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Government of Pakistan provides active support for sexual minorities

The government of Pakistan is providing active support to the transgender Hindu Hijra community by recognising their gender and by actively promoting their welfare through government employment.

BBC News Report at this link.

Hindu Hijra communities are religious communities devoted to the goddess Bahuchara.

God without God has an extended commentary on Matthew 19:12 which includes this section on the Hijra:

Finally there are those who, inexplicably, have ‘made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’. The key to this otherwise mysterious concept can be found in the religious nature of the hijra communities of the Indian subcontinent. Hijra communities are modelled on other single-sex religious communities, as found throughout the world and throughout history, with a guru or mother figure, a sisterhood, initiates and novices. They are made up of male individuals who dress as women, but rather than seeking to pass as women, live as hijra, sometimes called the third sex. The transition from novice to hijra is marked by surgical castration, referred to as nirvan (rebirth). The one carrying out the operation is called dai, which means midwife. By some estimates as many as one in five hundred of the subcontinent’s population may be living as hijra, in accordance with a variety of regional variations. The hijra understand themselves as religious communities devoted to the goddess Bahuchara Mata. They speak of having had a vocation or spiritual calling to become her devotees, to become hijra, from early childhood. The sacrifice of the genitals is the mark of devotion by which they are reborn and enter into the blessed state to which they were privileged to be called. In various eras they had not only religious but royal duties: they would have passed through the holy land in groups like other royal eunuchs. With an inner conviction understood in terms of religious devotion, the hijra have ‘made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’. It may be one notch away on the infinitely variable scale of queer sexuality, but comparisons with the contemporary western transgender experience are inescapable: here is their ancient precedent, and their biblical affirmation. It is about finding wholeness and personal integrity in responding to an inescapable spiritual calling; both the social transition and the surgery are ‘for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’.

Read the full piece here >>

or for more context read the full sexual minorities section >>
or the full eros section >>
or the full ethics section >>
or best of all the whole book >>