women. But in a landmark decision in December, the Supreme Court ordered that they be protected from police harassment, be eligible for a separate gender category on ID cards and be recognized under inheritance laws.

“We need proper rights,” said Noor, a 21-year-old member of Nanni’s household. “No one listens to our concerns.”

Although nascent legal status is a first step, social acceptance is likely to take far longer. Noor and the others said police officers and residents often beat, harass, rob and sexually abuse them.

“You get used to it,” said Nanni, who as the guru, or head of the hijra family, is combination parent, boss and enforcer. “It only shows how stupid their mentality is.”

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Queer Sri Lankan journey

Richard Dodds, Bay Area Reporter

There was a recent movie titled It’s Complicated, but I’m sure the complications facing its glossy characters are nothing compared to what the performer known as D’Lo faces everyday. In the exquisite solo show Ramble-Ations at Brava Theatre Center’s intimate second space, the Los Angeles performer takes us on a cultural and gender journey that has never been explored in quite this way.

By way of introduction, D’Lo comes from a Sri Lankan family, a little-understood heritage complicated by the fact that they are part of the Tamil minority defeated recently in a civil war. The family’s cultural background and Hindu faith aren’t exactly in sync with D’Lo’s “I’m gay” announcement, a coming-out that is complicated when, as relatives are getting used to having a lesbian in the family, she further declares that she’s transgendered and identifies as a man.

Directed by Adelina Anthony, Ramble-Ations is much more than a “I’m here, I’m queer, I’m transgendered” manifesto, as D’Lo bravely dives into personal conflictions, humorously (and convincingly) dons female drag to play several characters, and even gives us a slide-show documentation of a her/his childhood evolution from short-haired tomboy to a long-haired feminization under Southern Californian peer pressure to the bouncing, boyish, hip hop-styled persona that first greets us.

D’Lo projects an assurance tempered with deprecation, bemoaning a “Mickey Mouse voice” that belies desires for a masculine image, or describing Sri Lanka as a little nation of alcoholics created from a fart from India’s ass. He plays his own mother in full ethnic attire, who recalls D’Lo’s efforts to turn a childhood  Barbie into a Ken doll, and wonders why her daughter can’t at least look like such long-haired lesbians as Rosie O’Donnell and Martina Navratilova.

D’Lo dons a wig and a dress to portray a Valley Girl cousin who speaks at a memorial service for a friend who died in the 2004 tsunami that wiped out 35,000 Sri Lankans, but did nothing to unite the ethnically torn country. A scene in which D’Lo plays a tottering grandfather with a Gandhi fixation, but who curses like a sailor, highlights just what a nimble physical comedian he can be.

The 60-minute show never strays far from a laugh, but the reality of a simmering racial, gender, and cultural diaspora is also ready to emerge at any moment. That D’Lo does not profess to have yet sorted out all the complications turns out to be a big strength of Ramble-Ations .

Nepal’s Transgenders Make a Political Mark

Sudeshna Sarkar, Thaindian News

March 7th, 2010 - 2:36 pm

Kathmandu, March 7 (IANS) Bhumika Shrestha, who became the first Miss Pink Nepal, is an icon of the transgender community. And she is also its first member to take the plunge into politics.

The 23-year-old last month formally became a member of the Nepali Congress (NC), the largest party in the ruling coalition. “Politicians have the power to make an effective change in society,” Bhumika said.

When Nepal underwent a sea change in 2006 to become a secular state from the only Hindu kingdom in the world, the transformation was further heightened by the first Miss Gay pageant in a country that ostracised its homosexual community.

Much has happened since then.

“I joined politics to get a platform for my people. Politicians realise they can’t ignore us. In the last elections, all the major parties included the sexual minorities in their election manifestos,” Bhumika told IANS in an interview.

She remembers how she was thrown out of school as a 10th grader for her “womanish ways”.

“I was about 10 when I realised I was different from others,” says Bhumika, who chose the name when she decided to carve out a new identity for herself as a woman. “I preferred the company of girls and wanted to wear their clothes.”

She was taunted mercilessly by the boys in school and was expelled after teachers thought she was corrupting the morals of other students.

Hurt and humiliated, she was wondering what she would do with her life when someone told her about Blue Diamond Society (BDS), Nepal’s first organisation to protect the rights of gays, lesbians and transgenders.

“It was a huge relief,” she says. “I realised I was no longer alone. There were others like me.”

Today, Bhumika is a human rights officer in BDS and a well-known face in society, courtesy the limelight she received after being crowned Miss Pink and for taking part in public programmes seeking equal rights for the gay community.

Now she has chosen the Nepali Congress because she says she is inspired by the “democratic and socialist” philosophy of its founder, B.P. Koirala, who was also the first elected prime minister of Nepal.

She is also inspired by the thoughts and life of Mahatma Gandhi and Nepal’s freedom fighter Ganesh Man Singh, who strove for equality for women.

Bhumika has taken part in several interactions with Nepal’s lawmakers who are writing a new constitution where she has advocated equality for her community.

Though BDS’ founder Sunil Babu Pant is Nepal’s only openly gay MP, Bhumika and the others have had a tougher struggle gaining acceptance.

They are school dropouts while Pant is a computer engineer educated abroad and while he dresses in the accepted male way, they have chosen a sexual identity different from the one they were born with.

Suman Chepang, 20, was thrown out of school in Chitwan in southern Nepal for refusing to wear the uniform prescribed for girl students.

“For several years, I tied a stone to my heart and suppressed my natural inclinations, trying to look, dress and act like a woman,” says Suman who has now opted for a male identity. “But at the end, my heart revolted.”

Suman too was ostracised by society and when he decided to marry 23-year-old Bishnumaya, the bride’s family refused to accept him.

“There has to be a change in society,” says Suman, who has joined the ruling Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist with his wife and five others. “We decided to join different political parties so that it would be easier to usher in change.”

Suman says he chose the Communist party because he was profoundly moved by the life of its late secretary general Madan Kumar Bhandari.

“Here was a man who strove to uplift society,” he says. “Had Bhandari not died at such an early age, he would have transformed Nepal.”

A third group now wants to join the Maoists.

“It is the Maoists whose 10-year People’s War gave a voice to the downtrodden,” says a transgender who declines to be named. “It was the Maoist government that made the first budget allocation for sexual minorities and formed a committee to make regulations for same sex marriages.”

However, what is holding the group back is that the Maoists, despite their promises, have not been encouraging towards the community.

(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)

New Proposed Changes in the Upcoming DSM-V

Feb 10, 2010
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) DSM-5 Task Force has announced its proposed revisions and additions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the text used by US mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders. The revised version of the “Bible” of American Psychology is set to be published in 2013.

The task force describes a number of proposed changes related to “Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders.”

Significant proposed changes include:

Changing the name of “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Incongruence,” in response to a survey of transgender people. The task force states that the name change is intended to reduce the stigmatization of transgender people’s “condition.” Additionally, what was previously referred to as “a strong and persistent cross-gender identification” is now being referred to as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.”

Within “Gender Incongruence (GI),” referring to “the other gender” instead of “the other sex.” The stated purpose of this change is two fold: (1) to be able to diagnose intersex people (people with “disorders of sex
development”) with GI; (2) to allow people who have successfully transitioned to be free of this diagnosis.

(Check out full proposed changes to the DSM-V here.)