Pakistan is a heavily patriarchal society. Women and gender minorities are disadvantaged in almost every arena of life: outside, they face a lack of job opportunities, harassment in the workplace and streets and societal judgement on their appearance. In private spheres, they are forced to package themselves into the roles of mother, daughter and wife. They are subject to a familial system that is built on their subjugation and exploitation, where they are considered to be a burden on their family, with no respite or independence from constant struggles.

As two women who grew up in Pakistan, we are protected by virtue of our privileged upper middle social class. Our forays into largely public spaces are limited at best, and policed when they do happen. We would say that we live in well-surveilled, protected areas of the city. Yet, when we step outside for a walk with our friends — before sunset, by default — it wouldn’t be uncommon to be followed by individuals in cars, making unsolicited offers of a ride along with them, forcing us to shuffle our way back inside our houses or walk faster, hoping that they would grow bored or give up. We can’t escape the stares, definitely not when we’re out on the streets and sometimes not even when we’re inside our own car, waiting impatiently at a signal. Sometimes, the stares are accompanied by a graze against our back or a slight push as they walk by. Yet, we can’t even speak for the experiences of women in public and private spaces whose socioeconomic or religious positionality do not offer them the protection that ours do for us.

But we should consider ourselves lucky women in Pakistan if that is all we face in our everyday life. See, that’s the thing about being a woman or a gender minority in Pakistan: if your life has not been smeared by violence of the patriarchy, you learn to see yourself as a lucky one. You are taught that your rebellion at all these smaller things comes at far too great a cost because the consequences and implications of gender-based discrimination, violence and inequality are small enough for you to get by on the everyday, to just live a life.

That is, until they aren’t.

In the early hours of Sept. 9, 2020, a woman was raped by two men while waiting by the side of a highway to refuel her car when she was driving home with her children at night. Just a few days earlier, a five-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Karachi. In August, a female lawyer was abducted and gang raped for four days before being found and rescued. A 14-year-old girl was forcefully converted and married to a 44-year-old man, and trans activist Gul Panra was shot and murdered in Peshawar. These are only the cases that made it to the spotlight, as the majority of such cases in Pakistan go unreported and ignored.

Pakistan ranks as the sixth most dangerous country in the world for women, with about 5,000 cases of sexual violence experienced by women between 2004 to 2016 and over 15,000 cases of honor crimes reported. According to the Digital Rights Foundation, 190 incidents of gender based sexual violence have been recorded in Pakistan since the Motorway incident, that happened in early September.

However, these numbers aren’t shocking anymore. They would elicit no more than a shake of the head or a sigh. Girls in Pakistan grow up listening to, absorbing, internalizing stories of hatred directed against their bodies and their existence. We are used to this. We have accepted the trauma as a regular in our lives.

We aren’t told these stories to reflect on the violence that women and gender-marginalized people are subjected to, or in the context of spaces to heal from the trauma; these stories are told, retold and shared to police us, scare us into submitting to the patriarchy and consider ourselves “grateful” for not facing atrocities others have faced. The disruption in our lives has been carried on for so long that one forgets that there are places where the nights are safer, the eyes more trusting and smiles more genuine.

Despite the lack of shock that we feel, we do feel anger. Anger is probably the default for many women and gender-marginalized people in Pakistan. If you consciously identify as a feminist, anger is probably a default for you too. But if you get to express that anger, in whatever way you choose to, without fear of much repercussions in Pakistan, you are among the lucky ones. If we are lucky, we have found the vocabulary, spaces and people to talk about it, and in some cases, to collectively grieve it.

The past few years have seen Pakistani women and increasingly, gender minorities, grow impatient and angrier with the tiny concessions granted by the system that is built to oppress them. One of the spaces where this has been the most obvious is at the International Women’s Day celebration in Pakistan, also known as the Aurat March, with the progressively popular marches in multiple cities across the nation.

The Aurat Marches in Pakistan in 2018 and 2019 were bold, colorful, progressive spaces of self-love, healing, solidarity and radical empathy. In a way, the azaadi (freedom) and behenchara (solidarity; sisterhood) so boldly expressed on these days was a temporary, fleeting escape from a lot of the hate, violence and abomination that women and non-binary bodies exist within. They had comprehensive manifestos, a list of demands and representation from a diverse cross section of the Pakistani society. The marches faced their fair share of opposition, but they have become spaces for obscene displays of anger, to transgress cultural etiquette without immediately being persecuted for it and of furiously transgressing the boundaries of respectable resistance and purposeful feminism.

Despite what critics would want to claim, this type of resistance isn’t new or unusual for Pakistan. In fact, history has shown that the streets are the first witnesses of angry women in Pakistan. The All-Pakistan Women’s Association was founded in 1949, the women who founded the Women’s Action Forum in the 1980s against General Zia’s archaic ordinances resisted batons, tear gas and police violence on the street, the Sindhiyaani Tehreek had its own stance of resistance in Sindh.

Feminist resistance in Pakistan has been villanized as a foreign, Western, abhorently un-Islamic, even blasphemic, agenda. It is what rich, badtameez (ill-mannered), fahaash (indecent) women partake in to disrupt the lives of the perfectly decent men in their lives. It is what women do when they’re bent on undoing the rich cultural fabric of their nation and the importance of strong family ties that hold them together, the crux of it all. Yet, feminist resistance is an inextricable part of our country’s cultural fabric and of our traditions, too. It is part of our legacy, just as much as the violence and injustice has been.

And so in September 2020, after a summer of exposing harassment and abuse at regional schools and universities, in the days following the Motorway incident, people once again came out onto the streets, armed with their sanitizers, posters, drums and megaphones.

Some screamed. Others sang.

In an essay, Rubina Saigol wrote that in their earliest days, WAF members avoided public discussions on the body and sexuality, or more risqué, less obviously political topics. “Men, money, mullahs and the military”: we’re not sure who coined this phrase, but the older generations of feminists have used this phrase to identify the primary loci of their resistance and rebellion — it has always been obviously political and purposeful. Now, in the aftermath of this September, in the dialogue that has happened since, it is obvious that nothing will be off the table for feminist resistance in Pakistan in the coming future — whether it is discussions about our bodies, voices or actions.

Our resistance has seldom been successful; many of the battles fought in the 1980s are still the battles we fight today and we are still far from achieving anything resembling safety for women or gender minorities in Pakistan. The inequalities built into the exploitative nature of all our systems — religious, educational, familial, economic — are a reality in Pakistan. They have a trickle down effect, tainting our everyday experiences with apprehension, fear and anger.

But this year, we made our voices heard. This year, women refused to be silenced in the name of shame, morals or the age old “what will people say?” This was our year of disruption, one we will continue till our bodies are safe, our voices heard and our lives reclaimed.

Even though we are still scared, apprehensive and angry when we step out onto the streets, we go out with a greater hope that we will be less scared the next time, that one day this resistance will pay off and that our country will be as much ours and as safe for us.

As a poster at one of the recent marches said, “Aurat ki awaaz se, inqilaab aye ga”. Angry women will change the world — angry women will change Pakistan. Women’s voices will change the country.