Three transgender Pakistanis were gunned down and dumped like waste on a highway in Karachi, and as always, the police filed an FIR, the government mouthed platitudes, and the cycle of ritual condemnations resumed. For now, the cameras are busy rolling with outrage gaining traction on social media. However, all this would soon give way to a deafening silence. The dead join a long, anonymous procession of bodies that this republic refuses to count.
\nLet us not deceive ourselves. This is not an isolated crime. For a community already hounded out of schools, jobs, and homes, the graveyard has become the only place left where the state cannot evict them. A 2023 study found that more than 90 per cent of transgender Pakistanis reported physical assaults. From Peshawar to Malakand and Mardan, the bullets that tear through these bodies are not fired only by the gunmen. Instead, they are loaded by a society that finds its courage only in persecuting the vulnerable. Even those who survive carry a target on their backs. Marvia Malik, Pakistan\u2019s first transgender news anchor, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Lahore in 2023, a reminder that public visibility here invites bullets faster than respect.
\nRemember 2018? We cheered a rare law that promised dignity to transgender citizens. Five years later, the Federal Shariat Court struck down key provisions, stripping away hard-won safeguards. Amnesty International called the rollback a \u201cblow to the already beleaguered community.\u201d But it was more than that. It was a signal that constitutional guarantees of equality could be undone and that bigotry could be written into law. And the consequences are written in blood. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, 158 trans people have been murdered since 2015, and not one killer has been punished.
\nWorse still is the sanctimonious cruelty of society. Clerical councils openly demand that trans people be expelled from towns, yet the same voices that thunder about piety fall mute when a transgender body turns up on the roadside. We need to be honest with ourselves. We do not merely fail our transgender citizens. We hunt for them\u2013with laws that strip protections, with police that sneer at their sight, with neighbours who spit, and with a media that reduces their existence to spectacle.
\nJustice will not be delivered by more condemnations. It will be delivered when killers face the gallows, when the 2018 law is not just restored but enforced and when every police station is forced to treat transgender lives as equal to their own. Most of all, it will be delivered when society looks in the mirror and sees the blood on its hands.
\nUntil then, each fresh murder will stand as Pakistan\u2019s confession: that in this land of the pure, some citizens are not meant to live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three transgender Pakistanis were gunned down and dumped like waste on a highway in Karachi, and as always, the police filed an FIR, the government mouthed platitudes, and the cycle of ritual condemnations resumed. For now, the cameras are busy rolling with outrage gaining traction on social media. However, all this would soon give way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\n