South Asian gender diversity — hijra and kothi

The hijra tradition in South Asia — people who identify outside the male-female binary and whose identity has roots reaching back millennia — is one of the oldest documented records of formalized gender diversity in the world. Hijra communities have held roles in ceremony, blessing, and social life that no simple Western category fully captures; their contemporary marginalization is a product of colonial law and modern stigma imposed onto a tradition that preceded both. The kothi identity, overlapping but distinct, represents another instance of how richly varied the human map of gender has always been.