Is "hijra" a slur? Contextualizing South Asian (trans)misogyny
A note on the sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent
There is no realistic way for me to exhaustively examine the context of every South Asian transfeminized population (though believe me, Iâd like to). As such, Iâm going to limit my scope to India, but make a quick initial note about Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Pakistani transfeminized communities, according to my partnerâs sisters who are in the community, do consider âhijraâ more derogatory than their Indian counterparts necessarily do and refer to themselves as part of the âkhwaja siraâ community.
I have sadly not been able to speak to any transfeminine people from Bangladesh, but I have spoken to cis queers who have told me that they use âhijraâ in a manner similar to India.
If there are desi queers from those communities who would like to add their perspectives, please feel free to reblog. And for the South Asian communities I haven't mentioned (such as Sri Lanka), please feel free to add your perspectives too! I'm curious to hear from you all.
âHijraâ in its meaning and usage amongst the cis is most similar to the word ânaamardâ (NAH-murd). The ânaaâ is prefixal, a negation akin to ânonâ, while âmardâ is the word for âmanâ. It is a way of unmanning a man, of calling him lacking in the essential quality of manhood, of labelling him, in spirit if not in body, impotent.
As such, you can see how itâs an implicitly third-sexing construction (even before you account for how these communities are explicitly third-sexed, denied the epistemic autonomy to be recognized as women and now third-sexed by law). When Nanda called them emasculated homosexuals, it was not far off from how Indian culture forcibly categorizes and marginalizes them.
Members of the community have told me about their frustration and anger at being referred to as such, even though the word has now become a term through which they organize the community and sometimes advocate for themselves, a political reality that does not inherently contradict their campaigns to be recognized as women, and allowed to self-ID as such. (Recall, the Indian government currently mandates legal third-sexing of the hijra: they must first obtain a âTrans Certificateâ and be documented as a third sex before they initiate the process of being recognized as womenâa process that is contingent on subjecting themselves to transmedicalist scrutiny and gatekeeping!)
Others, however, have pointed out to me that the term is undergoing a process of reclamation. The term âhijraâ has a certain degree of legibility in Indian society even as it is a pejorative with degendering and dehumanizing connotations. It is being reclaimed intracommunally, but also by allies who speak of them without the usual stigmatizing connotations that cis society has saddled the term with.
Even still, I have also been told that the manner in which cis and especially Western academics use the term in scholarshipâand Iâm quoting hereâ"makes me want to tear my skin out". The fictions of ârecognized gender role in Indian societyâ and âoppressed only after colonialismâ are further simplifications and fabrications that obfuscate the role South Asian ruling-class collaborators eagerly played in petitioning for those colonial-era laws, and ignore such easily available empirical evidence as the Manusmriti mandating punishments for anyone who sleeps withâughââeunuchsâ.
In sum, Iâd liken the use of the word âhijraâ as analogous to the usage of âqueerâ in the 90s, as a slur in the contentious, contextual process of being reclaimed. As Aruvi put it to me on Bluesky:
We cannot allow cis people to dictate the discursive and epistemic terms of transfeminine culture. At the same time, the term âhijraâ still carries with it heavy baggage due to South Asian transmisogyny as well as the academic misrepresentations and epistemic extractivism that Western scholarship has subjected South Asian transfeminized demographics to.
If you want to know how best to use the term, try to do so without third-sexing, and without promulgating fictive ideas of South Asian cultures being âgender-expansiveâ and ârecognizing more than two gendersâ. Erasing the marginalization of the hijra is endemic to the way the term is used in the West, and that must absolutely be combatted.
On a final, personal note, I also wish to clearly state that I do not reject the label âhijraâ because I consider myself essentially different from them. Many Indian (usually upper-caste) trans women wish to distance themselves from the hijra, as though reproducing our societyâs disgust for them will spare them from the same fate. That is not an attitude I share, or wish to normalize. The hijraâboth those who affirmatively identify with the term, and those who wish to distance themselves from itâare my sisters.
I have simply not been granted the honor of being part of the communities and kin structures, and I do not wish to appropriate their struggles out of respect. Even still, their struggles are and will always be mine.