Kathmandu Passport
By Bikash
My passport has an O in the sex field. O for other.
I am not other. I am a man. But for now, O is what the state of Nepal will give me.
I am Bikash. I am 29, I live in Kathmandu, and I am a trans man.
How I got the O
People abroad sometimes picture me at a counter, picking a box. It didn’t work like that.
In Nepal, a passport comes after your citizenship certificate, the nagarikta. The marker on the certificate decides the marker on the passport. Mine said female, because that is what my family registered when I was born.
Changing it starts small. First you go to your ward office for a recommendation letter. Then you take that letter to the District Administration Office with your original certificate, photocopies and photos. Then you wait.
I remember the morning I went to the DAO. The line started outside the gate before the office opened. Men held plastic folders. Mothers held sleeping babies. A broker walked up and down, offering to fill in forms for a fee. When I reached the window, I had rehearsed my sentence so many times that it came out too fast.
I didn’t ask for “other.” I asked for male.
The officer was polite in the way officials are polite when the answer is already no. He said I could change my name. For a male marker, I would need a certificate from a medical board saying I’d had surgery. The surgery he meant isn’t done in Nepal. Even if it were, I don’t want it, and I couldn’t afford it.
He wasn’t cruel. He told me, almost kindly, that there was no rule he could use. I believed him. That was the worst part. There was no villain at the window, only a gap in the law with me standing in it.
So I applied for O. That took its own letters and its own months, while an office held my original documents. People at a community organization helped me with the forms. Some of them were tesro lingi, third gender, and proud of it.
That matters to me. The third-gender category exists because people fought for it in the courts in 2007, when most of the world wasn’t thinking about this at all. For many of them, it’s not a compromise. It’s who they are.
It’s not who I am. O was the only door the system left open, so I went through it.
The paperwork problem
A passport is supposed to open doors. Mine opens most of them slowly.
At the airport, there are separate security lines for men and women. I stand in the men’s line. Sometimes the officer looks at my face, then at the O, then at my face again. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes I’m sent to the other line, and someone there sends me back.
I’ve learned to answer calmly. Ho, sahi ho. Yes, it’s correct. No, there’s no mistake.
The first time I used the passport was a flight to Bangkok for a regional workshop. A Nepali can cross into India with a citizenship certificate, so for most of my life I’d never needed a passport at all. I had imagined that trip for weeks. I ironed my shirt the night before.
At departures, the officer called a colleague over, and they talked about me in front of me as if I couldn’t understand Nepali. After ten minutes, they stamped it. I boarded with my hands shaking. I spent the first hour of the flight looking out the window, trying to feel the excitement I’d been saving.
The same thing happens at the bank, at hospitals, and on job applications. Every form becomes a small negotiation: do I write what’s true, or what causes fewer questions?
Last year I interviewed for an accounts job at a trading company in Teku. The interview went well. Then the manager asked for a copy of my citizenship certificate for the file. He looked at it for a long time. He asked if it was mine. I said yes. He said they would call. They didn’t.
I can’t prove that was the reason. That is how it usually works. Nobody says no. They just don’t say yes.
At the clinic, it’s different. I want doctors to know I am trans, because it matters for my health. But I’d like to say it once, in a private room. I don’t want to explain it again to every receptionist who reads my file out loud in a waiting area full of people.
Bureaucracy is boring when it works. When it doesn’t, it becomes personal.
What our language already knows
Nepali doesn’t make me fight over he or she. Our pronouns don’t change with gender.
Gender lives in other places. It’s in the verb endings: whether someone says I aayo or aai, came as a son or came as a daughter. It’s in chhora and chhori. It’s in whether an aunt asks when I’ll be married off, or when I’ll bring a wife home.
For years, my family’s sentences put me in the wrong place without anyone meaning harm. They were just speaking the way they always had.
Now, when a shopkeeper in my neighborhood says, “Bhai, what do you need?” (little brother), I feel something settle in my chest. It’s one word. It costs him nothing. He has no idea what it gives me.
Telling my family
I didn’t come out all at once. I came out in pieces.
First I cut my hair and dressed the way I wanted outside the house. Then I told my didi, my older cousin, who had already guessed. She said, “I was waiting for you to tell me.” Then she made tea as if we’d talked about the weather.
Then I told my mother.
My aama didn’t shout. She cried, and then she asked questions. Was I sure? Had I thought about it? Did I know what people would say? What about marriage, and what about her when she’s old?
I understood that she wasn’t only afraid of me. She was afraid of the neighbors, the relatives, and every office I would have to walk into. She had spent her whole life learning how to protect her children from the world. Now she didn’t know which world to protect me from.
For a while, she asked if I was sure. Then one evening she stopped and asked, Khana khayau? Have you eaten?
In my family, that is how love often sounds.
My buwa took longer. He still slips into the old verb endings. Sometimes he avoids sentences that need them at all. For almost a year, he talked to me mostly about the weather, the price of vegetables, and cricket.
But last Dashain, when we were all at my uncle’s house for tika, a relative made a remark about me. My father said, quietly, “Mero chhora ho.”
He is my son.
Nobody said anything after that. My uncle put the red tika on my forehead and the jamara behind my ear, the same as for my male cousins, and gave me his blessing.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t, sometimes.
Recognition is not the same as safety
Foreigners sometimes tell me Nepal is so progressive. We have a third-gender category, so everything must be fine.
I understand why they think so. We were early, and our courts said things that other countries still haven’t said. During Gai Jatra, Kathmandu holds its Pride march, and I’ve walked in it.
Gai Jatra is the festival when families remember the people they lost that year. Walking through those streets with my friends, I think about the people from our community who never got to be seen. That’s part of why we march then.
But a category is not a job, or a doctor who doesn’t stare, or a landlord who doesn’t change his mind after seeing your documents. And the progress isn’t guaranteed.
Our Supreme Court recognized a trans woman as female without requiring surgery. The Home Ministry didn’t follow that ruling. It asked the court to review it and stopped processing gender change applications. Applicants get no letter, no explanation and no timeline.
A friend of mine, a trans woman, has had her file sitting in an office for months. She calls every few weeks. Every time, someone tells her to wait. She jokes that her documents are traveling more than she is.
I can be grateful to the people who won the third-gender category and still say it isn’t enough.
What I want
I want the same thing people asked for in 2007: to be recognized as who we say we are.
I want a citizenship certificate, and then a passport, that says M. I don’t want to prove it with surgery I don’t want, or with a medical board examining my body.
I want Nepal to keep the O for everyone who needs it, and to stop making it the only door for trans men and trans women.
I want offices to process our files instead of letting them sit in drawers.
I want my country to understand that we don’t all want the same word. That isn’t division. It’s honesty.
Mostly, I want to stand in the men’s line at Tribhuvan airport, hand over my passport, and have the officer look at my face, look at the page, and see the same person.
Not a puzzle. Not a category. Just a man from Kathmandu, going somewhere.
Editor’s note: Bikash is a composite character. His story draws on documented experiences of trans men in Nepal reported by Human Rights Watch and Nepali media. It is not one person’s account. If you’re working through your own documents, see our Legal Guidance for Trans Men.
