Every social movement tells stories. But an uncomfortable question is rarely asked: Who gets to decide which stories are told?<\/p>\n
In today’s development industry, narratives do not emerge solely from communities. They are increasingly shaped by funding priorities, international advocacy frameworks, media fellowships, academic scholarships, leadership programmes, conferences, and donor-funded projects. Together, they create an ecosystem that rewards some voices while marginalising others.<\/p>\n
This is not unique to gender and sexuality. It has become one of the defining characteristics of international development.<\/p>\n
Nepal’s experience illustrates how this ecosystem can influence not only policy, but language itself.<\/p>\n
Fifteen years ago, “Third Gender” was a globally recognised achievement of Nepal. It was embedded in our legal discourse and reflected indigenous understandings of gender diversity. Today, however, mainstream media, NGO reports, donor documents, and advocacy campaigns overwhelmingly prefer the terms “transgender” and the Nepali translation paralingi. This shift did not happen by accident.<\/p>\n
It happened through a carefully reinforced ecosystem.<\/strong><\/p>\n Donors fund organisations that adopt preferred terminology. INGOs support projects aligned with international frameworks. NGOs train activists using those frameworks. Journalists receive fellowships to report from those perspectives. Researchers receive scholarships to study those concepts. Government officials are invited to international conferences where those narratives are treated as global standards.<\/p>\n Gradually, one vocabulary becomes “professional.” The other becomes invisible.<\/p>\n This is how narratives are manufactured.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the most repeated arguments against Nepal’s “Third Gender” identity has been almost comical: If there is a third gender, who are the first and second genders?<\/p>\n The question sounds clever until one remembers our own philosophical traditions.<\/p>\n Third Gender was never a numerical ranking.<\/strong><\/p>\n It derives from the ancient idea of a “third nature”\u2014something distinct, intermediate, subtle, and not immediately obvious. The same symbolic meaning exists in concepts like the “third eye.” Nobody asks where the first and second eyes are. The third eye is not another physical eye; it represents a different way of seeing. Likewise, Third Gender describes a distinct social and cultural reality rather than the third position in a sequence.<\/p>\n Yet this indigenous explanation is increasingly dismissed while imported concepts are treated as universal truths.<\/p>\n Ironically, many development agencies regularly speak about “localisation,” “decolonisation,” and “respecting indigenous knowledge.” Yet when it comes to gender diversity, many continue exporting Western categories while expecting local histories to adapt to them.<\/p>\n The same pattern can be seen every June.<\/strong><\/p>\n Pride Month has become one of the most successfully globalised advocacy campaigns in modern history. Its origins in the 1969 Stonewall uprising are historically significant. But how did one moment in New York become the mandatory calendar for queer communities everywhere?<\/p>\n Across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific, organisations are encouraged\u2014and often funded\u2014to celebrate Pride in June regardless of local climate, history, religious calendars, or indigenous traditions. Rainbow flags, Pride toolkits, media campaigns, and corporate branding appear simultaneously across continents following a script largely written in the Global North. Critics from the Global South have argued that this universalisation risks overshadowing local histories, identities, and forms of resistance.<\/p>\n The phenomenon extends far beyond LGBT advocacy.<\/strong><\/p>\n Across Africa, scholars have documented how local understandings of sexuality and gender have often been compressed into Western identity categories such as “LGBTQ,” even where long-standing indigenous identities existed under different names and social meanings. The debate is not about rejecting universal human rights; it is about who has the authority to define identities and whose knowledge becomes globally legitimate.<\/p>\n Development itself offers countless examples.<\/strong><\/p>\n For decades, donor institutions have promoted concepts such as “good governance,” “capacity building,” “gender mainstreaming,” “resilience,” and “social inclusion.” Many of these ideas have generated important reforms. Yet funding has also shaped which approaches become dominant, which research gets published, and which organisations survive. Those who speak the donor’s language are often better positioned to secure grants, influence policy, and gain international visibility.<\/p>\n The result is not necessarily conspiracy.<\/strong><\/p>\n It is structural power.<\/p>\n Funding creates incentives.<\/p>\n Incentives create language.<\/p>\n Language shapes knowledge.<\/p>\n Knowledge shapes policy.<\/p>\n Policy eventually shapes reality.<\/p>\n The media occupy a crucial position in this process.<\/p>\n Media fellowships are often presented as neutral professional development. Yet fellowships inevitably influence which stories receive attention and which frameworks journalists become familiar with. When funding consistently favours one conceptual lens, alternative perspectives gradually disappear\u2014not necessarily because they have been disproved, but because they are no longer funded, researched, or published.<\/p>\n In Nepal, one simple exercise illustrates this question.<\/strong><\/p>\n Review the coverage of major newspapers over the last decade. How often do they describe people as “Third Gender”? How often do they automatically use “transgender,” even when individuals publicly identify themselves as Third Gender? How many feature stories explore Nepal’s indigenous concepts of gender compared to stories framed entirely through Western terminology?<\/p>\n These are empirical questions worthy of serious academic study.<\/p>\n The broader concern reaches beyond one identity debate.<\/p>\n Who determines what counts as legitimate knowledge?<\/p>\n Who decides which words deserve international funding?<\/p>\n Who defines what is modern, progressive, or scientific?<\/p>\n Communities should have the freedom to identify as transgender, Third Gender, non-binary, or by any culturally rooted identity they choose. Diversity means expanding choices\u2014not replacing one orthodoxy with another.<\/p>\n A truly decolonised development agenda would not export identities.<\/p>\n It would create space for multiple epistemologies.<\/p>\n It would support local languages.<\/p>\n It would recognise that liberation cannot be standardised through a single vocabulary, a single calendar, or a single historical narrative.<\/p>\n Perhaps the greatest irony is this: while international development increasingly celebrates “diversity,” it often speaks in only one language.<\/p>\n Real diversity begins when communities are trusted to name themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every social movement tells stories. But an uncomfortable question is rarely asked: Who gets to decide which stories are told?
\nIn today’s development industry, narratives do not emerge solely from communities. They are increasingly shaped by funding priorities, international advocacy frameworks, media fellowships, academic scholarships, leadership programmes, conferences, and donor-funded projects. Together, they create an ecosystem that rewards some voices while marginalising others.
\nThis is not unique to gender and sexuality. It has become one of the defining characteristics of international development.
\nNepal’s experience illustrates how this ecosystem can influence not only policy, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":14426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,1081,8,621,492,490,3,2065],"tags":[507],"class_list":["post-14425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-issue","category-explanationawareness","category-human-rights","category-news","category-opinion","category-slider","category-society","category-top-stories","tag-third-gender"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14427,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14425\/revisions\/14427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}