While progressive legal steps have offered recognition and protections on paper, deep-seated social stigma, religious opposition, and recent policy setbacks have left many vulnerable to discrimination, violence, and exclusion.
Pakistan continues to navigate a complex and often contradictory landscape in its treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly transgender citizens and those identifying as gay. While progressive legal steps have offered recognition and protections on paper, deep-seated social stigma, religious opposition, and recent policy setbacks have left many vulnerable to discrimination, violence, and exclusion. A series of developments over the past few years illustrate this persistent tension between formal rights and lived realities.
Pakistan’s journey toward transgender inclusion began with landmark judicial interventions. In 2009, the supreme court of Pakistan recognized transgender people as a distinct gender category, paving the way for rights such as voting and national identity cards. The transgender persons (protection of rights) act of 2018 marked a high point, allowing self-identification of gender and prohibiting discrimination in education, employment, healthcare, and inheritance. A 2 per cent job quota in the public sector was announced, and provisions extended to genderqueer identities.
Yet, as highlighted in a July 2025 analysis by The Diplomat, these legal gains have been undermined by poor implementation. Many transgender individuals remain unaware of their rights, and the job quota is rarely enforced. In Karachi fieldwork, interviewees described systemic exclusion: denial of hospital care, public humiliation, sexual violence, and barriers to housing, transport, and education. One tragic case involved Alisha, a young transgender woman shot in Peshawar in 2016 who died after hospitals refused treatment.
Families often disown transgender members, forcing reliance on traditional guru-chela (mentor-disciple) networks for survival. Estimated at around 500,000, the community faces ongoing abandonment, with advocacy groups like the Gender Interactive Alliance struggling for resources and influence.
Intensified Backlash
Positive outliers exist. In 2021, Rani Khan founded Pakistan’s first transgender-only madrasa in Islamabad, using personal savings to create a two-room space for Quran study, repentance, and skills like sewing and embroidery. The school offered a rare sanctuary for religious education and community, countering ostracism in a conservative Muslim society. It inspired similar initiatives, including a Christian transgender church in Karachi, signalling small but meaningful steps toward inclusion.
However, backlash has intensified. In December 2025, Islamic groups gathered in Karachi to reject the transgender act, now under legal challenge. shariah courts declared parts unlawful, with the government appealing to the supreme court’s shariat appellate bench.
Religious leaders condemned the law as a western import hijacking Islamic concepts like “khunsa” (intersex) to promote a broader LGBTQ agenda, which they labelled un-Islamic and a threat to natural gender order. They demanded the government abandon any promotion of such ideologies, framing self-identified gender as incompatible with faith.
This opposition echoes broader regional and global trends. At an October 2025 forum at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, co-hosted with the Carr-Ryan Centre for Human Rights, activists including Nayyab Ali – Pakistan’s first legally recognized transgender National Assembly candidate – condemned rising anti-LGBTQ prejudice. In Pakistan, speakers noted rollbacks to the 2018 Act, such as struck-down clauses on gender identity and inheritance in 2023, alongside persistent murders of transgender individuals and forced disappearances elsewhere.
Faltering External Support
Gay individuals face even harsher realities, as same-sex relations remain criminalized under colonial-era penal code provisions, carrying up to life imprisonment. A stark case involved Preetum Giani, a 75-year-old man who attempted to open the Lorenzo Gay Club in Abbottabad as a non-sexual social space. His application, leaked online in May 2025, triggered outrage. Authorities rejected it on religious and legal grounds, and unidentified men abducted him, forcing him into a mental health facility for electroconvulsive shock treatments – despite homosexuality not being a disorder under local law. After release, protests by groups like Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam targeted the hospital, heightening threats. Giani eventually secured asylum abroad, underscoring the dangers of visibility for gay Pakistanis.
External support has also faltered. In February 2025, a US funding freeze under the Trump-Vance administration terminated most USAID contracts, crippling LGBTQ initiatives across SouthAsia. In Pakistan, this disrupted HIV/AIDS prevention and support for transgender people and men who have sex with men, scaling back services and leaving thousands without antiretrovirals or outreach. Regional groups reported closures, layoffs, and reduced healthcare, exacerbating vulnerability in a context where governments often neglect these communities.
Pakistan’s experience reflects a broader paradox: pioneering legal frameworks coexist with entrenched prejudice, religious pushback, and international aid disruptions. Transgender citizens enjoy nominal recognition but endure social forsakenness, while gay individuals risk severe persecution for seeking safe spaces. Activists emphasise collective action and chosen families for resilience, yet systemic change remains elusive amid conservative pressures and policy reversals.
Image: Water for Women Fund
