Rukshana Kapali

Nepal, CAHR, Autumn 2019

Rukshana Kapali is a 20-year-old transgender female human rights activist from the indigenous Newa community of Nepal. Brought up in a patriarchal society that talks about binary and opposite, she struggled in her childhood with non-conformity in society.

Amidst a lack of information and an identity crisis, Rukshana experienced bullying and went through abuses by the principal in her school. She, however, managed to pass SLC (a Grade 10 degree in Nepal until 2017) and escaped the obnoxious environment of the school. While she drove her own path of self-education through the internet to understand about the diversity of gender and sexuality, she decided to stand up for herself at the age of 14. She not just came out to everyone, she also begun being vocal about queer rights in social media.

In 2015, Rukshana started actively blogging about issues around gender, sexuality, queer rights, Newa, heritage, indigenous rights, entho-lingual rights, feminism, body shaming and online violence. She usually uses three to four languages, and actively creates content in her native language, Nepal Bhasa. Working for two years in Blue Diamond Society, one of the organizations on queer rights, she decided to begin a new wave of the queer movement in Nepal and consequently co-founded the Queer Youth Group and co-initiated the Queer Rights Collective which is involved in frontline advocacy around queer rights in the country, and champions awareness among people in the society. She has professional affiliations to several other organizations such as LOOM Nepal (a feminist organization), Youth LEAD (Asia Pacific Regional Network for young key affected population) and Youth Voices Count (Asia Pacific Network for young LGBTQ individuals), while having a working history with Sahaayam Nepal (Comprehensive Sexuality Education) and Right Here Right Now (a platform of 16 organizations on sexuality advocacy in Nepal), the youth engagement group at the Women Deliver Conference 2019 and the Federation of Nepalese Indigenous Journalists - Kathmandu.

Over the years, Rukshana has been invited to various national, regional and international conferences for speaking appointments. She was at the 38th Session of the Human Rights Council for Trans Advocacy Week organized by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. She has initiated different campaigns such as the Save Nepa Valley Campaign in 2017, which advocates for an alternative, comprehensive development that respects human rights of all citizens, instead of exclusive infrastructure building, commercialization and urbanization that only serves the interests of a select few in power. She promotes a broader understanding of development, which includes the preservation of heritage, stakeholdership of indigenous groups, local community building and the use of environmentally friendly building practices. She was involved in the Save Nepa Valley Campaign until April 2019. She also began a series of discussions called ‘Tsi-Nu-Tok’ which organized events for people to gather and talk about various topics around the queer rights movement, which merged with Queer Youth Group later in 2019.

Rukshana has published books around language and sexuality, namely Gender and Sexuality Terminologies in Nepal Bhasa, a trilingual collection of gender and sexuality terminologies (in English, Nepali and Nepal Bhasa) and A Dictionary of Gender and Sexuality (in Nepali language). She has worked with language experts in her native language to introduce queer vocabularies.

While Rukshana’s work alongside the variety of groups she has worked with is taking a national frontline in terms of the queer movement in Nepal, and beginning a new wave in the history of queer rights in the country, she has faced attacks due to the work she does. As a person who faces intersectional experiences of marginalization, her work is attacked by multiple agencies. In 2019, the Queer Youth Group in collaboration with the Queer Rights Collective organized the first ever Pride Parade in the country that was a deviation from a ten-year-old practice of coinciding the pride event with a traditional indigenous festival of Saa Paaru ( Gai Jatra ) that commemorates death and mortality through humor and mockery. As a result, she faced verbal assaults and threats from people who are associated with the mainstream queer movement in Nepal. While this new wave of the queer movement in Nepal takes into account many issues around gender and sexuality, such as accepting transgender people who exclusively identify as male or female, implementing neologisms around non-binary identities, moving beyond the traditional Hinduistic concept of ‘third gender’, acknowledging and working with intersectional perspectives, it receives attacks from people of the older queer rights generation. She has been portrayed as someone who is working “against” the mainstream queer movement in the country.

Bullied and abused in her school life, Rukshana aims to see a society where queer individuals can express themselves without fear. To educate society about the diversity of gender and sexuality, she is preparing coursebook content for school students during her time in York. The coursebooks are designed for school students to get knowledge and exposure to content around the spectrum of gender, sexuality and queer diversity. She plans to finalize the books with consultation from different queer rights activists in Nepal and to make them available in at least 10 major languages of Nepal.

Rukshana’s website is : www.rukshanakapali.com