Meti

What meti names and what it does not

The word belongs to a set, and the set is what makes it hard to translate. Kothi overlaps with meti without matching it. Panthi names the masculine partner and is not a gender word at all. Anya, other, is the administrative label that appears on Nepali forms, and third gender is the legal category, used sometimes as an umbrella for sexual and gender minorities as a whole and sometimes interchangeably with other.

Respondents did not choose between them. Most people in the Williams Institute sample were attached to several identity terms at once, a primary identity did not mean attachment to that identity alone, and the same term indicated different identities when different respondents used it. The report's conclusion is that an individual's identity cannot be understood according to a single label, and that it is understood better where the person is allowed to use more than one.

Almost all of these terms describe people assigned male at birth, and among the respondents assigned female at birth the survey found no strong attachment to any of them except gay and third gender.

Where the word meti is said to come from

Wikipedia reports that the term originates in Darjeeling, across the Indian border, where it means to quench one's thirst, alluding to meti sexual interactions with men. That derivation is reported rather than demonstrated. Nothing traced for this entry dates the word's first appearance in writing, names anyone who used it first, or points to a lexicographical source behind the Darjeeling claim.

The legal record is kept far better than the word is. In 2007 the Supreme Court, in a case brought by Sunil Babu Pant, ordered the government to include a third category in citizenship cards, to scrap all discriminatory laws against sexual minorities, and to form a committee to study same-sex marriage. Pant was Asia's first openly gay federal-level politician. The ruling made self-determination the sole criterion for establishing a gender on government documents, which set a precedent well beyond Nepal, and the card that resulted offers both as an option under gender.

Why the census could not count metis

The 2011 Nepal census was the first attempt by any national government to count its people by three genders, male, female and third gender. It failed, and the UNDP and Williams Institute report names four reasons: no clear printed definition of the third gender in the census enumerator handbook, limited training and awareness among enumerators as to how to collect information about it and explain it, reluctance to record people who identified as third gender along with reported cases of harassment by enumerators, and software that could not handle data disaggregated by three gender categories. The results were published by male and female only.

Al Jazeera reported in 2014 that the unsuccessful census prevented Nepal from becoming the first country to officially count people self-identifying as a third gender, and that because budgets take census data into account, the missing count is also an absence from the government spending meant to relieve the discrimination those people face. By then the Nepalese electoral commission, along with some banks and some trekking agencies, had begun including anya on registration forms of their own.

What the Blue Diamond Society survey found

About a year after the census, the Williams Institute, in partnership with the Blue Diamond Society, designed and ran a survey covering demographics and socio-economic status, self-identification with sexual orientation and gender identity terms, experiences of discrimination, and access to HIV services. Sunil Pant, who had brought the 2007 case, sat on the team that designed it.

The report identifies a Third Gender and Meti group in its data that other data collection efforts would overlook if they relied on a single term such as kothi to measure the gender non-conforming population, and puts the potential undercount at 11.3 per cent. The report itself presents that figure as a share of its own sample of sexual and gender minorities, and claims nothing for any wider Nepali population.

The same report is explicit that the Nepali terms carry strong sexual behaviour assumptions. Some metis, it records, define their identity both in terms of feminine gender identity and expression and in terms of a sexual role, as the receptive partner in anal intercourse. That is why the word does not map onto Transgender or Third gender, both of which are silent about who does what with whom, and it is a second reason the word differs from Hijra: 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.

The assumptions did not predict behaviour reliably. One group reporting strong attraction to men and to panthis also produced more than 45 per cent of respondents naming recent sexual partners who were women, a category that had not appeared in their answers about attraction. The report's own reading is that identities are dynamic, including the ones usually assumed to correspond with particular behaviour.

What life under the ruling has looked like

Al Jazeera found in 2014 that only a handful of people had been given a citizenship card in the new category, that local and district administrations still requested proof to certify a person's gender despite the self-determination principle, and that the central government issued the third category only to new applicants. The Williams Institute report makes the same point with its cover photograph: a Nepali transgender activist holding a citizenship certificate that lists her as male after dozens of attempts to change it.

Semanta Dahal, a Kathmandu lawyer, described the limit built into the decision itself. The 2007 provision was a directive to find the laws that were discriminatory rather than a declaration that any law was unconstitutional, since there was no constitution, and the civil and criminal code still treated what it called unnatural sex as illegal. Hari Phuyal, the lawyer involved in the first Nepalese ruling in favour of a live-in relationship between two women, said the report on same-sex marriage was prepared and sitting with the Ministry of Health.

The record of harassment runs on both sides of the ruling. In 2004 thirty-nine metis were arrested and detained for spreading perversion, with no due process available to them. After floods in the Sunsari district in 2008, residents identifying as metis reported being denied food supplies because of their appearance. In 2013 Human Rights Watch denounced arbitrary arrests and government harassment of LGBTI people in Nepal under a Public Offences Act that lets chief district officers jail detainees without due process. Sipha Choudari told Al Jazeera she had been held in custody for sixteen days because officers took her for a sex worker, and had been challenged at Nepalgunj airport by staff who did not believe she was the person in her passport.

Why Nepalis disagree about the category

Employment is the mechanism the material names most often. Wikipedia's account is that many metis are pushed into sex work because other roles are closed to them, which is the reason it gives for the relatively high incidence of HIV in the community, and the remedy it names is knowledge and education. Swastika Lama told Al Jazeera that sexual minorities, transgender people above all, are not welcomed in any job but prostitution, and described the difficulty of opening a bank account, buying telephone cards, renting a room and applying for work.

Not everyone in Nepal accepts the framing. Shiva Achariya, a human rights officer at the National Centre for AIDS and STD Control, part of the Ministry of Health, told Al Jazeera in 2014 that for him and many other Nepalis a person cannot be identified as third gender, that there is no such thing because there is no harassment, and that the government had a constitution to write for more than a hundred ethnic and social minorities. Mira Mishra, a professor of gender studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, put the remaining work differently, as a need for a mass awareness campaign aimed at young people, who are relatively open. By then sexual and gender minorities were holding weekly demonstrations demanding a parliamentary seat of their own.