Transgender in electoral fray against all odds

KARACHI: Bindiya Rana looks stressed. She's been campaigning for the last several weeks hoping to win from Karachi's Mehmoodabad area, a Muttahida Qaumi Movement stronghold. The competition is stiff, and Rana knows she is unlikely to win, given that she represents the transgender community, a small and marginalized community across Pakistan.
"I haven't been able to sleep for several days," says Rana, who runs the Gender Interactive Alliance (GIA), an NGO dedicated to improving social, educational and economic position of her community."I've been receiving threatening phone calls; people have been coming to my house and demanding that I stop standing for elections. I don't know what to do."
The short-lived excitement about being able to run for Pakistan's general elections has quickly quelled for Rana, who had hoped to become an ambassador for her community's rights. Despite legal reform and the promise of government jobs, much remains the same for the community, marginalized by society and forced into the sex industry, beggary and performance work.
Rana's race to become Mehmoodabad's representative signifies the challenges the community faces. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that the Khwaja Sira (transgender) be accommodated with a third gender category on the national identity card. Despite the ruling, many members of the community had difficulty obtaining identity cards.
"The kind of laughter that greets them when they go into a bank to open an account, or an office to pay a bill, is just unacceptable," Salman Mukhtar, who volunteers as the program officer and has worked on Rana's campaign. "I'm appalled by people's inhuman attitudes towards this community, as if they are not human at all." Mukhtar launched a social media campaign to build support for Rana.
"Our campaign has been really successful but it's the liberal voice, the urban educated who are 'liking' us or supporting us. We don't have the money to run a full-scale campaign so we have no choice. The reality is that none of our voters in Mehmoodabad have access to the Internet and they aren't likely to vote for her."
The 2009 ruling opened up the possibility for someone like Rana to contest elections as a representative of a marginalized community but the reality on ground has not been so open to her elections.
"I don't think that they - in their wildest dreams - thought someone would actually stand for elections," laughs Rana as she discusses her campaign strategy, her hopes and her goals for her long-ignored constituency. "They tell me that we are dirty and diseased, how can we stand for the people."
Rana makes few friends in the mainstream because of her critique of society's expectations of transgender people. Pakistan tax authorities inducted the Khwaja Sira into their ranks, hoping that they would help increase their tax revenue. Sent door to door to dance and clap and drum before tax evaders homes, transgender folk have shamed debtors into paying up their taxes. Yet despite promises of stable, long-term jobs, little has been done to make transgender people permanent employees.
"We tied up with Rana because no one would register her papers when she wanted to start an NGO," explains Rana Asif Ali, GIA general secretary. "We believe that a rights based approach is the only way in which we can see people rise up."
That goal seems a distance away as Rana contemplates ejecting from the Mehmoodabad race. "I'm not afraid of death myself," she said. "But there are many others around me, and the future of our community that I have to keep in mind."