Constitutional Human Rights Of Transgender Persons In Pakistan: A Linguistic And Social Inquiry

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the lexical choices made in the Constitution to represent gender, the granted constitutional human rights of transgender persons, and contradictory social practices from the perspective of making them powerless and marginalized in terms of non-gender binary.  The quantitative analysis of the second section of the Constitution related to human rights and principles of policy for government in terms of nouns and personal pronouns to represent generic pronouns and its implication for gender representation in a legal document was carried out through simple concordance program 4.0.5 by generating word list of data to find the frequencies. Moreover, the basic human rights of dignity, education, health care, financial security, employment opportunities, and equality in all respects ensured to all the citizens of state are discussed and social realizations of these rights for transgender are explored. The findings reveal that transgender persons neither have any representation in the Constitution of Pakistan nor they are the recipients of basic human rights in Pakistani society as compared to other marginalized groups like women, children and differently able people. To conclude, it can be said that although in the last decade, governments have passed some policies (Transgender Persons Welfare Policy, 2018) to empower Transgender community, yet, a long-term nation based social awareness program and implementation of policies are recommended to make transgender persons’ lives better in letter and spirit.