PESHAWAR:Although navigating through the ups and downs of life is always a tremendously thorny ordeal for transgender persons in K-P surviving on the margins of society, their fated struggle for acceptance rarely ends with death.
The transgender community of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), faces the worst form of persecution, with regular instances of target killing claiming the lives of countless trans persons every year. As the community unites in bereaving the ruthless murder of another innocent fellow member, the additional exasperation of locating a cleric and grave for the deceased’s funeral proceedings weighs heavily on its nerves.
Last month, the friends of Asma Lata, a Karachi-based trans woman brutally murdered at the Iqbal Plaza in Peshawar, had to face a similar quandary, when they had to wait for seven hours before their beloved friend could finally be laid to rest. After futilely pleading two or three local people to perform the funeral prayers of Asma, they found help in a non-native transgender, associated with religious preaching, who out of courtesy came forward to perform the last rites of the deceased.
This however, can surely not be seen as a lone occurrence since a couple of years ago too, the local imam had openly refused to supervise the funeral and burial proceedings of a transgender who was murdered in a similar case of target killing in Peshawar.
“In K-P, immense fortitude is required to bury a fellow transgender friend. We literally have to beg religious leaders and locals to assist us in the funeral prayers and burial. Moreover, finding burial space for a trans person is just as difficult,” revealed Arzoo Khan, a trans rights activist and Chairman of the Trans Alliance Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
“For Asma’s burial, we had to collect a donation worth Rs120,000 before her body could be sent through an ambulance to Karachi for burial. Neither the government nor any private organisation helped us with this. Day by day transgender persons are being brutally killed yet no space exists for us to bury them,” lamented Arzoo.
