Meti

The legal fact is much better documented than the etymology. In 2007 the Supreme Court, in a case brought by Sunil Babu Pant, ordered the government to add a third category to citizenship documents, to scrap discriminatory laws and to convene a committee on same-sex marriage. Pant was the first openly gay federal-level politician in Asia. The ruling made self-determination the sole criterion for the category, which set a precedent for identity documents well beyond Nepal.

Why the census could not count metis

The 2011 Nepal census was the first attempt by any national government to count a population by three genders. It failed, and the United Nations Development Programme and the Williams Institute set out four reasons in 2014: the enumerator handbook carried no printed definition of the third gender, enumerators were barely trained in how to ask or explain it, some were reluctant to record third-gender answers and some harassed the people giving them, and the software could not handle data split three ways. The results were published disaggregated by male and female only.

What that cost is concrete. Al Jazeera reported in 2014 that the failure stopped Nepal becoming the first country to count people who identify as a third gender, and that budgets follow census data, so the absence of the count is also an absence from government spending. By then the electoral commission, some banks and some trekking agencies had begun offering anya, other, on their own forms.

What the Blue Diamond Society survey found

About a year after the census, the Williams Institute worked with the Blue Diamond Society, a Nepali sexual health and human rights organisation, on a survey covering demographics, self-identification, discrimination and access to HIV services. Its central finding about the word is that respondents were attached to several identity terms at once, that the same term meant different things to different people, and that an individual's identity could not be read off a single label.

The practical consequence is a counting problem rather than a philosophical one. The report identifies a Third Gender and Meti group in the data that would have been missed entirely by a survey using kothi alone as its measure of gender non-conforming respondents, and puts the resulting undercount at 11.3 per cent. That figure is a share of the survey's own sample of sexual and gender minorities, not a share of any Nepali population.

Why meti is not simply an identity label

The survey is explicit that the Nepali terms carry strong assumptions about sexual behaviour. Some metis, it records, define themselves in terms of feminine gender identity and expression and also in terms of a sexual role, as the receptive partner, and the counterpart term panthi names the partner rather than a gender. That is why the word does not translate cleanly onto Transgender or onto Third gender, both of which are silent about who does what with whom.

The same feature makes meti unlike Hijra, its better-known neighbour to the south, in a different way: a hijra joins a household under a guru and the community structure is the category, whereas meti names a position in a set of relational terms with no lineage attached. Almost all Nepali terms of this kind describe people assigned male at birth, which the Williams Institute noticed when the respondents assigned female at birth in its sample had no strong attachment to any of them except gay and third gender.

What life under the ruling has looked like

A court order is not an administrative system. Al Jazeera found in 2014 that only a handful of people had received citizenship cards in the new category, that local and district offices still demanded proof of gender despite the self-determination principle, and that the central government issued the third category only to new applicants. Semanta Dahal, a Kathmandu lawyer, pointed out that the 2007 decision was a directive to find discriminatory laws rather than a ruling striking any down, and that the civil and criminal code still treated what it called unnatural sex as illegal.

The record of harassment is older than the ruling. In 2004 thirty-nine metis were arrested and detained on a charge of spreading perversion, without due process. After floods in the Sunsari district in 2008, residents identifying as metis reported being denied food supplies because of how they looked. Human Rights Watch reported arbitrary arrests and government harassment of LGBTI people in Nepal in 2013, under a Public Offences Act that lets chief district officers jail people without due process.

How discrimination shapes the picture

Employment is the mechanism most often named. Metis are frequently pushed into sex work because other work is closed to them, which is the reason usually given for the high rate of HIV in the community, and the responses proposed in the literature are education and access to prevention rather than anything specific to the category. Not everyone in Nepal accepts the framing at all: Shiva Achariya, a human rights officer at the National Centre for AIDS and STD Control, told Al Jazeera in 2014 that in his view and that of many Nepalis a person cannot be identified as third gender, and that there is no such thing because there is no harassment. Mira Mishra, a professor of gender studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, argued in the same piece that legal change had run ahead of social attitudes and that the work left was a matter of public awareness.