What place do homosexuals and the transgendered have amidst the chaos of Pakistan, and what role are the media playing in framing the issue? This is a guest post by blogger Kyla Pasha, who teaches religion and history at a university in Lahore. She focuses on the recent spectacle surrounding a couple, and sees unsettling parallels in the treatment they received and the conditions leading up to the Lal Masjid episode.
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It was good for a while. TV was becoming a playground for free speech. Begum Nawazish Ali, a cross-dressing talk show host, asked real questions of real people while wearing fake breasts and heavy make-up. Sex was sneaking into the public conversation after 20-odd years of exile and we were beginning to see AIDS awareness ads in all types of media that talked about the merits of protected sex, hetero- and homosexual. The moderation of the Musharraf regime was enlightening us all.
But then Pakistan had its first official tangle with homosexuality and the media; the public conversation remembered itself and went back to its roots – conservative Islam and aversion to all things sexual.
A married couple, Shumail Raj and Shahzina Tariq, sought the protection of the apex court in Lahore from harassment against Shahzina’s family. Shahzina’s father did not accept the marriage and wanted to marry his daughter off as repayment of a debt. When the couple went to court, the father alleged that Shumail was not a man but a woman and challenged the marriage. The court ordered a medical examination of Shumail – something that the couple’s Supreme Court appeal counsel, Dr. Babar Awan, has subsequently claimed as an abuse of power – and determined that Shumail Raj “has no male organ.” The couple was subsequently accused and convicted of perjury under Article 193 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) for claiming that Shumail Raj is a man when medical tests have shown that he is female. They were both sentenced to 3 years imprisonment in separate jails.
The media responded by calling them “the she-couple.” The term has never been elaborated, but most reporters are comfortable reading the couple as lesbian. It is true that they are taking their cue from the Lahore High Court – which initially charged them under Section 377 of the PPC for “unnatural acts” but withdrew the petition when the prosecution realized that penetration is essential for conviction under the law. But even so, none of the coverage betrays even a passing understanding about the distinction between homosexual relationships and heterosexual relationships in which one person is transgendered. It is as if the issue once marked as sexual deviation needs no further explanation.
Opinion pieces expressed otherwise. Individuals have written in to counter with detailed and sometimes extremely technical explanations of the difference between transgenderism and homosexuality. In a letter to the editor, Nehdia Sameen has written with passion against a news report in The Dawn (the country’s oldest and most staid English daily) by Muhammad Saleem and invokes Iran as an example:
Mr Saleeem would have done well to at least research the psychological phenomenon of transgenderism before using a derogatory term such as 'she-couple' or 'she-husband' in relation to Mr Raj and his wife…
The case of the aforementioned is the first of its kind in Pakistan, but our neighbouring Muslim country, Iran, is no stranger to transgenderism or to sex-change surgeries.
Not only has Iran issued fatwas to support the struggle of transgendered individuals and support their right to live psychologically healthy lives by altering their bodies, but the Iranian government also pays for these surgeries, and assists the individuals involved to obtain new identification documents and papers.
But it seems that the coverage and public reactions to the coverage have forced the debate into a new arena. The television news channel GEO, owned by the Jang Group and slightly more left-leaning than other media outlets, recently aired a programme on gender ambivalence, albeit in a sensationalized manner. Beginning with an advisory for parental discretion, the interviewer asked people to hypothesize about what they would do if their son played with girls’ toys or wanted to wear female clothing.
And so the discussion moves on, at the same time as male and female students in Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad attempted to bring Shari’a law to Pakistan by vigilante acts including, primarily, the abduction of individuals they believed to be involved in sexually immoral acts such as prostitution. The standoff between Army Rangers and the Lal Masjid students - and its eventual, bloody conclusion - was front and center in the national and international news media alike. But in the back of the public mind, the freedom to choose exercised by Shumail and Shahzina and penalized by the courts, is juxtaposed with the Lal Masjid ambition of bringing some kind of “true Islam” into Pakistani public life. Nobody has as yet made an overt connection between the two issues, but it won’t be long. Sexuality has entered the public sphere in Pakistan and what that does to the larger conversation about Islam and Musharraf’s “enlightened moderation” is something to keep an eye on.
--Kyla Pasha
