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per cent of the hijras living in India today have undergone genital surgery - according to the 1990 BBC documentary Eunuchs: India’s Third Gender (Yorke and Prasad 1990), as well as to one of the morę outspoken hijras we interviewed in Banaras.¹¹

The hijras have organized their lives in resistance to a social structure that prevents their integration. Their marginalization often begins at a very early age when family members, neighbours, and peers respond negatively to their presence. Sulekha,¹² a 38-year-old hijra who lives with a małe partner in a smali yillage outside of Banaras, spoke with great sadness about her childhood, when she was informed because of physical reasons that she was a hijra. The child of a hahai, or ‘sweet-maker’, Sulekha spoke proud-ly of her family and regularly alluded to their high social status as Kanya-Kubja Brahmans. Yet when only 7 years old, she was forced to realize that, in the eyes of Indian society, her existence as a gen-dered being was ąuestionable, if not reprehensible. She recalls a particular moment when she realized that she was different from her peers, for neither boys nor girls would let her into their play-group: