The Invisible Human: A Reflective Autoethnography about the Lives of Pakistani Transgender People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, transgender people in Pakistan have been isolated and denied substantive rights, due to dominant discourses of marginalization that have served to deny them basic human rights. These include rights to social services such as education and healthcare, in addition to the right to employment. The only profession seen as legitimate for transgender people is prostitution, or sex work. They live at the margins of society, disowned by their families and mocked and ridiculed by the rest of society. They are commonly targets for various forms of abuse at the hands of police and others in society. In 2016, an angry customer viciously attacked a transgender female sex worker, Alisha, shooting her eight times. Alisha later died because she was denied timely medical attention at the hospital. No one was held responsible for her death for three years. In this dissertation, I examine the murder of Alisha as an example of gendered racial violence and the continued colonization of marginalized people, as an entry point to consider how Pakistani transgender people are rendered invisible. This research explores how issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, among other factors, have defined transgender people in Pakistani society. This research is approached methodologically as a reflexive autoethnographic work. I worked with Alisha on a transgender empowerment project when I was Cultural Advisor for the U.S. Consulate General in Lahore, Pakistan. Her murder motivated me to apply to the Doctor of Education (EdD) program, in the Department of Social Justice Education (SJE), Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto, with collaborative specializations in Comparative International Development in Education, and Global Affairs with a special focus on South Asia. This dissertation in practice highlights the transformative power of practicum education as a step toward advancing the understanding of Pakistani transgender people. This EdD project is designed to serve as an educational toolkit for North American (Canada and US) educators. It includes two parts: 1) a written narrative that suggests strategies to empower transgender sex workers in Pakistan; and 2) a digital story board about the lives of Pakistani transgender people. I hope Alisha’s story moves you to join me, and to stand up and speak out for transgender people’s rights everywhere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".