Ninth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

Health-related needs and experiences of transgender community have been notably absent from research, policy, and practice on displaced populations in South Asia as a result of disproportionate focus on post-conflict geographical displacements within and across national borders. Resultantly, the transgender community has remained invisible to global and national rehabilitation efforts despite their community’s unique, collective and multilayered experiences of protracted displacement. The following paper draws on 30 in-depth interviews with transgender sex workers in Lahore to examine the relationships between contextual conditions, displacement and HIV among transgender population in Pakistan. Findings of this study suggest that indigenous experiences of transgender displacement in Pakistan are primarily a response to everyday violence and discrimination. The nature of these displacements is communal (requires absolute abandonment of existing social networks within highly regimented transgender kinship networks), individualized, highly regulated, repetitive, fragmentary, and often non-geographical. These experiences of displacement intensify individual and collective vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in transgender populations by increasing livelihood insecurity, inaccessibility to welfare and healthcare services, social isolation and exposure to sexual and gender-based violence and exploitation. Yet the increasing state-led biosurveillance of this community has rendered intentional displacements critical for transgender survival by providing escape (mostly temporarily) from exploitative transgender communal leaders (gurus), violent clients, abusive law enforcement agents, while expanding personal networks at the same time. Therefore, I argue that it’s essential to understand the indigenous transgender experiences of displacement to ensure effective HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in the country.