Hijra

That is the reason it is not a translation of transgender. Harvard's Religion and Public Life project notes that in Hindu society people of non-binary gender expression have held important roles for more than two thousand years, but the hijra community as it now exists is a specific social institution with a structure, not a description of an inner sense of gender.

What hijras do at a birth

Hijras perform badhai at births and weddings, singing and blessing in exchange for payment, and the blessing is understood to carry force because of who is giving it. The obverse is a curse, and the ambivalence between the two, auspicious and feared at once, is the position the category has held for a very long time.

The economy that sits under the ritual role is precarious, and where badhai has declined the alternatives have often been begging and sex work. Sources that describe the ritual role without the economics produce a romanticised account.

How the law changed

Colonial administration criminalised the category. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 registered hijras as a criminal tribe and made their performances and their dress a policing matter, and that framework outlasted the empire that built it.

Recognition came in 2014, when the Supreme Court of India held in the NALSA judgment that transgender people, hijras included, constitute a third gender entitled to constitutional protection. Khawaja sira and Meti carry the Pakistani and Nepali recognitions, each dated in its own entry. Reporting on the Indian judgment noted continuing implementational disenfranchisement, which is the ordinary distance between a ruling and a life.

Why the count is disputed

The 2011 Indian census recorded 487,803 people under other, the first census to offer the option. It is generally treated as a substantial undercount, and estimates circulating around the 2014 judgment put the figure nearer three million. The gap between an official count and a community estimate is itself the finding here.

Some hijras are intersex, and the colonial literature treated the whole category as though it were, which Intersex sets out as a general error rather than a South Asian one.

Regional names differ and are not always synonyms: kinnar in parts of northern India, khawaja sira in Pakistan, thirunangai in Tamil Nadu, each with its own history and its own preferences about the others.

Why the regional names are not synonyms

Kinnar, khawaja sira, aravani and thirunangai are often listed as translations of one another and the communities involved do not always agree. The Tamil term thirunangai, meaning respected woman, was promoted from the 2000s partly in preference to aravani and partly against hijra itself, which some Tamil speakers consider a north Indian imposition. In Pakistan khawaja sira carries a Mughal court lineage that the Indian term does not claim in the same way.

A catalogue that files them all under one headword loses that, so this one gives them as regional names with their territory attached and writes the larger communities separately.

What the word means literally

The Arabic and Urdu root behind hijra carries a sense of leaving or departing, the same root as the hijrah, the migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in 622. Whether the gender term derives from that root or merely resembles it is disputed, and sources that assert the connection confidently are overreaching. What is not disputed is that leaving is a fair description of the social fact: joining a hijra household has usually meant leaving a natal family.