For many trans women and Khawajasira in Pakistan, the internet emerged as a place of opportunity and hope. A place where they could exist beyond neighbourhood gossip and family surveillance, a place where they could choose their name, pronouns, and connect with a community which didn’t exist in classrooms or at home.
From early Facebook and Orkut days to Instagram and TikTok, trans users have continued to build small universes for themselves. They found each other. They found audiences. Some even found influence and a source of income. Over time, though, this place has become entangled with a harsher reality: the same platforms that offered visibility and connections, also hosted coordinated hate campaigns against them. In Pakistan, there has been a growing trend where right-wing influencers gain prominence by turning trans rights into viral outrage.The tropes remained the same, they are termed to be “anti-Islam” and involved in spreading “western agenda” — an agenda which is never properly defined and used in vague terms to incite fear and mass outrage. This collective experience of trans visibility being weaponised is the defining challenge of the digital era for the community.
Prominent trans activist and founder of Moorat March Shahzadi Rai confirmed that this systemic pattern is observed across all provinces. Narratives related to agents spreading “western agenda”, “obscenity” and being “anti-Islam” is quoted back to activists in public spaces too, and this directly impacts their employment opportunities, as many people remain unwilling to hire transgender people in their organisations, Rai explained. Hate mongers even go to claim trans people are “anti-Pakistan” alluding that their existence is somehow “dangerous” for the country, she added.
Human rights activist Ayesha Khalid notes, this is a calculated political strategy. The “Western agenda” narrative is used by ruling bodies as a tool to avoid doing the legislative work required to grant rights. They rely on “proxies” to create this narrative, seeking to “curb their voice” by denying that the community’s demands are legitimate. The murder of trans persons following online campaigns proves that this digital violence is often a prelude to physical violence.
Research also confirms these systematic patterns. The Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) verified that the gendered disinformation campaigns weaponise religion and morality with the explicit intent to cause economic and physical harm, directly validating Shahzadi’s observations.
Hyra Basit, Senior Project Manager at DRF, notes the attacks target the community with slurs and disinformation about their “status in Islam” and their “connection to West” and ‘liberal’ agendas”. The ultimate consequence of this digital hate campaign was the successful political attack on the community’s legislative rights.
The landmark Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018, which recognised self-perceived gender, was weaponised online. Religious and political actors framed it as a foreign agenda” and an attack on “family and Islamic values” and continued to spread disinformation about it.
Senior Trans Activist and Founding Member of Gender Interactive Alliance Bindiya Rana described the fallout as devastating. The hate campaign led to community division, and tragically, led to the murder of some members, she explained. The campaign culminated in the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) striking down key provisions from the law, especially those related to self-identification and inheritance in May 2023.
Another concern related to online posting is when online harassment transitions into physical and economic harm. A young content creator Fira experienced this first hand.
Fira, a student, used to post content intended for Gen Z circles, but it started landing on hostile feeds, and coordinated slurs such as “chakka” and “khusra” were used to harass her brothers at their workplace and police her family at home. The pressure of constant online hate and harassment along with pressure of finding good employment opportunities made Fira take the decision to remove and archive her videos.
Despite the systemic toxicity, the internet remains the primary avenue for self-affirmation and community building. This resilience forms a powerful counter-narrative to censorship.
Content creator and model Faryal views her work as her passion project which aims to “normalise transgender visible content culture in society”. She works to continue influencing people to make this commonplace, and hopes that one day trans people are also able to reclaim public places such as malls and coffee shops without people making them feel like they don’t belong. Faryal follows a simple strategy to ward off online negativity: she strictly avoids her “haters” and focuses on her “lovers” which includes her family and followers. “Positivity itself is the greatest thing in a person, which allows them to overcome the world’s negativity,” she said. Yet, this positive self-expression is the very thing weaponised.
The fight for digital rights is fundamentally a fight for accountability, where existing legal and technical systems have failed the community. As a trans journalist, writing about the experiences of trans women in online spaces means to me more than just reporting violence, it’s about documenting our survival. Every deleted video inciting violence, every slurred name shouted at us when we walk the streets, and every stalled legal reform is a deliberate act aimed at silencing a community that refuses to be invisible – both online and offline.
The greatest tragedy is that the joy expressed by Faryal, the basic right to create, be seen, and find family is the very thing weaponised against us. The fight documented here is for nothing less than the right to exist in the digital world without that existence being used as a justification for our harm in the physical world. The failure of the state and global platforms to act against this targeted, AI-accelerated hate is not an oversight; it is an active denial of our citizenship and humanity. This report is a call for accountability where the systems have willfully looked away.
The Structural Failures
The DRF Legal Team explains that while Pakistan’s legal framework offers several protections, their enforcement and awareness regarding laws have emerged as key challenges.
Rai confirmed that there is a critical knowledge gap. Community elders had “never heard that there was any official complaint mechanism for online harassment, let alone how to use it”, she explained.
It is important to note that the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), 2016, doesn’t recognise ‘gender’ as a protected category under the hate speech clause leaving victims with inadequate legal recourse, explained Basit. Furthermore, almost all transgender people are “hesitant to reach out to law enforcement” because they believe they will be “victim-blamed”, she added.
Basit even confirmed that social media platforms often fail to recognise hate content automatically. X (formerly Twitter) in particular is described as a “very difficult platform”.
Khalid asserted that platforms like X and Facebook are culpable because “they are capitalising on this hate” and prioritising profit over safety of all users. She also criticised the institutional failure in curbing the spread of hateful content against minorities in online spaces. The situation has become “very, very dangerous” because of AI, which anyone can use to “morph your online identity,” putting words in your mouth and creating highly realistic fake videos or images.
To secure digital spaces, the Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) outlines urgent steps required from institutional actors:
- The state must recognise ‘gender’ as a protected category under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), 2016.
- The state must “not give into social media hype and frenzy” which affects the integrity of laws (e.g., the TPPR Act).
- Social media policies must look beyond “imminent physical harm” and instead consider the “holistic effects” of content and comments that target transgender individuals.
- Platforms should commit to continually engaging with trusted partners (such as DRF) and to improving response times to reporting.
