By PLS
I almost wish I lived in Dallas. The city has a substantial population of Pakistani origin, so its cable companies include offerings from Pakistani TV. Chances are I’d be able to see the latest rage in 
Pakistan—a late night interview program in which Begum Nawazish Ali quizzes the lions of the nation–social, political, artistic.
Evidently the big names actually clamor to be interviewed by am elegant, expensively-dressed, gorgeous transvestite who’s flirty and raunchy in a way a real society woman wouldn’t dare to be on TV. Such behavior would compromise her reputation, her honor—and a woman’s honor is her family’s, which is why all too many women, on the merest suspicion of infidelity, are murdered in Pakistan by their husbands, fathers and brothers.
Let that be for now and check out the photo from the New York Times. The Begum, in real life a young man by the name of Ali Saleem, is truly beautiful.
Ali Saleem is totally open about his constantly fluctuating bisexuality. He contends that Pakistan, too, is more open than outsiders believe. However, Salman Masood, the author of the NYT piece, finds “it something of a mystery why a man who openly acknowledges he is bisexual is a sensation here.”
Actually I’m not surprised. Modern Salafist Islam may object to the expression of complex gender identities, but there’s a very old custom in South Asian Muslim society which calls for elaborately costumed transvestites to perform songs and dances during wedding festivities. The hijra performers were almost de rigeur. 
What’s more, the North Indian classical dance form known as Khatak has both Muslim and Hindu variants, each offering set pieces calling for the dancer to alternate male and female identities, an astonishing transformation I have seen many times. In the Hindu format the dance focuses on Radha and Krishna. Muslim dancers, like Muslim poets, will depict their own versions of the lover and the beloved.
According to Shovana Narayan, author of Kathak (The Lotus Collection, Roli Books, New Delhi, 1998):
Any dance form if alive today and sharing a long traditional history, owes its present position to the inherent dynamism within the dance-form, capable of withstanding all forms of onslaught while continuously adapting and innovating in the wake of changed circumstances—socially, artistically and politically.... One of the predominant factors [for Kathak] was the external change of environment which was not the usual change of dynasties ruling the region but along with it, a change in the religious belief of the rulers of medieval India.....In the field of “abhinaya (mimetic exposition) the element of Sufi interpretations were incorparated whereby...Lord Krishna...became synonymous with...the Supreme Lord. (23)
There are also purely secular interpretations performed by old time courtesans and dancers in the famous red light district of today's Lahore.
Masood also suggests that Begum Nawazish Ali is a purely urban phenomenon, but Christopher Ondaatje, who wrote Sindh Revisited: a Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: 1812-1819: The India Years, found a hijra with a startling resemblance to the “Begum” in a tiny village outside the Sindhi city of Thatta, while researching his fascinating amalgam of text and photos (published in 1996).
Seema, as Ondaatji writes and we can see, was “vivacious, svelte, clean-shaven well kept and well groomed. He had applied a light lipstick and a light rouge to his face. He had kohl around his eyes and a reddish eyeliner.”
Thatta, of course, was not always a backwater. It was once a very prosperous city, a port city, a center of trade, on which caravans would converge. Ondaatji often quotes from Burtons’s own account of his trip entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. At one point Burton describes a camel caravan which contained male “travelling wives.” They were “boys and lads almost in woman’s attire and Kohl’d eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses and henna’d fingers and toes.” (162)
Clearly there is more context for the acceptance of Begun Nawazish Ali than Salman Masood realizes...or wishes to acknowledge.