Intersex Asia Talks: Special Conversation with Esan Regmi on the journey of CFC Nepal

May 11 is the birthday of CFC Nepal. Intersex Asia is honoured to interview the Co-founder and Executive Director Esan Regmi to learn more from his critical journey of building the first intersex organization in Nepal.

Esan, Many congratulations on the 4th anniversary of CFC Nepal. The journey of the organisation is deeply connected with your personal journey. Could you share a little bit about how you started activism on intersex rights.

Knowledge about Intersex issues is very limited not just in Nepal but also across South Asia. Till the age of 20, I did not know I was an intersex person. In 2010, I decided to leave my birthplace due to stigma and discrimination and shifted to living in the city. It was only then I came across an LGBTI organisation. LGBT groups in Nepal started adding ‘I’ to LGBT in their acronym in 2001. When they oriented me on LGBTI terminologies, I realised that I was intersex. I then wanted to know more about intersex issues, intersex activism, and intersex people. I googled ‘intersex in Nepal’ and ‘intersex in India’ and did not find anything. While researching appropriate terminology for LGBTI populations, I came across the website of Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). Everything on their website was in English and was particularly difficult for me to understand as English is not my native language. It occurred to me that there may be many others like me in the country who, just like me, had no access to information in their language and stayed hidden in society. I realised that I needed to raise my voice because I did not know anything about intersex until this time. From 2011 onwards, I started sharing my personal experience on various platforms and engaging with mainstream LGBT organisations.

From 2011, you were already working with LGBTI organisations. What motivated you to start an independent intersex-led organisation?

Yes, I did join an LGBTI organisation, but there were no intersex members and intersex-focussed activities. Given that we did not connect with other intersex people in Nepal, we were not yet aware of their specific issues, so I began by sharing my experiences.
Two intersex persons contacted me after hearing about my experience. I realised that sharing my narrative was powerful and was helping us connect with more and more intersex people in the country.

In 2015, I came to Kathmandu. In the same year, I participated in the ILGA Asia conference in Taiwan to join the first intersex pre-conference event. In this event, I got the opportunity to meet six intersex activists. This was the first time when intersex activists from different parts of Asia came together on a single platform to discuss our issues. For the first time, I realised I was not alone and felt more confident to speak strongly about our issues at the national level. Through our conversations and experience sharing, I realised that the larger Asian intersex community felt the same way that intersex issues are marginalised even within LGBTI groups.

After this event, I started making efforts to initiate the first intersex meeting in Nepal. Rather than getting support, I felt discouraged by the approach of the LGBTI organisation where I was working. This made it evident to me that I had to work separately and exclusively to raise intersex issues in Nepal to ensure our issues do not get diluted in the larger LGBTI narrative.

Another issue that came up very often was that most LGBTI organisations in Nepal and even in India are looked at as the ‘third gender organisations’ or ‘hijra organisations’. Not all intersex people wanted to associate themselves with those names. From 2001 to 2016, no specific issues about the intersex community or related advocacy initiatives were undertaken in Nepal. The intersex people in Nepal were facing lots of issues in society and we decided to raise our issues separately because our issues are distinct from the larger LGBT group. In 2016 ( after our 1st national intersex workshop), we started our group to raise our issues and called it Campaign for Change.

Now that we know how CFC came into being, please share a little bit about your idea behind naming the organisation as ‘Campaign For Change’?

Several discussions happened around the name. We specifically wanted a name related to intersex. But as you know, in the South Asian region, the word ‘sex’ itself is such a taboo in society. We realised that even registering the name could become difficult for us. We considered several name options but nothing clicked. Our thinking was that 16-17 years had passed since LGBTI activism started in Nepal, feminist issues were being discussed for way longer, but there was still no knowledge or discussion about intersex issues within these movements. We realised that our mission was to bring about a change and we saw ourselves as initiating the movement as a campaign. Hence, we arrived at – Campaign For Change.

We still see ourselves as more of a movement as opposed to an organisation. We are an organisation only for technical governance but we are associated with it like it’s a movement, a movement to challenge negative and faulty perceptions about intersex conditions and people in the society, a movement to bring about a change in the lifestyle and living conditions of the intersex community. It has been five years since we started and nothing drastic has yet happened but several small yet very important changes have come about and they continue to motivate us and give us hope.

CFC has indeed made some serious strides in the intersex movement in Nepal and this would not have happened without your dedicated contributions. Today we are celebrating the day of registration of the organisation. Did you face any challenges in the registration process and building the organisation?

Registration per se was not a difficult task. We registered as a non-profit company and that process is rather straightforward. Designing the governance framework was particularly challenging. CFC is comprised of lived experience activists and they don’t have experience in managing organisational issues. We come from different cultural, socio-economic, educational, and family backgrounds. Before CFC came along, most of us weren’t very active in social activities and movements. Due to lack of exposure, we recognised we even had initial hiccups in socialisation for work. We are also placed in various parts of Nepal and that distance creates its own set of challenges, especially when not all places have direct connectivity. Another big challenge for us is reaching out to people about intersex issues. There is an acute lack of knowledge on this subject. Most people assume that intersex is ‘the third gender’, so our communication needs are diverse.

While the scope of work is so vast, we have limited capacity and resources. Our board members and members of the executive body are intersex individuals, and they do not have the educational backgrounds and skills to manage this scope of work. Scaling up or expanding is necessary but also difficult at this point. Our current capacity and resources do not allow us to hire experts to help us. Some organisations manage a smooth sail in this regard- if you have the resources, you can hire the expertise. There are many reasons behind the funding challenges faced by intersex organisations. The foremost reason is the assumption that a grant made to an LGBTI organisation would be utilised for the benefit of all identity groups. The reality is far from this assumption.

That is a very important point and must be raised ever so often. How has the presence of CFC Nepal made an impact on the lives of intersex people in Nepal?

We are a few steps ahead from where we were five years ago. Even in 2016, when we organised the 1st Intersex Workshop in Nepal, most of the community members were not even confident that we could have an organisation to call our own, an organisation to represent us, that there will finally be a change in the quality of our life. Not that our lifestyle has changed yet, but we have a presence now. We are constantly in touch with intersex people, we provide support if there are any troubles. We try to make their everyday life better in any way we can. We are supporting the education of some intersex individuals. We consider providing peer support as an important role for our organisation.

We are based out of Kathmandu and our members are spread in various, even remote, parts of Nepal. They actively advocate for intersex rights in their areas. The presence of an organisation that works exclusively on intersex issues has empowered people. Over the years, we have built relationships with several activists and collaborated with civil society organisations. . For the last three years, we have received requests from various organisations who wish to work with us on intersex-specific issues. The British Council for instance has been actively engaged with us. Till now, intersex people never got any support during crisis times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, CFC Nepal was able to provide emergency financial assistance to more than 25 intersex people with the support of Intersex Asia.

It is great that CFC has made its presence felt and created a space for itself in Nepal and also brought intersex people together as a community in such a short period! Are there any success stories or milestones that CFC has achieved in the past four years that you’d like to share?

We started CFC as an informal group in 2016 and in 2017, we registered the organisation. I worked with an LGBTI organisation and had parallelly started working independently on intersex issues. We had started engaging with UN mechanisms, but the Nepali civil society and the Government were still unaware of intersex issues, despite several years of LGBTI activism in the country. They still had misconceptions about intersex identity, and they continued to have notions that intersex was ‘the third gender’ or transgender. To establish the distinct nature of intersex issues, we started conducting awareness workshops on intersex issues in different educational institutions and organisations. We also published important knowledge resources on intersex issues in the Nepali language.

There was also hope that this will also bring intersex issues into focus with the Nepali government and civil society. In 2016, we organised the 1st Intersex Workshop and that was the first time when intersex people gathered together in Nepal. This is the starting point of the history of the intersex movement in Nepal. Later in 2016, we submitted a report on intersex issues to the CRC committee. They reviewed our report and made recommendations based on that to the Nepal Government. This was our first big achievement in terms of advocacy. This brought us recognition. We also submitted a report to the CEDAW committee and they sent their recommendations and concluding observations to the Nepali government. Since then, we have supported several intersex individuals in terms of healthcare, surgeries, livelihood, and education.

On the fourth anniversary of CFC Nepal, would you like to share a message for the larger intersex human rights movement?

We have so far been looked at from the tainted lens of disease or abnormality of some kind. In contrast, intersex people are manifestations of the diversity of human life. This is how intersex must be understood and celebrated. There is also this misconception that being intersex is only about having ambiguous genitalia, which is also not true. There are over 40 intersex variations and a lot of them do not have ambiguous genitalia. This has to be accepted with pride. Everyone, including human rights organisations/movements, must have this knowledge. How our society thinks and what rules and regulations it creates for itself directly translate into the rules and regulations of our country. It’s the same people writing them. When they do not recognise us, they do not consider us. They must look at us like equal human beings with equal rights. At the moment, we are marginalised and that is due to the sheer ignorance and neglect on the part of the system. Our issues must be mainstreamed. Lastly, I want to add that while all LGBTI organisations do include the ‘I’ in their description, most of them do not work on intersex issues. They need to realise that adding the ‘I’ in the acronym comes with a responsibility. Therefore, the inclusion of intersex issues should be done substantively and not as a token.