The excerpt presented above is gleaned from a conversation that I had with a hijra called Suki who my sari-clad hijra interlocutors addressed as ‘guru’ on the premises of a shrine in Dhaka. This normatively attired, hijra-identified person was, I later found out, not only heterosexually married, but also an influential sadrali hijra guru in that area. During my fieldwork one of the things that fascinated me was the way several hijras I had known continuously oscillated between a hijra subject position and that of a masculine householding man. What does such movement across and between heterosexual masculinities and the hijra subject position entail in terms of bodily and sartorial practices? How do hijras interpret these various practices through which they transform their gender?

This chapter explores hijra notions and practices of gender. It challenges the stereotypical notion that a hijra subject position inheres in and flows from emasculation. While hijras do often talk about their being an intermediate gender, a closer attention to the actual practices and processes through which hijras gender themselves brings into view a picture far more complex and nuanced than the extant trope of ‘third sex’ allows for. Rather than view the hijras as a static and ahistorical third gender category, I elaborate how hijras not only understand and explain normative categories of gender, but also practice those categories in quotidian settings. The guiding principle in this chapter is that gender ideologies are not to be understood as discontinuous with the practices in real-life situations. Rather, the ideals that hijras publicly proclaim and the practices they enact are mutually co-constitutive, and it is through an interrogation of this mutual interplay that we may be able to understand not only the limits of a third sex framework, but also the concept and praxis of gender.