Hijra

Hijra is a gender category of South Asia, found chiefly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Hijras are usually assigned male at birth and live as neither men nor women. What separates the term from anything in the Western vocabulary is that it names an institution as much as a gender: hijras belong to organised households, and hold ritual entitlements that a person outside those households cannot claim.

That is why "the South Asian word for transgender" is a mistranslation rather than a shorthand. A person can be non-binary alone, in private, having told nobody. Nobody is a hijra alone.

Definition & scope

Membership runs through initiation into a dera, a household headed by a guru, whose chelas — disciples — owe her deference and contribute to the household's income in return for lineage, protection and a place. Accounts of the community describe these households grouped into wider lineages called gharanas, each under a nayak. The structure is kinship built deliberately, usually after the natal family has been lost.

The ritual role is equally definitional. Hijras perform badhai — singing, dancing and blessing at the birth of a child and at weddings — and the blessing is understood to carry weight precisely because the giver stands outside the reproductive order she is blessing. Devotion to the goddess Bahuchara Mata is widespread, and a large share of hijras are Muslim, so the tradition is syncretic rather than the property of one religion.

Regional names are not simple synonyms: kinnar in the north, khwaja sira in Pakistan, aravani and thirunangai in Tamil Nadu. Several were adopted deliberately to displace hijra in places where outsiders had turned it into an insult.

History & origins

• Antiquity to the medieval period: third-sex categories appear in Sanskrit legal and medical literature, and gender-variant courtiers and attendants are recorded under the Mughals, though continuity with the modern community is a matter of scholarly argument rather than settled fact.
• 1871: British India's Criminal Tribes Act brings hijras under registration and surveillance as a class presumed criminal, prohibits them from adopting children, and criminalises castration — an anti-hijra campaign whose administrative logic outlasted the empire.
• 2009: Pakistan's Supreme Court directs that khwaja sira be recorded as a distinct category on national identity documents.
• 2011: India's census offers an "other" code alongside male and female for the first time.
• 2013: Bangladesh recognises hijra as a separate gender by cabinet decision.
• 2014: the Indian Supreme Court decides NALSA v. Union of India, holding that hijras must be treated as a third gender for all legal purposes, that gender identity is "an innate perception" rather than a biological fact, and that no one may be made to undergo medical examination to prove it.
• 2019: India's Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act defines a transgender person to include those "having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta", naming the community in the statute itself.

In practice

Legal recognition and material circumstance have moved apart. The 2014 judgment was expansive; the 2019 Act that followed was criticised for requiring certification through a district magistrate rather than resting on the self-identification the court had affirmed, and fieldwork on how the Act operates in Kolkata found the rights it grants largely inaccessible in practice, with discrimination continuing across family, work, education and healthcare.

The household economy is the other constant. Badhai has thinned as urban ritual life has changed, and begging and sex work substitute for it — an outcome of exclusion from ordinary employment rather than a feature of the tradition, and the reason employment and education provisions were the part of the 2014 judgment the community pressed hardest for.

Psychology

No diagnostic category applies to being a hijra, and none should: it is a social and religious status, not a clinical one. The ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, and the DSM-5 diagnoses distress rather than identity.

The research literature that exists is public-health research, concentrated on HIV, violence and access to care, and it consistently reports that the burden is produced by exclusion. The colonial-era framing of hijras as a criminal class is the historical fact that literature keeps returning to, because the administrative habits it created outlived the statute.

Prevalence & culture

How common is the hijra identity?

One real count exists and it is contested. India's 2011 census recorded 487,803 people under its "other" gender code — about 0.04% of the country's population — with the largest share in Uttar Pradesh and an overall literacy rate of 56.07%, well below the national figure. The count is an anchor rather than an answer: the census asked about gender, not about hijra identity, so the category is wider than the community; and community organisations hold the figure to be a substantial undercount, given the cost of declaring oneself to an enumerator.

Pakistan's 2017 census was the first there to count khwaja sira separately, on the Supreme Court's direction. Its preliminary release recorded 10,418 people in a population above 200 million, 6,709 of them in Punjab; the Bureau of Statistics' final tabulation revised that to 21,774. Both figures are treated by community organisations as far too low, for the reason the Indian count is.

The comparison in that last row is offered with a warning attached. A US identification rate and a South Asian census code are not measuring the same thing, and the gap between them says more about who is willing to be counted, and about what the question asked, than about how many people exist.