Nepal Elects First Transgender Woman Lawmaker
LGBTQ rights advocate Bhumika Shrestha wins a historic parliamentary seat as part of a sweeping election victory.
Nepal has elected its first-ever transgender woman to parliament, with the election commission confirming last week that 37-year-old LGBTQ rights advocate Bhumika Shrestha will serve as a lawmaker from the centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party, which secured 182 of 275 seats earlier this month.
In Nepal, voters cast two ballots in parliamentary elections: one elects 165 members from single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post voting, while the other fills 110 seats from party lists distributed proportionally based on the overall vote.
RSP, led by rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, won 125 of 165 directly elected seats and secured 57 more through proportional representation — leaving it two short of a two-thirds majority. Shrestha is among those 57 proportional-representation MPs.
“I am very excited but also feel the responsibility on my shoulders,” Shrestha said, according to Agence France-Presse. “Our constitution has provisions for our community but they have not translated to laws and policies. Our community expects me to raise our issues [in parliament].”
Nepal has some of South Asia’s most progressive LGBTQ rights laws. Discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation is outlawed, and citizens can select a third nonbinary gender marker on citizenship documents and passports.
In 2023, an interim Supreme Court order allowed same-sex and transgender couples to register marriages. But no one from the LGBTQ community has held public office since 2008, when a gay man became a lawmaker through the proportional representation system, according to AFP.
The LGBTQ advocacy group Blue Diamond Society estimates that more than 900,000 people in Nepal identify as sexual minorities.
Supporters gathered at Blue Diamond Society headquarters earlier this week to congratulate Shrestha, offering scarves, draping her in floral garlands, and presenting gifts — including a pen symbolizing the legislative power she will now wield.
Umisha Pandey, president of the Blue Diamond Society, called Shrestha’s election a “historic” moment.
“Our pains, our sufferings, our feeling, our stories and our every problem is only understood by us, not by others,” Pandey said.
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