Our conversations toward “Reimagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia” began in the dismaying aftermath of the 2023 Pakistani Federal Shariat Court judgment in Hammad Hussain v. Federation of Pakistan. This judgment (now in abeyance while being appealed) deemed major portions of Pakistan's 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act “unIslamic” and unenforceable. However, this judgment was written not only in the register of Islamic jurisprudence, but it also deployed common global tropes emanating from anti-gender, homophobic, and allegedly decolonial religious nationalist registers (Awan 2022; Redding 2022). Despite the loss, disappointment, and precarity resulting from this judgment, many of Pakistan's trans-hijra-khwaja sira communities and allies continued to work against the exclusions represented by this decision and hostile mechanisms of transgender rights and legitimacy.1 Such efforts to reimagine trans possibility entail reckonings with the coconstitutive scripts of gender, sexuality, nation, region, language, kinship, class, caste, labor, and religion. This special issue grows out of the robust scholarship engaging such reckonings across South Asia and asks how regional conversations in their “collusions and collisions” (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 151) might further reimagine trans-hijra-khwaja sira possibility with, against, and beyond the state.
Pamment et al. (Sat,) studied this question.