Thank you for your help by the way!

well, i would do a survey of various definitions that have been made. you can compare them and critique them.

in terms of what is "true" or not, this is a construction so there is no "truth" inherent in it that isn't relative to any one persons definition. of course there is a kind of epistemological privilege given to self-definition, so if you were going to do interviews then what your participants said hijra meant to them would be the central part of your analysis, and you could connect that to various academic interpretations of hijra identity.

just in terms of general theory, it's not productive to try to collapse two different cultural constructions into one another, like "hijra" and "homosexual" or "transexual" or "berdache." hijra is hijra, and you can talk about similarities or differences between different constructions but you can't say that one "falls under" the other.

that's on the cultural analysis level, in terms of the academic inquiry into what gender and sexualiy variance is, that's a big open question with a lot of research that needs to be done and a variety of conflicting theoretical schools approaching it. the dominant strong constructionist program even goes so far to say that the only thing that you can do is cultural analysis and that any question into whether a person is "homosexual" or not is meaningless beyond their self-definition. even if you don't go that far and think that gender and sexual variance is probably rooted in biological and psychological phenomena then that kind of inquiry can only be done on an individual level, it doesn't make sense to say that "hijras" are homosexual or transexual, it only makes sense to make that kind of inquiry on the level of highly specific developmental processes in individual lives, an enterprise that is probably beyond the scope of what you're trying to do.

it seems like you already have some critiques of academic analyses of what "hijra" means, it seems like you could build your analysis around those criticisms, and as you mentioned in your private e-mail that you're interested in globalization and change you could bring those complications into the mix after you've set up your criticism of the various formulations that you've read.