BBC News

[boykitten]

Pakistan allows transsexuals to have own gender category

There has been little opposition to the decision by Pakistan's Supreme Court to allow a third gender category, apart from male or female, on the national identity card.

Comments

[splitcomplex]

Shehzadi is transgendered: physically male, but psychologically female.

"When I was about six or seven, I realised I wasn't either a boy or a girl," Shehzadi says.

Er?

transgendered people were ... seen as exemplary devotees with no family ties.

Uh.

I mean it's a step forward, but some parts of this article are giving me a severe case of side-eye.

[aaskew]

this. :\

Either Shehzadi is genderqueer, or it's just a language problem; when I was younger I likewise thought that I wasn't either a boy or a girl, because I didn't feel like a girl but likewise thought I couldn't be a boy either because I didn't have a penis.

[splitcomplex]

Yeah. I mean, when I was younger I sometimes thought that maybe I was supposed to be a boy, because I didn't know there was any other option, but if someone was quoting me for a magazine article I definitely wouldn't want them to say that about me (or to quote me properly while saying that I'm "psychologically male").

[galhea]

Even as I facepalm at the wording fail in the article, I kind of understand some of it because there's a cultural difference, especially with gender stuff. It's colonialist of Westerners to expect other countries to conform to how Westerners view gender, especially when the other countries have had a "third gender" category before colonization by the West (this is a key thing to note, by the way, considering how colonialism often demonized accepted cultural practices and made certain groups marginalized when they weren't before). Also, I'm willing to bet that most of the wording fail is due to translation and the biases and/or ignorance of the translators