IN the holy months of Ramazan and Muharram, the transgender community remains solely dependent on society’s charitable endeavours as their usual earning activities of performing at ceremonies and weddings come to a halt during these months. To run the wheel of their life, they go door to door to collect alms and food, but mostly receive a cold response.

Our society clearly practises gender apartheid when it comes to our interactions with the transgender people. They are jeered and ridiculed rather insensitively. All our moral codes and ethics about respecting human life lie by the wayside when and where we come across a transgender person. They are shooed and booed away as if they are some kind of outcasts.

Who gives us the right to humiliate them? Religion? Culture? Neither. Our attitude is based solely on our ignorance and indifference. We treat them badly for reasons that are beyond anyone’s control.

Even from the pulpit, the saintly voices should exhort people to act humanely with the transgender people, and give their zakat and donations to them. Parents ought to be counselled against distancing themselves from their gender-flux children. The media should also air advertisements and show programmes to change the negative public opinion towards the transgender community. Theatre is the platform whereat this community is derided the most, and that must be reined in by courts of law and media regulatory authorities.

I urge everyone to include this community in their charitable offerings. Rather we should support and sponsor them financially so that they may get education and learn various trades to earn their livelihood with dignity. They deserve our support, especially the charity that takes place during Ramazan.

M. Nadeem Nadir
Kasur

Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2022