The years since 2007 has seen increasing legal recognition of the third gender identity in South Asia, extending to include the partial and contested recognition of transgender identities and rights – first in Nepal and subsequently in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Such recognition has been a result of increasing mobilisation of gender-nonconforming people like the hijras, kwajasiras or metis in these countries, alongside the mobilisation of transgender and non-binary people more recently. Despite this increasing visibility, few studies have paid attention to the histories of mobilisation around transgender or third gender identities in South Asia other than that of the hijras, which have mostly been dominated by studies on India.

What can a study of such mobilisation by Nepali NGO activists who found themselves in the middle of a violent Maoist insurgency and increasing politicisation of ethnic identities contribute to the understanding of the emergence of third gender politics in South Asia and a history of transgender identities? How might this further contribute to the understanding of the third gender as a Hinduised, sanitised and homogenised category of identification in the Indian sub-continent? This paper maps out these linkages by tracing the biography of the third gender to argue that the category emerged out of interactions between national and international human rights frameworks available to queer activists at a time of heightened international attention on conflict-related rights violations in the country and increasing global and regional mobilisation on transgender rights. In doing this, I especially focus on the national mobilisation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture by human rights activists in Nepal, the regional mobilisation of Public Interest Litigations for LGBT rights in South Asia and the global mobilisation of transgender rights. I contend that queer scholarship should take the political economy of activism seriously to better understand queer politics in resource-poor contexts in the global South and how such politics in both the global North and South might shape the trajectories of identity and movement formation within specific social movements.