Nepal Recognizes a Third Gender

adri Pun slept in a gravel courtyard in rural Nepal for more than a week. After the first two days, he stopped eating. By night, he huddled under wool blankets, clutching a folder full of papers, some of which made his life legal -- his birth certificate, his motorcycle license, and his citizenship identification card -- and one which made a new life possible -- a 30-page, four-year-old court decision.

By day, he left the courtyard and entered the government building it encircled. He spent hours at the building shoving the documents in front of various government officials, insisting his ID papers were wrong. After 12 days of protesting, he won his case: Badri Pun was issued a new citizenship ID card, and it listed him as "third-gender."

The Court's decision was a stunning victory for the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) rights movement in Nepal, the formal movement just six years old. Its specific orders, however, have been slow to manifest. The Dec. 21, 2007 decision in Sunil B. Pant et al. v. the Government of Nepal ordered the government to scrap all discriminatory laws, form a committee to study same-sex marriage policy, and establish a third-gender category for gender-variant people. The piecemeal implementation of the third-gender category tells the story both of the relentless activism on the ground and of the politics of sexuality and gender rights in contemporary Nepal.

The third gender in Nepal is an identity-based category for people who do not identify themselves as either male or female. This may include people who want to perform or want to be presented as a gender that is different from the one that was assigned to them at birth, based on genitalia or other criteria. It can also include people who do not feel that the male or female gender roles that their culture dictates to them match their true social, sexual, or gender-role preference.

There are other countries that have third-gender policies, but none nearly as comprehensive as Nepal. India has used a third-gender category in several administrative capacities.