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Introduction
The harsh nature of punishment for homosexuality in Muslim societies has strengthened the view that Muslims criminalize all desires that fall outside the heteronormative. Such views contribute to mainstream Western queer perceptions1that focus on the discrimination suffered by those individuals who self-identify as homosexual in Muslim-majority contexts. While there is truth to these assertions, I also want to point to other individuals who do not fit easily into either lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) categories and who live openly in some Muslim societies, albeit on the margins. At the same time, I do not mean to suggest that those individuals whose desires fell outside of the heteronormative have always enjoyed status equal to other subjects/citizens in historical Muslim empires or contemporary Muslim-majority societies.
Scholars have examined the lives of transgendered individuals as well as the unfolding of their sexuality in a variety of Muslim contexts.2This article, however, limits the investigation to pre-colonial and colonial India as well as contemporary Pakistan and examines the struggle for citizenship rights by individuals frequently referred by a myriad of names including khwaja sara and hijra. Largely challenging the male-female binary, they have a range of physiological male bodies. Some of these individuals are castrated, others do not demonstrate typical 'male characteristics' during puberty, and a very few are born as intersex individuals.3They may also be biologically female and choose to live as males, or they may be ambiguous categories that have no parallel in Western labelling of sexual difference.4Some scholars5use the term 'transgender and/or transsexual' to refer to khwaja sara and hijra. Neither men nor women, such folk have been considered members of a third sex in South Asia for the last 3,000 years.6Further, they do not always see individual expressions of desire as the sole defining features of their lives. Instead, their histories move us towards an understanding of how sexuality is implicated in religion, community networks, and class location.
Finding it difficult to find a label or fixed identity for khwaja sara, hijra, or transgender, in this discussion, I will use these terms interchangeably7along with the more contemporary term trans*.8In order to understand the changing dynamic of their lives,...