The Transgender Rights Bill is recently discuss in Parliament. After Jamaat-e-Islami’s Senator Mushtaq pushes for the inclusion of certain amendments to the Bill.
The transgender community says that false propaganda is being unleashes against the Transgender Protection Act. Calling those who fight for equal rights of transgender people as homosexuals is tantamount to persecuting them.
Journalist Tanzila Mazhar joins with trans activist Aisha Mughal on the show ‘Insights with Tanzila Mazhar’. To discuss the misconceptions that are stirring up on social media:
People takes no time to make quick comments even nobody reads the 2018 Transgender Person Protection of Rights Act.
When an Act passes, a set of rules also passes with it. Finally, the law pass in 2018. Likewise, a rule book of this act release in 2020.
Rule no. 3 pertains to ‘amending the existing CNIC’. Which mentions that any transgender can change their CNIC to obtain an X card.
In 2018, the Act grants trans people their essential rights to education, dignity and employment.
The bill of transgender rights allows that person to have self perceive gender identity.
Aisha says that now people are using it for political gains and conflating it with homosexuality. Which is an act of cruelty towards the trans community.
While she was speaking about Senator Mushtaq and his objections to the term ‘transgender’. Moreover, his concern that allowing trans rights will lead to validating the LGBTQ movement. Aisha says it appears that either the Senator is severely misinform. Or that he hasn’t read the rule book.
She points out that according to the rule book, a person could only get their gender change to ‘X’ on a Nadra CNIC not to a man or woman. As states by the Senator, thereby negating their concerns that man would be passing off as women and vice versa.
Statistics quoted by the JI were not verified by the CNIC issuing body NADRA. And Aisha says there are more verification require.
She further adds that if anybody actually changes their gender from a man to woman or vice versa then it can not be through this law. Meanwhile, the terms of this law don’t make any such provisions.
She advises everybody to read the rules first and not engage in misinformation without doing their own research.
It may mention that the Protection of Rights Act 2018 is commonly known as the Transgender Act. Further, this law passed in the last months of the PML-N govt. When Shahid Khaqan Abbasi was the prime minister in 2018. It was one of the few laws that the government and the opposition voted unanimously in transgenders favor.