With increasing urbanization and development in cities such as Faisalabad – social and individual identities are rapidly changing. However, the idea of gendered division within cities especially in development thinking has always put certain populations at a disadvantaged position compared to the others. Apart from huge differences in infant mortality, literacy and malnutrition cases between different genders, gendered segregation is often visible in specific demarcations of geographical spaces within the city of Faisalabad. The belief that any gender other than the cis-gender-male belongs to the boundaries of their houses (char-deewari) has reinforced the division of public and even private spaces in favour of the already male-dominant and patriarchal community within the city. Faisalabad’s transgender communities in particular face extreme forms of gendered demarcations and are a direct victim of urban informality and urban violence.
Urban Informality
Transgender persons have been greatly secluded to what many locals call the ‘Khusra Gali (khusra being a term commonly used for the third gender and gali implying street).’ The housing, sanitation and hygiene conditions remain archaic compared to the city’s other posh areas like Abdullah town that have seen rapid urbanization in recent years. Even though, Pakistan as a state has often tried to introduce regulations in the favour of the community to go in coherence with Foucault’s argument “that the modern discourse on sexuality gradually emerged in mainstream Western societies through the technologies of power and bodily discipline,” Pakistani society’s uneasy coexistence with the trans-gender community has almost always been quite apparent. Insecure and secluded living spaces restrict their mobility, economic and educational opportunities to a huge extent. These secluded residential spaces for the transgender community often don’t offer basic education and medical centres while the others in the city refuse to enrol the third gender. These trans-genders usually live in katchay (mud) houses built on un-even roads and exposed water pipelines. There are zero to minimum waste disposal provisions exposing the residents to health risks every hour of the day. Police officers often invade the residential areas of these trans-genders by raiding their houses and different spaces without any legal notices due to inadequate security restrictions by local government or authorities. Mobility remains a huge issue too since many local car services often refuse to come to areas where trans-genders reside (for eg Khusra Gali) and public transport provisions remain far from the areas where they reside. In case transgenders do use the public transport for mobility – they face all kinds of harrasments and catcalling has almost been normalized. The recent rapid urbanization has in fact had a de-politicizing affect in the city that has created power rivalries and the idea of competing interests just as Morgenthau suggests that the desire of power “manifests itself as the desire to maintain the range of one’s own person with regard to others, to increase it, or to demonstrate it.” (Troy,2018)
Keeping this certain conceptualization of power in mind, it is quite clear that only one group maintains power as opposed to the other – hence the birth of an essential characteristic of the power-politics in the domain of recently urbanized cities. In the case of Faisalabad, it can be applied to the power-politics played between normative (stronger) genders/gender roles versus the trans-gender community – the khwaja-siras. Rene Girards memetic theory also suggests that human conduct is all about the imitation of desire (to power) and hence leads to the formation of the ‘global street’ that is powerless human agglomerations in the urban sphere exactly against the powerful human communities.
In fact, this exclusion leads to extreme situations of vulnerability among the transgender communities and often inculcates within them, internalized humiliation. The community then also appears to adopt a rather invisible approach in which they remain socially passive within the city that is keep their areas of residence secluded and low-key. This goes in coherence with Bayat’s (2004) ‘quite encroachment’ according to which “practice and/or change is subtle and hidden rather than radical and public, or because certain groups lack the resources to mobilise” (Banks,2019)
This passive participation furthers the inferiority of khwa-siras within the city and also obscuring the ‘backwardness’ that exists within the otherwise apparent urbanization in terms of safety, hygiene, infrastructural development, general lack of opportunity and resources and disorder.
Urban Violence
Often, due to limitations in job opportunities, trans-genders, also commonly known as khwaja-siras in the cityare forced to work as prostitutes and are often subjected to abuse and violence. It is extremely common for men to have mehfils (gatherings) where transgender persons are invited to dance for hours until those men throw hefty amounts of cash to demonstrate their superiority and wealth. Such practices are also extremely common at weddings and other celebrations within the city. The practice has been so deep-rooted within the culture of the city that often, having no other choices for income, these transgender persons themselves show up at events and dance on the streets until some donation or reward is given to them. However, it is also extremely common for these trans-gender persons to be harassed at events and rape cases are extremely common. In case of consensual sex-work, these transgender persons are often forced to have sex with several men at the same time even though they had only agreed to one. In fact, khwaja-siras are, many times raped in their very own homes due to lack of secure infrastructural facilities within the spaces they reside. According to The Express Tribune, two women named Saima and Asma were raped inside their house in Jaranwala Road, Faisalabad upon refusal to have sex earlier. (Islam, 2016) However, the police themselves remain extremely insensitive to the community and often refuse to file any harassment cases for these trans-women/men and in fact remain light-bearers of these meta-narratives against trans-genders themselves. Usually, transgender individuals who are victims of harassment and rape just accept the abuse and ignore their psychological trauma due to the banal meta-narratives that surround much of the city’s circumference. In fact, the culture of morality in the city still goes hand in hand with the idea of ‘forcing corrective behaviour ’ and hence the transgender persons are often beaten up and hurled stones at for being what the locals call, under the influence of religious motives, deviant and un-Islamic. This has led to a great deal of Gender Identity Disorders within the particular marginalized community in Faisalabad. Added to this is the entire idea of gurus and chelas that forms a nexus of a toxic yet never ending power-sharing culture that reduces the values of these transgender persons down to either being ‘economically active’ or being ‘sustainable enough.’ This causes an infliction of beauty standards that need to be fulfilled by all the chelas for his/her guru to be able to economically make their space within the khwaja-sira community. Often, transgender persons see their hair as a sign of beauty – something that gets them work. A very common form of abuse in the city hence is men raping and then shaving the heads off of these transgender persons to ‘de-beautify’ them.
Even though, efforts are on way to uplift the position of the community within the city – it really is the traditional meta-narrative that despite all efforts secludes the transgender community in the city and puts them at the forefront of all inequalities socially, economically and politically.
Bibliography
Tribune.com.pk. (2016, July 29). Two trans-women raped in their home in Faisalabad. Retrieved from https://tribune.com.pk/story/1150578/heinous-crime-two-trans-women-manhandled-raped/?
Troy, J. (2017). The Power of the Political in an Urbanizing International. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3034363
Divan, V., Cortez, C., Smelyanskaya, M., & Keatley, J. (2016). Transgender social inclusion and equality: a pivotal path to development. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 19(3 (Suppl 2). doi: 10.7448/ias.19.3.20803
Roy, A., & AlSayyad, N. (2004). Urban informality: transnational perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham (Md.): Lexington Books.
Adeel, M., & Yeh, A. G. O. (2018). Gendered immobility: influence of social roles and local context on mobility decisions in Pakistan. Transportation Planning and Technology, 41(6), 660–678. doi: 10.1080/03081060.2018.1488932
Into the City with Mehru 