On International Women’s day, Tashnuva Anan Shishir, a right activist who had previously worked with many NGOs supporting transgender people and became Bangladesh’s first transgender news anchor. She read the first news bulletin on the private Boishakhi television channel.
She delivered the three-minute news bulletin.
Talking about the history she discovered in her early teens she was trapped in a man?s body. She says she was sexually assaulted and bullied for years.
?The bullying was so unbearable I attempted suicide four times. My father stopped talking to me for years,? said Shishir, now aged 29.
?When I couldn?t cope with it any more, I left home… I couldn?t stand the neighbours telling my father about how I should act or walk in a masculine way.? She fled her home in a southern coastal district to live alone in the capital Dhaka, and then in the central city of Narayanganj.
There she underwent hormone therapy, took jobs working for charities and acted in theatres, all the while keeping up her studies.
In January she became the first transgender person to study for a master?s in public health at the James P Grant School of Public Health in Dhaka.