The Magazine

Dancing between Life and Death: An Afghan Trans Woman’s Life in Pakistan

May 25, 2025
By: Rida Khan

Annie’s residence is humble. Two mattresses are placed on the carpeted floor of her room, which is also used as a living room and a kitchen. Annie prepares tea, making her home welcoming and cozy.

Annie, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan trans woman based in Peshawar, looks intently in the mirror as she adorns herself for the interview. As an Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) child, Annie loved being dolled up. In her home country of Afghanistan, Annie was particularly fond of her sister’s company and would request her to apply makeup on her face. First, Annie would ask them just to powder her face and then nudge them to put on the blush, thicken the eyebrows, and eventually apply lipstick.

”You have gone too far,” Annie’s sister would say.

But deep down, Annie knew that breaking the gender binary is not Western; queer people like her were Indigenous to her homeland. With her short hair and makeup, Annie was called an “American woman” by her sisters.

As Annie and I sit down for the interview, her face appears radiant from the varying bright colors reflected from the disco ball in the living room. Hues of blue, green, pink, and yellow dance lightly on her face and the walls around us.

This space is also a recreative site where queer people gather, celebrate joy and dance as the myriad of colors bounce between them.

Annie’s residence is also a site of scrutiny from the state. Raids by police have become more frequent in Annie’s residence ever since the Pakistani government implemented the Illegal Foreigners’ Repatriation Plan (IFRP) in 2023. This plan introduced measures to compile comprehensive databases of “illegal foreigners,” and manage the arrest, detention, deportation, and repatriation of undocumented or overstaying individuals. As a result, the crackdown against Afghan residents in Pakistan ensued, many of whom faced harassment, arrest, detention, and forced deportation to Afghanistan.

Afghan trans people in Pakistan usually do not hold valid forms of documentation to reside in Pakistan, which include having a Proof of Registration (POR) card issued by the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) or the Afghan Citizen Card (ACC) granted by the Pakistani government. Recently, even Afghans who hold valid forms of documentation, like ACC, are being deported from Pakistan.

Annie fled her home country, Afghanistan, at the mere age of thirteen when she realized that her family was not accepting of her queerness. Annie moved in with her partner in Peshawar and started working at a tailor shop to sustain herself. After five years of living in the city, Annie experienced a traumatizing incident in which she was physically assaulted by men at a dance function where she performed. Her leg was shot, and she experienced severe injuries to her head.

“My mother would cry day and night and convince my father to send me back to Afghanistan,” Annie recalls.

Annie moved to Afghanistan briefly, but her extended family’s taunts would not spare Annie about her feminine attire and get-up. Annie’s brother would beat her, tear her clothes apart, and humiliate her. She ran away again, this time on the Chaman border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to resettle again in Peshawar, where she felt relatively safe. Ever since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, Annie has not visited her home country. To do so would endanger her life

As an undocumented Afghan refugee with only a middle-school education, Annie does not have access to formal employment opportunities in Pakistan. Dancing publicly at functions is her only source of livelihood to sustain herself. Annie makes a meagre amount of six to eight thousand rupees (roughly $20-30) per dance function, which is barely enough to buy a week’s groceries for herself. For Annie, dancing publicly offers possibilities but also contradictions. Public dance functions allow Annie to embody her queer self; she wears a wig, dolls herself up and performs for an audience. Dancing brings her joy. But when performing for an entirely male audience, it renders her queerness precarious. She cannot afford joy without being exposed to intimidation and violence. One time, after dancing at one of these functions, Annie was surrounded by a group of men from the audience who demanded that she pay a gruesome amount of two lac (roughly $800), more than Annie gets paid in a year. Annie did not have the means to arrange the amount so the assailants then threatened her, cut off her hair, and raped her.

Even though the assault was captured by security cameras in the area, the police released Annie’s attackers within hours. It wasn’t the first time she had been failed by the authorities meant to protect her. Annie no longer has faith in the protection the police are supposed to provide. In February, she was attacked at night by unknown men while walking through the bazaar. Two of them forced her into a car, physically assaulted her, and tore her clothes.

“The moment the men reached for my clothes, I knew that the men did not want to steal. They wanted to do something more brutal,” Annie said.

Somehow, she escaped the car and cried for help. Annie called her friend, who took her to a public hospital. There, the hospital had a separate space designated for treating trans patients where they could receive medical care. This was an improvement on past practices, when hospitals would deny treatment to trans people, and it cost them their lives. While these efforts to provide a designated space for trans patients to receive medical care have been lauded by the trans community, they are not adequate to access health justice. While Annie received treatment for her injuries, police officers refused to register her First Investigation Report (FIR). FIR is a complaint lodged with the police by the victim of a cognizable offence or by someone on his/her behalf and allows the police to start investigating the case.

“Your community always has such problems,” the police said to Annie.

According to the lawyer, Aminullah Khan Kundi, many trans people do not come forward to report cases of violence, abuse, and harassment. Oftentimes, once a case is registered, the victim is even more in danger than before. The accused will intimidate the victim, threatening more violence unless the victim drops the charges. Even if an FIR is registered, a financial settlement is reached between the two parties. The police are known to collude with the accused party to avoid any repercussions, and the case is dissolved within hours.

In the absence of legal mechanisms towards justice, Namkeen Peshawri, a trans woman activist based in Peshawar, encourages community-centric survivor support for victims. She runs a Trans Support Group, comprised of Pakistani and Afghan trans people, where she provides housing to Afghan trans people fleeing Afghanistan and offers them support. Through her collective, Namkeen provides communal housing support to Afghan trans people by hosting them and encouraging her Pakistani friends to do the same.

“I don’t believe in borders. The Afghan trans women are like sisters. We speak the same language,” Namkeen said.

The police’s attitude towards trans people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, located in the northwestern region of Pakistan, is hostile. In one of the TikTok videos that resurfaced over the internet recently, which was shared over 10,000 times, a dance function that comprised trans people performers is interrupted by two policemen. Immediately, a crowd of trans women gathered around the police officers, clapping. Unlike conventional clapping, the hijra clap typically occupies more space, commanding visual and aural attention, and can express happiness, joban (endorsement), anger, the onset of a fight, or protest. As the clap gets louder and more zealous, more power is conveyed.

The police officer said: “You have to seek permission for such functions from the police station. At least twenty people in the area have complained that they cannot sleep.”

“This is a wedding function,” interrupted one of the members from the crowd. The police officer raised his finger and stated: “There is a way to do things.”

The Tiktok video unravels the power dynamics between trans people and police officers; how queer spaces are surveilled, and the patronizing tone in which trans people are treated and corrected. The state-led surveillance is an inherited colonial legacy in which the British criminalized queer people in the sub-continent under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. According to the historian Jessica Hinchy, the British put Hijras (an umbrella term for queer people) under the ‘criminal tribes’ category that included nomadic tribes and queer people because they defied colonial notions of borders, mobility, and occupation. By criminalizing queer people, Hijras were easy to monitor, surveil, and control.

The tribal belt of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, formerly known as Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), that borders Afghanistan, has been particularly vulnerable to police surveillance and control. During colonial times, the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) was introduced, which treated the tribal regions not as part of Pakistan’s constitutional mainstream but as an exception zone where the rule of law was suspended in favor of collective punishment, arbitrary detention, and administrative justice. This legal framework enabled the Pakistani state to justify surveillance, displacement, and militarization as part of state security.

Even though the FCR was abolished in 2018, the remnants of the colonial legacy impact the economy of trans people who are largely Afghan. Namkeen Peshawri states that Afghan trans women residing near the tribal belt are more vulnerable to attacks and surveillance. She says that the religious leaders or ulema have issued a religious ruling or a fatwa against trans people. The ulema claim that trans people in the area are responsible for spreading vulgarity. With no dance functions in that area, trans people’s livelihoods have been severely impacted. Namkeen knows at least fifty trans women who are living hand-to-mouth and are compelled to engage in sex work, which exposes them to violence, abuse, and diseases.

Annie aspires to move abroad by seeking asylum like her other friends. She believes that her life would be better as she would be able to have greater mobility and safety.

“My life is like that of a dog. All day the dog barks, but then at night, the dog retreats to a corner and remains silent. All day, we try to make ends meet, go to dance functions, and are then silently cornered,” Annie said. For Annie, going back home is not an option. She would risk her life if she went back to Afghanistan.

“My mother calls me an orphan.”

Annie bursts into tears as she thinks about her home and family.

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About the Author

Rida Khan is an aspiring academic. Her research interests lie at the intersection of queer theory, migration and ethnicity. She is also a feminist organizer.