the third sex

Human Rights Watch has written to Nepal’s government voicing concern over what it calls continuing police abuse of transsexuals. The organisation says there has been a pattern of arbitrary arrests and violence against people the Nepalis call “metis”, genetic males who identify themselves as women, and they are asking for a full investigation.

Police in Nepal say they are taking the allegations very seriously but add that many of the metis were working as prostitutes and that as this was illegal in Nepal, raids on hotels were “permissible”.

The BBC has been covering this story and says that in the past few weeks metis have been detained without warrants, badly beaten, burned with cigarettes, forced to strip and even had guns pointed at them.

Similar allegations – sometimes with photographic evidence – are regularly made by the Blue Diamond Society, a group working among Nepal’s transsexuals, according to the BBC.

Blue Diamond http://www.bds.org.np was founded in 2001 as Nepal’s only organisation for sexual minorities.

It has its own weekly newspaper, with editions in English and Nepali, which acts as a platform for many marginalised groups in Nepal, but tends to be dominated by issues affecting gay and bisexual Nepalese and the significant number of meti, who unlike transsexuals in other countries are almost unknown outside of Nepal, and it appears are little known inside their own country.

BDS’s founder and director, 32-year-old Sunil Pant, explored his own sexuality while studying in Belarus. Returning from overseas, he wanted to discover more about Nepal’s gay culture. Even he was surprised at the number of metis, who are at their most visible, naturally, in Kathmandu.

He chose the name Blue Diamond because blue is regarded as a gay colour in Belarus, while the diamond symbolises compassion in Buddhism, one of Nepal’s two main religions.

Nepalese attitudes to sexual diversity are complex. Sunil says most Nepalese – especially Buddhists – are tolerant in this regard. But Sunil says there is hostility, for instance from those he describes as fundamentalist Hindus. And when metis try to claim equal rights, acceptance wanes and may give way to violence.

The Gurung people of western Nepal have a tradition of men called maarunis, who dance in female clothes. This has endorsement from an unlikely source, namely the Royal Nepalese Army, who recruit maarunis to perform dances as entertainment within the barracks. They have also traditionally had a role in the royal palaces, says Sunil, as good luck symbols.

Curiously enough, Blue Diamond’s newspaper is being funded by the British government, according to the BBC, which quotes an unnamed British diplomat as saying it is part of a campaign to reduce the impact of HIV and Aids. The funding is by Britain’s Department for International Development, which has a budget for small projects like this, with the British Embassy overseeing the grant.