Despite the fall of the authoritarian government, trans and intersex Bangladeshis remain tethered to the existing systems of social and digital criminalization.
As Bangladesh’s interim government further assumes responsibility for leading the nation, a glaringly important topic that has evaded public discourse is the implementation of life-affirming mechanisms for the country’s deeply ostracized transgender and intersex communities. July’s student-led anti-discriminatory movement had gained traction, and the respect of millions across the globe due to its clarion calls for justice and accountability that eventually overthrew the Awami League regime.
The key characteristic behind the revolution was its reliance on the term ‘anti-discriminatory’, and needless to say, vulnerable and systemically excluded communities are the ones who fall prey to everyday forms of discrimination. While various minorities such as the Indigenous Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) and Dalit Hindu communities have managed to break the silence on the brutalities they are facing, trans and intersex communities’ needs remain largely inaudible.
Transfeminine people in Bangladesh have generally been categorized as hijra, a South Asian colloquial term that originated in India. In the ethnographic literature, the hijra refers to a highly scrutinized socio-economically marginalized group of persons assigned male at birth who dress in women’s clothes and live in intentional yet hierarchical kinship structures.
Hijras are often studied as a community with a consistent historical trajectory, with pre-colonial records stretching back to at least the seventeenth century, during which the British categorization of ‘eunuch’ under the Criminal Tribes Act Amendment of 1871 was hypothesized to have imposed criminality upon them.
The blatant disregard is evident in the administration’s choice of student leadership: one of the key coordinators of the anti-discrimination student movement has been the skillful orator Sarjis Alam who has become widely known for his so-called ‘anti-fascist’ stance and continuing revolt against all fascist forces in Bangladesh society. However, his anti-fascist ideologies do not extend toward the dignity and self-determination of the numerous hijra community members who took part in the movement by volunteering at hospitals, donating lakhs of funds, and organizing blood donation campaigns.
Due to the rise of anti-colonial discourses in the twentieth century, the hijra terminology emerged as a transgender or ‘third gender’ group that defied Western notions of gender incongruence. In contrast, capitalist expansion and a fixation on identity markers have given rise to our institutionalized understanding of ‘transgender’, which tends to rely on individual aspirations for bodily transformation.
Hijras have gained growing legal recognition in the country, particularly under the Awami League government, which since 2013 has officially allowed members of the community to identify as a ‘third gender.’ While the public lauded the governmental recognition, the policy was strictly used to differentiate between ‘true/natural’ and ‘artificial/duplicitous’hijra gender expressions.
This part of the ‘third gender’ policy required police and doctors to routinely surveil and arrest trans job seekers who wore women’s clothing but did not undergo castration. Consequently, the ‘third gender’ recognition yielded very few material benefits for trans women and hijras, who continue to face exclusion within employment and educational spaces.
State recognition via the ‘third gender’ policy also meant the cultural historicity that has long protected hijra and transfemme communities since Bangladesh’s inception in 1971 was slowly breaking away at its seams. News sourceshave indicated that Bangladesh has been a major surveillance hub and source of illicit financial flows in previous administrations.
To distract the country from its corrupt proceedings, the Awami League occasionally used Bangladeshi hijra and transgender people’s plight to escalate trans panic throughout the country, particularly with the incident of Asif Mahtab, a former faculty at BRAC University and the ensuing anti-trans protests that followed in January 2024.
It was apparent that Sheikh Hasina was more invested in symbolic gestures of solidarity, such as welfare schemes andseparate mosques under a culture of state-sanctioned surveillance to keep transgender communities separate from cisgender counterparts and diminish our chances of belonging.
Since August 5, 2025, the interim government’s appeal has been to break away from dynasty politics, which previous renditions of the Awami League and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have remained beholden to. In stark contrast, core promises by Dr. Yunus’ administration have been to usher in greater freedom of choice, dialogue across differences, and for citizens to move away from the prying eyes of the surveillance state.
Yet, the current regime under the banners of ‘anti-discrimination’ and ‘anti-surveillance’ has not once acknowledged the path forward for its trans and intersex citizens, rendering the community’s illegibility in public life. The resounding inaction and denial of rights-based mechanisms are thus keeping transgender and intersex people from accessing power, respect, and, consequently, their own humanity.
The blatant disregard is evident in the administration’s choice of student leadership: one of the key coordinators of the anti-discrimination student movement has been the skillful orator Sarjis Alam who has become widely known for his so-called ‘anti-fascist’ stance and continuing revolt against all fascist forces in Bangladesh society. However, his anti-fascist ideologies do not extend toward the dignity and self-determination of the numerous hijra community members who took part in the movement by volunteering at hospitals, donating lakhs of funds, and organizing blood donation campaigns.
Even after Hasina fled the country, Sarjis continued his smear campaign on August 9 against transgender people, denying our very existence in Bangladesh’s social fabric. What was meant to be a joyous beckoning for Bangladesh’s new future has instead fortified the country’s existing institutionalized transphobia under which trans and intersex people are further surveilled and violently gazed upon.
Hijra and transfeminine people’s visibility in Bangladesh has always been intrinsic to the Bangladeshi state’s surveillance and control of gender, particularly femininity, as part of its nation-building project. Under the guise of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ and the state’s focus on safety and infrastructure development, the presence of Bangladesh’s military and police apparatus has gradually increased while accessing people’s private information has become faster than ever. As liberal notions of trans visibility and representation markedly increased over the past decade, the term ‘transgender’ has become a household term across a very connected globe, as well as a very digitized Bangladesh.
Simultaneously, the Islamic religion in some of its most vile forms has further entrenched itself into Bangladesh’s political and social conditioning, marking transphobia, in other words, the policing of gender, as a primary site of contemporary surveillance. The rationale behind Islamists’ assaults on trans people is that we are seen as ‘experimenting with gender’ and influenced by Western ideology, even though there is evidence to the contrary that Islam does not condone transness.
Much like the anti-trans bills spearheading political discourse in the United States, the growing anti-trans rhetoric and surveillance of trans people in Bangladesh appears less motivated by a concrete policy agenda than galvanizing a self-victimizing political base and incrementally advancing the decades-old project of materializing an extremist Islamic ethnostate in Bangladesh. Building such ethnostates is nothing new; they have existed for centuries and are meant to shrink public spheres of collaboration and coerce people into adhering to certain notions of civility and hegemonic ways of being.
The underlying motive behind Bangladesh’s trans panic is that gender nonconformity or deviations from assigned roles at birth unsettles the deeply rigid (seen as ‘traditional’) articulations of gender and occupational hierarchies that the state has relied on to maintain social order and regulate femininity.
Take the example of the anti-discriminatory student movement, where young women students participated in large numbers. Yet, once Sheikh Hasina left the country and the interim government was formed, the cis-men student coordinators took on numerous leadership roles, indicating that women should not occupy a dominant role in the country’s political transition.
This discrepancy was noted by Nusrat Tabassum, one of the leading women student coordinators, where she implores the public to address the various forms of discrimination prevalent in society as focusing on one form of discrimination (taking down a fascist dictator) will not yield Bangladesh’s transformation. The interim government has yet to roll out any objectives and actions related to tackling gender justice and women’s rights in Bangladesh.
Gender-based prescriptions are integral in establishing the degree of punishment wielded on marginalized communities where transgender people fall prey to harsh consequences and even death. To understand how these punishments are meted out, it is essential to note that Bangladesh’s history of gender surveillance has been instrumental in creating a trans-exclusionary climate, namely through the shape the country’s institutions have taken. The shape institutions have taken is the shape of our absence.
Yet, these institutions have also been shaped by trans people’s struggle against them, particularly the punishment and humiliation of trans femininity and the receding of trans masculinity within their corridors. Trans femininity and hijraassertions in traditional workplaces have been watered down to spectacles of excess and hysteria that refuse to be disciplined. Surveillance mechanisms in Bangladesh have always sought to repress the dangerous minority, in this instance, the trans woman, to strip her of her femininity and reveal her falsehood.
Technologies of surveillance and classification have transferred ‘carceral’ into the everyday domestic spaces and institutions inhabited by respectable men and women while criminalizing spaces of gender transgression. As a result, informal economies such as sex work and begging have become synonymous with trans people’s personhood in Bangladesh, destroying their chances of habitation in this world.
At this stage, the fundamental question becomes: does the interim government and the country’s current political parties intend to tighten its surveillance and regulation of trans people? Or will it democratize and expand its gender justice discourse? To date, there has been no significant difference between the previous and current iterations of Bangladesh’s government, which has relied on the policing, surveillance, and obedience of its gender-nonconforming citizens to establish its rule on the masses and to curb dissent.
A popular mass uprising composed of mostly middle-class Muslim men is what resulted in the overthrow of Hasina’s regime, which has kept intact the various oppressive and exploitative mechanisms targeting transgender people, Indigenous populations, and poor and landless workers. Over the past decade and since August 5, Bangladesh’s welfare schemes and the panopticon surveillance of gender nonconformity branded as ‘public safety’ have created a false narrative of progress for transgender people.
The optical declaration of liberty and fairness disguises the inequities and institutional disparities faced by trans and intersex Bangladeshis, further diminishing the community’s political resistance. As long as trans and intersex Bangladeshis remain tethered to the existing systems of social and digital criminalization, the struggle for a ‘new Bangladesh’ is far from over.
