Khawaja sira

Where the name comes from

Eunuchs have been present in South Asia since Islam arrived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Many were imported as slaves and rose to positions of standing: political advisers, respected generals, guards of the royal harem. Some held sacred offices, at the Ka'ba in Mecca and at the burial place of the Prophet in Medina. That history is why khwaja sara reads as respectable in Pakistan while khusraa in Urdu and khusra in Punjabi read as insults, and it is why the Urdu word hijra is avoided by many of the people it describes.

The literal translation offered in English has usually been eunuch, and the fit is poor: only a fraction of khawaja siras today are castrated. Nothing in the record consulted here dates the first use of the word in its current sense, which is a gap rather than a finding.

What no source dates is the word itself. Khwajasara is traceable as a court title and khawaja sira as a community name is plainly later, but nothing on file records a first use of the term in its present sense, so the entry gives the lineage without a year attached to it.

Why khawaja sira and hijra are argued about

Whether the two words name the same thing is disputed inside the community, and the disagreement is precise. Jannat Ali, who coordinates the drop-in centre at the Khawaja Sira Society in Lahore, draws the line at the household: a hijra is somebody inside the guru-chela system, while a khawaja sira can be anybody, including a person outside it, and by that account a trans woman is a khawaja sira. She is not in the system herself, and has described the first question anybody asks a newcomer as the name of her guru.

Sunny, who works for NAZ Pakistan, the parent organisation of the Khawaja Sira Society, puts it the other way. Hijra, on her account, is a culture rather than an identity, one that trans women in Pakistan have to follow because there are no other options, though some now stand outside it. For her the two words mean the same thing. Anchal, interviewed on a Lahore food street in 2016, said only that the community prefers khawaja sira. A catalogue that resolves this disagreement would be reporting something the community has not settled.

How the households are organised

The guru-chela structure is the backbone: a guru is a head teacher, chelas are disciples, and a chela can in time become a guru. Entry is formal. A payment of 125 rupees, called chittai, makes somebody the chela of a chosen guru. Discipline is financial and social at once: a chela who errs may be fined thousands of rupees, and refusal to pay brings the cutting off of hookah pani, the ordinary socialising with other members of the community.

Most arrive after leaving home. Children whose behaviour is read as girlish are pressed by parents to change it, often less out of hostility than out of fear of what neighbours and relatives will say, and the households absorb the people that pressure expels.

Why the courts changed the category

In 2009 a group of khawaja siras returning from a wedding in Taxila were arrested and mistreated by local police. The jurist Aslam Khaki filed a writ petition, and between 2009 and 2011 the Supreme Court of Pakistan issued a series of directives, the most consequential of which created a new gender category. The court held that khawaja siras are citizens under the constitution, with rights and dignity equally protected. The National Database and Registration Authority then added a third gender category, officially named Khawaja Sira, to the national identity card.

Two things complicated the victory. The court documents used only the word eunuch, naming neither hijra nor khawaja sira. And the category was, in Muhammad Azfar Nisar's account, almost unanimously disavowed by the community it was created for, which is why legal recognition on its own moved so little. The 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act went further, barring discrimination in education, healthcare and employment and allowing people to correct their documents to their self-identified gender.

What the census could not count

The 2017 census of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics recorded 6,709 transgender people in Punjab, 2,527 in Sindh, 913 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 133 in Islamabad and 109 in Balochistan. The Pulitzer Center, reporting in 2016, put the figure at roughly 1.5 million. The distance between those numbers is the finding.

Health research fills part of the gap. A cross-sectional study of 91 self-identified khawaja siras in Islamabad, published in PLOS Global Public Health in 2026 and recruited through community gurus, found 68 per cent above the clinical threshold for psychological distress, 34 per cent unemployed, and 45 per cent uncomfortable or unsafe in healthcare settings. The authors note that recruitment through gatekeepers limits how far the sample represents anybody beyond itself.

How the stage represents khawaja sira

Visibility in Pakistan is double-edged, and theatre is where that shows most clearly. Commercial Punjabi stage shows and contemporary mujra draw khawaja sira performers into a circuit built on ridicule and eroticisation, while smaller theatre initiatives and the 2022 film Joyland have given room for self-representation. The scholarship on this describes not a choice between visibility and invisibility but a choice between two kinds of visibility, one built on consumption and one on testimony. The same doubleness runs through the ordinary economy of blessing at weddings and births, which sits alongside begging and sex work as the income the community has been left with.

Some khawaja siras are Intersex, and Pakistani society widely assumes all of them are, an error Intersex sets out in general terms. The relationship to Transgender is contested rather than settled, and the relationship to Hijra is contested inside the community itself.