ABSTRACT
In May, the landmark policy, The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, was signed into law in Pakistan. The author centers the policy to think through the politics of legal recognition and the emerging linguistic gestures that challenge our frames of human/e and humanity. Over these last 10 years, several terms are/have been circulating within political/policy landscapes as legal names for Pakistan’s nonnormative gender, sex(ed), and sexualities—such as unix and eunuch, alongside the term she-male, and a recent return to the more respectable Persian/Farsi/Urdu term khawajasira and the adoption of the English term trans/gender. Through a reading of these crisscrossing terms—across legislative discourses, activist deployments, and communal affective registers—the author analyzes trans temporality, social formations, complex genealogies, uneven inheritances, and political uses. The article specifically focuses on concepts for transness introduced by elders—Bubli Malik, Bindiya Rana, and so many others—such as interactive alliances, wajood (to exist, existence, presence, being, substance, or entity), and insaniyat (human, humane, humanity). Centering these concepts allows the author take up what she sees as the key questions and challenges the trans communities are posing to current understandings of trans life: Which bodies and which ways of life are being afforded legal protection and recognition by the policy? Is there a more humane way to frame the right to exist? The author argues that inter/active alliances, wajood, and insaniyat are ways of worldmaking towards the plurality of the human/e. This pluralizing of the human is a challenge to the concept of ‘human rights’ as singular/individual—and demands a relationality (intimate sociality and interconnected survival) of existence, attending to the entanglements between language and legality, survival and subjectivity, flesh and structures of feeling.
