Abstract
Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variability are being pushed out and projected anew but where its historical, trans-local, cross-scalar, and open-ended working out is mappable. To outline its futural shapes, this text closely traces a set of affective, representational, and practical strategies as part of an unfinished, contested, and dynamic process of encounters across a variety of allies and actors: individuals, institutions, collectives, spaces, and networks. It illustrates, on the one hand, how trans* in Pakistan kicks off a capacious contact zone, triggers cross-sectional encounters, and generates momentum with implications, which impact but also exceed local conditions. On the other hand, it observes how its horizons might be curtailed by conditions and concerns that privilege some ways of gender nonconforming over certain others.
