Confusion or conspiracy? Pakistan's trans rights act falls to dispute
- By Hunain Ameen -
- Oct 04, 2022
KARACHI: After religious parties claimed the trans rights act paves way for possibility of same-sex marriages, among the violations of other Islamic edicts, it has been challenged in, and thus has been termed anti-Sharia by the Federal Shariat Court
Senator Mushtaq Ahmed of Jamat e Islami petitioned against the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, and he separately also proposed an amendment that among other things, finds fault with even the term ‘transgenders’, which he says is an umbrella term that accommodates people with gender dysphoria, who are otherwise perfectly fine with respect to their bodies.
Subscribe ARY Stories on YouTube for more stories & informative videos
His proposed amendment recommends the term, in the very title of the act passed in 2018 and whose rules were hammered out in 2020, must be replaced with ‘intersex’.
The amendments further deem necessary a medical board to ascertain a person’s gender, as opposed to how rights act considers this a private matter of self determination not subject to state scrutiny.
There are other disputes, as well, for instance that of inheritance law.
Legal experts and rights activists that ARY News spoke to, on the other hand, have unequivocally spurned the claims as baseless and unsubstantiated.
“They have either not read the law and its rulings, or they don’t understand it, said Abdul Moiz Jaferii, a lawyer and analyst.