Paper rights, grim realities

In 2013, the Bangladeshi conferred formal legal recognition upon the hijra community, establishing a “third gender” category on official documents. It was hailed as a progressive watershed. Yet the reality of marginalisation retains an unrelenting grip. 

Last week, Md Moshin, a fifty-two-year-old known widely as Moushumi Hijra, was murdered in the port city of Chattogram. As a long-serving Guru Ma, Moshin anchored a community structure that provided shelter and kinship to those systematically cast out by polite society. Her violent death exposes that the state may acknowledge an identity on paper, but their vulnerability is all too real as of now.

Thirteen years prior to Moshin’s murder, Noman Robin’s film Common Gender arrived in Bangladeshi cinemas, making a rare attempt to thrust the subterranean existence of hijra people into mainstream consciousness. The production lacked prominent stars and bypassed the comfortable isolation of art-house circuits to confront commercial audiences directly.

Viewers entered the theatres with crude curiosity and exited in reflective silence. The narrative was sparked by a real incident of casual brutality…a director witnessing a hijra individual being violently ejected from both male and female public conveniences at a Dhaka shopping centre. When interrogated about their presence, the victim’s response was primal: "I am human. I need to use the toilet."

That assertion remains an unsettling indictment of the present day. The contemporary tragedy of the hijra is not that they are a modern anomaly struggling for assimilation, but that their systemic degradation represents a relatively recent historical regression. 

Far from being alien to this region, gender-variant populations occupied established, recognized niches across the subcontinent for millennia. Classical Hindu texts, including the Ramayana and Mahabharata, contain explicit references to gender variance. Historically, hijras were invested with spiritual potency, performing ritualistic songs and dances at weddings and births. Their blessings were sought to secure prosperity and fertility, while their curses were genuinely feared…a dynamic that created an equilibrium of utility and social power.

Under Islamic rulers, particularly during the Mughal era, gender-variant individuals and eunuchs frequently attained positions of significant administrative and political authority. They managed royal households, served as trusted guardians, and advised courts. Proximity to state power was not merely possible; it was routine.

The destruction of this historical synthesis was an enterprise of British colonial administration. Governed by Victorian moral anxieties and an obsession with social classification, the colonial state viewed the hijra as a moral contagion requiring regulation. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 institutionalised the criminalisation of gender-variance, demanding registration, surveillance, and the active suppression of their public expressions. 

Decades after the British departed, the administrative apparatus and societal prejudices inherited from that era remain intact. A community whose presence once commanded imperial audience and spiritual deference was reduced to begging at traffic intersections and fighting for basic physical safety.

The violence inflicted upon the community extends far beyond petty crimes and killings. It operates as a continuous lifecycle of coercion. It begins in early childhood with familial rejection, progresses through denial of formal education and employment, and culminates in structural poverty and public harassment.

When Common Gender attempted to dramatise this reality in 2012, its artistic choices were met with mixed reviews from the very people it sought to depict. Hijra activists pointed out that the production viewed them through an external lens, casting cisgender actors rather than authentic community members. They argued that aesthetic representation is a poor substitute for genuine structural inclusion.

A community can be rendered visible on the silver screen while remaining entirely disenfranchised from political and economic institutions.

Moreover, the nature of the threat has evolved. In 2012, the film conceptualised violence primarily through the mechanics of familial shame, social bigotry, and interpersonal rejection. By 2026, the rhetoric surrounding gender identity in Bangladesh has become overtly political and dangerous. Police have detained a suspect in Moshin’s murder, while community members allege the involvement of extremist factions. 

Whether these claims are validated by judicial evidence or not, the pervasive terror felt across the hijra network is very real.

Moshin’s role as a Guru Ma points out an element missing from conventional commentary. The hijra community does not consist of fragmented, helpless individuals wandering the periphery; it relies on complex alternative kinship systems, informal economic safety nets, and clear hierarchies crafted precisely because traditional societal institutions failed them. Moshin exercised authority and maintained order within her sphere, yet remained completely unprotected outside it.

Constitutional accommodations and administrative tick-boxes offer cold comfort when social attitudes still remain hostile. A government form granting a third-gender designation cannot shelter a teenager expelled from their family home, nor can it compel an employer to hire a qualified candidate. Common Gender was ultimately an unfinished argument. Its central plea was for the majority to recognize the basic humanity of a vulnerable minority. 

More than a decade later, the ultimate failure of policy is that hijra citizens are still expected to prove their worth, perform their trauma, or suffer tragic demises simply to justify their right to exist.

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Adiba Hayat heads the Life & Arts section of Daily Waadaa