Transgender persons reluctant to get registered for free treatment in KP

PESHAWAR: Only 15 transgender persons have availed free treatment on Sehat Card Plus in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year despite having entitlement.

A total of 4.86 million people have received cashless healthcare services, including only 15 transgender persons, according to data. The data shows that 10.6 million families (30 million individuals) have been registered with Nadra and are eligible for free diagnosis and treatment services under the scheme.

Of the registered people, 54 per cent are men and 46 per cent are women but the number of registered transgender persons is only 0.001 per cent. Among those, who have received treatment services on SCP, 54 per cent are women, 46 per cent are men and 0.0003 per cent of them are transgender persons.

The free health insurance programme, launched in 2016, has benefitted five million people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa at a cost of Rs136 billion.

According to officials in the health department, transgender people wanted to be referred to as women and thus they did not want to register themselves as transgender. Nadra has only registered 183 transgender people so far, and 15 of them have benefited from free medical treatment on SCP.

“They want to avail free treatment as women for which there is no ban on them because every single citizen of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who possesses a national identity card, is eligible to get these services on SCP in all empanelled hospitals,” they said.

Qamar Naseem, the programme manager of Blue Vein, a non-governmental organisation, told Dawn that there were a number of reasons because of which transgender people were reluctant to register themselves with Nadra for the free treatment programme.

“It is very disappointing that despite all the efforts of civil society and Nadra and the facilitation of the social welfare and women empowerment department, transgender people are not registering themselves,” he said.

He said that one of the reason stated during meetings with transgender persons was pressure from family. Being married and having children, they wouldn’t be able to travel to Gulf states in addition to complex procedures for changing their identities in all documentations including banking, inheritance, ownership, school or college certificates, jobs and other areas, he added.

Qamar Naseem, who has been working on rights and issues of transgender persons in the province, said that some of the transgender persons said that they got no benefit, and therefore they would not register themselves with Nadra.

According to TransAction Alliance for Transgender, their number is around 45,000 but no data is available to confirm it. Transgender Protection Policy is in the last stages, but the law department has yet to approve it.