When one reads through the handful of media pieces covering Bangladesh’s transgender community, the narrative is usually about their victimhood and aspirational longing for a better yet elusive future. In Bangladesh, hijras (individuals assigned male at birth who harbor outwardly feminine expressions) have long lived on the margins. Scholarly interest in this gender non-conforming community dates back to colonial times, where hijras are historicized as spiritual figures with the power to bless or curse, with contemporary scholars emphasizing how this much-revered figure has been expelled from areas of education, employment, healthcare, and housing. 

In the case of Bangladesh, a growing rise of religious conservatism has taken precedence within policy-making decisions concerning transgender and hijra communities. To preserve a fragile ruling coalition that included appeasing Islamist parties, the Awami League party has often turned a blind eye to violence and threats faced by hijras and trans people Not only have these (in)actions prevented trans people’s movement gains, but it has enabled right-wing academic intellectuals to capture social and political capital through a targeted escalation of trans and gay panic. Their well-intentioned academic ideas, designed to benefit the Bangladeshi mind, are inadvertently being used to campaign against trans people and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of indigenous minorities. To contextualize how the country arrived at this stage of trans panic, it is imperative to understand what the right has to gain by insisting that trans people are a threat. 

The rise of global LGBTQ liberalism 

“The transgender movement in Bangladesh started in 2000 through non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Conversations around trans rights took place within the larger women’s rights movement,” said Joya Sikder, a veteran trans woman activist and director of Somporker Noya Setu (SNS), an organization working for gender minorities. 

In 2013, a significant form of state recognition arose when the Awami League government allowed members of the hijra community to identify as a ‘third gender.’ While state recognition of such a deeply pathologized population was considered a major achievement, this did not lead to legal or political benefits for the country’s growing transfeminine population.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Time Magazine marked the year 2014 as the “transgender tipping point.” Since then, various liberal projects aiming to ‘include’ trans people in public life were backed by state and federal governments, pinkwashing the settler country’s image as a ‘LGBT-friendly’ nation. While Western empires used inclusion tactics to assimilate trans people into the state, violence against racialized trans people persisted in the backdrop. This was in sharp contrast to how nations that were deliberately underdeveloped by imperialist and colonial forces set different standards in governing their transgender citizens. Denying ‘human rights’ to trans people living in the global majority strengthened the U.S. public relations strategy of being a trans haven. 

Bangladesh is one such global majority country where the LGBT community faced massive setbacks from 2016. The decline in activism is attributed to the sensational murders of Xulhaz, a gay man, and Tonoy, a non-binary individual, both of whom were affiliated with the gay magazine, Roopbaan. Their deaths paralyzed the LGBTQ+ community, and the architects of previous gay rights advocacy efforts secured asylum in Western countries. 

In the absence of senior activists, a younger and more politically sharp generation arose amid a watershed age of trans visibility. Rarely discussed, the handful of large NGOs working for gender-diverse populations leveraged the deaths of Xulhaz and Tonoy as a cautionary tale to suppress movement-building efforts. To date, NGOs continue to solicit lucrative funds from international charities claiming to improve LGBT ‘advocacy and capacity-building’ efforts. 

How Bangladesh’s far-right seized identity politics 

Despite the rise in Bangladesh’s trans visibility, many hijras did not want to be seen as transgender as they believed hijragiri to be a culture and way of living. The tension between hijra vs. trans terminology led to national-level consequences for the country’s first transgender rights bill, which was petitioned to the Awami League in 2022. Due to backlash faced by hijra community leaders, Bangladesh’s Human Rights Commission was unable to pass the bill. 

“Gurus (leaders) who run hijra households benefit from the earnings made by their chelas (children) and nati-chelas (grandchildren),” said Joya, “Gurus don’t advocate for legal rights because if younger trans people have rights and become educated, they can no longer make money from the sex work and begging done by chelas.” 

The wedge in hijra vs. trans terminology was capitalized upon by right-wing intellectuals, Asif Mahtab Utsha and Md. Sorowar Hossain, two university professors who spread viral

rumors that transgender individuals are homosexuals who regularly changed their genders to carry out depraved activities (e.g., a trans woman who enters a women’s restroom is dangerous and is reduced to their male genitalia). Biology must decide every individual’s destiny. 

“In one of my old interviews, I had said that transgender is a gender identity and hijra is a culture. Utsha and Sorowar manipulated my words to falsely claim that transgender people are homosexuals in disguise,” said Joya. The intellectuals went so far to claim that hijras are born with intersex conditions and therefore psychology did not play a role in hijra identity formation. 

Transphobia escalated further in 2024 with the Sharif/Sharifa case at BRAC University, where Utsha tore out a book promoting transgender inclusivity. Large protests were held by various student bodies in solidarity with Utsha’s transmisogyny. “Right-wingers in Bangladesh are not doing anything new. They have been copying the same playbook that has been used over centuries to deny transgender people the right to live like any other human being,” said Meem Arafat Manab, a 29-year-old Mathematics lecturer at BRAC University. 

“The right-wingers want to keep transgender people within the hijra category. That way, hijras will continue doing sex work and begging as that is considered tradition,” said Joya. The explosive scenario that played out at Bangladesh’s leading private universities reflects the growing power of contemporary right-wing intellectuals and Islamofascist hardliners in distorting the public’s ideas of sex and gender. 

No More Playing Safe 

In 2024, Sahara Rabil Chowdhury was a 23-year-old trans woman and a 3rd-year student at Sylhet’s Metropolitan University. She spent most of her childhood moving between various villages in the Chittagong division due to the nature of her family’s occupation. Eventually, her family moved back to Sylhet. During her teenage years, Sahara noticed how the absence of legal rights affected her access to safety and material resources as an effeminate man. Her gender non-conformity invited predatory and sexual advances from stalkers, which she narrowly escaped. 

In freshman year, Sahara had entered her university as a closeted trans person. Upon transitioning, the faculty advised her to use the female restroom. During the Sharif/Sharifa scandal, online accusations surfaced that Sahara used both male and female restrooms as she desired. However, Sahara did not drink water during the day to avoid using campus restrooms. The bullying intensified over the years, and her peers went so far as to claim that because she was a class topper, Western organizations were paying faculty members to raise her grades.

While transantagonism was eating away at Sahara’s everyday reality, she became strongly influenced through reading about the Black civil rights movement in the United States. She believed that the goal of the oppressors was not to eradicate queer or trans people but to keep these communities as exploitable subjects. The deliberate denial of legal rights has pushed most transfeminine individuals into becoming sex workers and concubines, in other words, disposable. The acute denial correlates with Achille Mbembe’s theory of ‘necropolitics,’ which classifies certain populations as dead and devoid of being considered human. 

In July 2024, when students rallied with their blood against the despotic Awami League and Sheikh Hasina, Sahara took part in the protests and organized extensively on her university campus. After the interim government under Dr. Mohammad Yunus was sworn in, Md. Sorowar Hossain and Asif Mahtab Utsha once again took to social media to deny governmental registration of trans protestors who participated in the July uprising. 

“Sorowar and Utsha committed genocide denial by standing against the transgender martyrs of July. They have actively denied the truth of LGBT people’s contributions to driving away the Awami League,” shared Sahara. 

The aftermath of the 2024 uprising saw increased mob violence against trans women and their livelihoods. Most hijras lived in shared households or gharanas, a hierarchical kinship system that has existed for centuries. These households, often located in impoverished areas, were vandalized by transphobic mobs with impunity. The lack of legal mechanisms also compounded the precarity faced by trans men, non-binary, and intersex people. Without any social safety nets and legal rights, the trans community has become a demographic that is increasingly being pushed toward sex work and street begging to make ends meet. 

In South Asia, access to rights and benefits is determined by the role of the family and the institution of marriage. While assimilation into heteropatriarchy has been critiqued by radical leftists in Western societies, the exclusion of LGBTQ+ groups from accessing marriage has real, material consequences and can mean life or death. Sahara alongside other queer and trans individuals been demanding that Bangladesh’s LGBTQ people should be able to use marriage as a shield against wrongs that no one, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, should suffer. No loved one should be excluded from inheritance benefits and pensions, end-of-life decision-making, hospital visitation, and the many other family rights reserved for married couples.

‘The purpose of the system isn’t to exterminate LGBTQ people. It’s to make you disposable and exploitable. That’s what scares me so much. That’s what makes me care about this community and our legal rights,” says Sahara. 

In a defiant move to counter the trans hatred that Utsha and Sorowar regularly circulated on their Facebook pages, Sahara drew satirical and polemical cartoons of them both. With the increasing allegations made by Metropolitan University students against Sahara for getting ‘special transgender treatment’ and the cartoons that were drawn, Sahara was expelled from the university on August 13, 2025, without any disciplinary hearing or due process. Since her expulsion, Sahara has faced vitriol from right-wingers and media outlets on the violent nature of her drawings. Utsha and Sorowar spiraled into a social media rampage about how trans people will bring about society’s destruction. 

A historic declaration of trans agency 

In the Jim Crow era, civil rights figure Dr. Martin Luther King advocated for the use of non-violence as a way to achieve the gains needed for Black people living in the United States. His rationale was that if the oppressor witnesses the oppressed’s suffering, they will be moved to change their hearts and therefore their oppressive actions. Black Panther Party leader Stokely Carmichael aka Kwama Ture who refused to be assimilated into the middle-class mainstream, expressed that, in order for non-violence to work, the opponent must have a conscience, and in the case of the United States, they had none. 

Sahara’s ‘violent’ drawings align with Carmichael’s theory of using violence as a means of resistance, given that the right-wing Bangladeshis don’t possess a conscience or see trans people’s humanity. When a certain group is constantly living under threat, activists are interrogating whether non-violent tactics will work to change hearts and minds. Sahara thinks otherwise. “LGBT people have not been given a place in Bangladesh’s social contract. And thus we have no obligation to the social contract to preserve civility or non-violence to acquire our rights.” 

After Sahara’s expulsion, the media was more fixated on covering Sorowar and Utsha’s perspectives as they held a more ‘respectable’ position in society. In a rebuttal, Sahara delivered a searing press conference statement at the Dhaka Reporters Unity on August 22, 2025, which detailed the structural violence that Bangladeshi trans people have been subjected to due to a lack of legal protections. 

The journalists refused to cover her statement in full as Sahara’s ferocity did not fit into the media’s traditional ideas of transgender victimhood. Even though Sahara’s declaration defied the media’s bylines of victimhood, their silence is indicative of how a trans person can be written about only when they fit the category of a victim.

“During the Awami League’s political rule, someone like Sahara could not have held a press conference to express her views publicly. The right wing became what they are now during the Awami League’s tenure. I think the July uprising has unmasked the fascism that’s already been here,” said Meem. 

For too long, far-right academics, religious preachers, and influencers in Bangladesh have convinced the general public that trans and LGB people are prone to violence and mental illness to back up their unsubstantiated transphobic claims. Immorality is permanently ascribed to queer and trans people: these are part of the right’s coordinated efforts to shackle these communities to positions of sex work and economic bondage. Ultimately, the goal is to remove LGBTQ people from public life and sequester them elsewhere, be it through misinformation, legislation, or extrajudicial murders. 

An uncertain road ahead 

Sahara is resolute that the only solution is to fight against the systems that have targeted and disenfranchised trans people in the first place. She states how it’s crucial not to let the rhetoric by right-wing intellectuals be weaponized against trans people. Identity politics has been used to pit communities against one another (hijra vs. trans, gay vs. hijra, etc.). The reality remains that for centuries, trans women have been relegated to ghettos and engaging in survival sex work. 

When asked whether the LGBTQ community are gearing up to protest, she says, “If people in the community don’t fight against the system, I will fight by myself and if needed, I will die by myself. Jodi tor daak shune keu na aase tobe ekla chalo re (If no one responds to your call, then go your own way alone). I will be fighting regardless of my privilege or marginalization. I will not use my agency to accept defeat.”Email