Between Recognition and Rejection: Hijra Experiences of Bureaucratic Encounter in Bangladeshi Public Service Delivery

Abstract

In 2013, the Government of Bangladesh officially recognised hijra people as a third gender, a move that has been called a landmark in South Asia’s gender-identity policy. Over ten years later, however, to our knowledge, no study has yet treated the street-level encounters between hijra citizens and the frontline officials who administer health, employment, social protection, and law-enforcement services as a unified administrative phenomenon. Existing scholarship instead treats these different sectors in isolation from one another. The studies mostly cover the years 2009 to 2025 and, with one comparative exception, are based in Bangladesh, mainly in urban areas. This article attempts to fill this gap through a qualitative meta-synthesis of nine peer-reviewed primary studies reporting hijra participants’ first-hand accounts following the secondary qualitative research procedure developed by Cheong et al. (2023), which has been adapted here for already-published rather than raw online interview data. Through thematic synthesis, we use Lipsky's (1980/2010) street-level bureaucracy framework alongside Herd and Moynihan's (2018) administrative burden framework, building on previous South Asian usage of the latter framework, applied across health, employment and, comparatively, law enforcement, with cross-sector evidence on registration and identity documentation, rather than to one sector or a single administrative transaction; social protection formed part of the search scope but is not covered by the coded studies. The synthesis points to four cross-cutting themes: symbolic recognition has not been operationalised into administrative categories; hijra citizens bear substantial learning and compliance costs; strategic concealment of identity is interpreted as carrying psychological costs; and frontline discretion is exercised largely beyond formal channels and is mostly unchecked. When taken together, these findings show that hijra citizens experience a distinctive form of administrative burden, one that is generated not by excessive procedures but by the absence of an administrative category that is operationalised for them in the systems they encounter.  The present study extends the theory of administrative burden to a group that is recognised in law but not accommodated in administration while providing a cross-sectoral evidence base for inclusive public service redesign in Bangladesh and similar Global South settings.