Ground Report

Homosexuality is strictly taboo in the highly conservative society of Pakistan. It is little wonder that same-sex marriages are disallowed by the law itself.

 Perhaps not the most broad-minded of approaches, but clear and unambiguous nonetheless. If you’re a woman, don’t marry a woman…simple, right?

Wrong!

Because, how do you define a woman?

That was the question with which Judge Khwaja Muhammad Sharif was faced last week, when couple Shumail Raj and Shahzina Tariq were brought before the court by Shahzina’s father, who wished to have their marriage annulled on the grounds that Shumail was a woman and thus this “same-sex” marriage went against religion and custom.

 A very interesting assertion, given that Shumail has undergone two sex-reassignment surgeries in the last sixteen years. Now, with breast and uterus removed and vagina closed, Raj one again finds herself considered to be female.

In the eyes of the law, at least.

 For when Raj called himself a man in court, he was accused of perjury. It appears that despite the lack of female organs, Raj remains a woman simply by dint of her birth as one. The couple now faces three years in prison for perjury, while the more serious aspect of the "morality" of the marriage is yet to be decided upon.

Their marriage was termed an act of “unnatural lust”. One can’t help wondering exactly how blind the court must be, seeing that the couple has given a dozen statements to the effect that they married simply to save Shahzina form being sold into wedlock to pay off her uncle’s gambling debts.

As the case continued to unfold, I could only think of it s a comedy of the most abject errors. Despite having decided that Raj was in fact a woman, the police were in a quandary about which jail to keep “her” in- the women’s’ or the men’s’? The case soon became a source of entertainment for the locals, and the couple found it  next to impossible to leave the court, what with the unbelievable number of people who turned up to see them.

It is truly sad how two troubled people have been turned into nothing more than freaks.