The regulative and oppressive effects of gender norms on bodies of transgender workers have been mostly explored in standard binary gender work settings. We explore the regulative effects of specialized transgender work regimes by posing the following two questions: How do specialized transgendered work regimes regulate transgender work and bodies? How do transgender workers cope with these regimes? Through a case study of khwajasiras, a community of male-to-female transgender people in Pakistan, we explain how competing and conflicting body ideals of hyper-eroticism, spirituality, and hybridity set by these regimes, allow khwajasiras to transgress the binary gender norms. Ironically, however, these specialized work regimes have their own regulative and oppressive effects on khwajasiras’ bodies and work. We then demonstrate how khwajasiras cope with these regulative effects in three different ways: embracing the body ideals, strategically shifting work and body across the regimes, and relegating body norms as unimportant for being a transgender. We finally argue that these differences in enacting different form of transgenderness is an outcome of a tight coupling or contradiction between audiences, khwajasira community and individual workers’ own sense of transgender authenticity.

This paper examines how media discourses on gender and work play a part in regulating the lives of a community of Pakistani gender diverse people, called Khawajasiras. Developing a critical discourse analysis of media news, we show how this regulatory process results in discursive mechanisms positioning Khawajasiras' work as “dirty” and in need of “respectable” and exclusively “feminine” alternatives. This regulatory process revolves around delegitimizing Khawajasiras' non‐normative work and their gender fluidity in the job market. Khawajasiras' recognition is thus conditional upon their reproduction of a socially heteronormative notion of work and gender. We conclude that this regulatory process not only forecloses possibilities of resignification for this historically disenfranchised community but also risks producing new forms of abjection by enforcing notions of “fake” (with an implicitly assumed notion of “authentic”) Khawajasira. The findings of this paper ultimately problematize contemporary ideals of recognition of non‐normative gendered groups.

No abstract