I do not pretend to be able to definitively claim that every single hijra thinks of herself as a woman. However, when hijras engage in activism to advocate for legal recognition as women, when they participate in Aurat Marches (aurat means woman) holding signs that say “Hijras Are Women” and “Trans Women Are Women. SHUT UP”, it is safe to state that presenting hijra identity as mystical, complex, and utterly beyond any affinity to “Western” transsexuality is deliberate silencing and a baldfaced attempt to further the hermeneutical injustice desi cultures already subject them to. Most reprehensible, however, are the attempts to paint any desires for solidarity between hijras and transsexuals as “Western imperialism”, or to enshrine their degendering as a valiant “decolonial” effort to preserve non-Western cultures in all their bloodstained glory. [. . .] (Trans)misogyny is not a cultural value worth preserving. The development of a cross-cultural transsexual and transfeminist consciousness, rooted in the recognition of how our identities and struggles are similarly shaped, is not imperialism. It is a struggle for liberation, one that queer academia is heinously eager to oppose, and one whose proponents shall no longer be spoken over.
Talia Bhatt, The Third Sex
