Saturday, April 4, 2015

A Transgender Bangladeshi Changes Perceptions After Catching Murder Suspects

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Ellen Barry from New Delhi.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — In an alleyway off a marketplace
 specializing in meat and live chickens, up a few narrow,
 precipitous flights of cement stairs, can be found the most
sought-after transgender crime fighter in Bangladesh.

Reporters from newspapers and television stations are
combing Dhaka looking for her, and so are police officials,
who said they would like to give her an award for bravery.
But since Monday, when she nabbed two suspects in the
killing of a blogger , the woman, Labannya Hijra,
21 — who takes her last name from the South Asian term  
for biological males who identify as women — has melted
back into the city where she has been invisible for so long.

After three days of searching, a reporter found her on
Thursday, and she agreed to tell her story publicly for the
first time. She was willing to speak only after her mentor,
another hijra named Sapna Hijra, granted her permission.

The blogger, Oyasiqur Rhaman, 27, was attacked by three
young men, who had reportedly been ordered to kill him for
writing comments critical of Islam on social media.
Ms. Hijra grabbed the T-shirts of the fleeing men, who
were students. As they struggled in her grasp, a machete
fell out of one man’s bag and clattered to the ground.
One of the men whacked at her hand and shouted at her to
let him go, and she yelled back, “Shut up!”

“We in the hijra community, we don’t want any terrorist
activity in this society,” she said. “We want an environment
where each and every person, including hijras, can move
around the city safely.”

It is surprising that anyone intervened after Monday’s brutal
attack, not least a member of a marginalized minority.
After months of violent political protests and deteriorating
security, Dhaka has become a place where witnesses prefer
to forget. On Feb. 26, a group of young men killed Avjit Roy ,
 an atheist Bangladeshi-American blogger and author, on a
crowded street as he left a book fair.
“Not less than 10 to 12 people saw the attack,” said the victim’s
father, Ajoy Roy, but the police were unable to get useful
descriptions from witnesses. “Either they are not interested
or they could not find them.”

The Dhaka Tribune reported on Tuesday that locals were
reluctant to chase Mr. Rhaman’s killers. Ms. Hijra said she
caught two of the men as they ran past her, pursued by police
officers and civilians. When the police caught up to her, they
arrested the men, and Ms. Hijra made herself scarce. The third suspect escaped.

She hesitated to come forward, fearing that the killers’
associates would remember her face. She considered fleeing
to the village where she grew up.

But over the next several days, she began to notice that,
even without identifying herself, she was getting an
unusual degree of respect.
“Some people, when they see me, they say, ‘You did a
fantastic job, you grabbed the terrorists,’ ” she said.
 “So there is some new appreciation of our hijra
community.”

Transgender people occupy an unusual social stratum in
South Asia, where conservative societies still consider
same-sex intercourse to be a crime but also allow the
existence of a third gender — a well-established category
that dates back to the age of the “Kama Sutra.” Nepal,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have all legally recognized the
existence of a third gender, including on passports and
other official documents.

Ms. Hijra recognized herself as a hijra as a child, and left
home at 9 in the company of an older transgender woman.
In Dhaka, she joined a rigidly hierarchical commune
headed by Sapna Hijra, whom she refers to as “guru-ma,”
or revered leader. They make their living by a traditional,
low-stakes protection scheme: asking shopkeepers for
small sums of money and creating a noisy racket on the
street outside if they refuse. The business model depends
 heavily on the belief that hijras have the power to invoke curses.

She lives in a tin-roofed shanty and earns about $4 a day
begging.
“We don’t have a normal life; we are not normal human
beings,” she said. “Sometimes I hate myself when I think
I am a hijra.”
But on the other hand, she said, “many people love us,
because we are helpless and deprived.”
On Thursday, speaking about the attack in the presence
of her guru, Ms. Hijra was asked whether she would
appear in person to accept congratulations from the
police. She looked expectantly at Sapna Hijra, who
said, “Why not?”
“Yes, I can expect to receive an award,” Ms. Hijra
said happily. “I grabbed two terrorists.”



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