DERA GHAZI KHAN - The transgender community will file petition with the Supreme Court against the results of the 6th Population and Housing Census released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistic (PBS).
This was disclosed by Shahana Abbas, the coordinator of Ittehad Bara-e-Haqooq-e-Khawaja Sira Pakistan. Talking to The Nation, Shahana said latest census results that the country’s transgender population stands at 10,418 including 913 of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 27 of FATA, 6,709 of Punjab, 2527 of Sindh, 109 of Balochistan and 133 of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) are against the actual population of the community.
She added the community has rejected the bogus, inaccurate and misleading count of transgender population across the country.
She claimed more than 1,000 transgender persons were living in district Multan, 200 in Muzaffargarh, 150 in Layyah, 300 in DG Khan and 50 in Rajanpur. She added as per annual report-2015 of United Nations AIDS (UNAIDs) Control Programme, TG population is around 150,000. Similarly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as per report of Trans Action Alliance (TAA)/Blue Veins, the TG population of the province was to be between 40,000 and 50,000.
“In Karachi, as per a report of Gender Interactive Alliance (GIA), the TG population is between 15,000 and 20,000, while around 7,000 TG community members were registered by GIA activists in a door-to-door campaign following the 2009 Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) directive,” she said.
She said that in Lahore, the Khwaja Sara Society (KSS) has registered 20,000 TGs for their Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) project. She criticised that above mentioned counting is more than result of official census and it is against rights of TG community.
She complained that the census staff did not visit their places where they live, or refused to count them because mostly they did not have CNICs and individual houses yet now. She added that several transgender persons, who were mentioned as male or female in their CNICs, were not counted as transgender.
She disclosed it should be in mind, TG rights activists have already rejected similar results of official survey of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) which were conducted on the directives of the SCP in 2009 against the recognised standards of research.
She demanded the PBS should publish a name list of these 10,418 TG for real pictures of facts.