ISLAMABAD: “I always wanted to do my Masters but I had to quit my studies after Matric when people discovered my gender,” said Alisha, a 30-year-old transgender.
Fast forward to the present and she has secured admission in Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) and hopes to turn her dreams into reality.
Alisha, who is originally from Gujranwala, lives in Rawalpindi, said she was blessed to have loving parents who enrolled her in a good school in a nearby locality.
However after she grew up and people started shaming her parents for what their daughter’s gender was, Alisha left her studies and family- forever.
Allama Iqbal Open University in September last year offered free education—Matriculation to PhD—to transgenders in the country. So far around 26 forms have been received for various programs, said Director Admission AIOU Zia-ul-Hasnain. Zia-ul-Hasnain was also confident that the numbers would grow even still as the transgender community was becoming increasingly aware of their rights.
President Transgender Association Almas Bobi, who is conversant in English, stated that the community should make the most of the AIOU’s offer of free education and said,”I learned about the program through a news story and requested my community members to take benefit of the offer of free education, but unfortunately they are accustomed to making money through weddings and dance parties and have shown little interest in the program,” she lamented.
However, she was optimistic about changing times and the opportunities for respectable jobs and positions if the transgender community was well-equipped with education.
Qamar Naseem, a senior lawyer, who takes on legal cases of transgenders in Islamabad and Peshawar, described the AIOU program as praise-worthy but also echoed the concerns raised by Almas Bobi and stated that the response from the community was quite lacklustre since most of the members were not even able to read or write.
Alisha, who like many other transgenders, earns her living by dancing and begging, said that when she heard about the AIOU’s offer through her friend, she became quite excited because she wanted to become a lawyer so as to fight cases of her family members (transgenders) and secure their rights.
“Majority of eunuchs don’t know how to read and write; which is why only I got an admission out of around 30 of my friends because they didn’t do matriculation. A few of them accompanied me when I went to submit my admission form to the university’s main campus in Islamabad,” she said.
Alisha recounted how they were never treated with such a respect ever before in life, it was a pleasant surprise to watch how the university officials offered them tea with biscuits, something they’d not experienced.
The transgender community is arguably the most neglected and marginalised community who have not been given any importance in the Pakistani society, also known as Khawaja Siras, they are considered by many an abomination.
In a historic ruling by Pakistan’s Supreme Court in 2009, transgenders were recognised as a ‘third gender’. Subsequently, in 2011, the Supreme Court ruled for them to get national identity cards recognizing them as a separate identity – neither male or female – and granted them the right to vote.
According to the 6th Population and Housing Census released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics on August 25, 2017, Pakistan’s transgender population stood at 10,418 — 0.005 percent of the total population of over 207 million.
This was the first time in the country’s history that the transgender community was counted separately by enumerators.
Statistics show that 74 percent of the transgender population resides in urban areas as opposed to the majority of the overall population that lives in the rural parts of the country.
A further breakdown reveals that 6,709 transgender people live in Punjab; 2,527 in Sindh, 913 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), 133 in Islamabad, 109 in Balochistan and 27 in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).
However, the TransAction Alliance, which has been increasingly vocal in demanding equal rights for transgenders, rejected the figures and claimed the population to be at least half a million across the country. The group added that many of them earn their living as wedding dancers and providers of blessings in exchange for cash.
