Western countries are rewilding homophobia in the developing world

Sometimes you decolonise so hard you become a raging homophobe

Via an organisation called the Equal Rights Coalition (@EqualRightsC), western countries are training activists all over the world how to use international soft law to eradicate sex in favour of gender identity in their national legislation.

The ERC was founded by the governments of the Netherlands and Uruguay in 2016, and launched at a global LGBTQ conference in Montevideo. Its member countries are represented by the foreign ministries, diplomatic missions, and international development ministries of 44 countries from Europe, the US, Canada, a bloc of Latin American countries, and very recently, Thailand.

It also lists as members those countries' biggest and most-moneyed NGOs.

As part of the ERC's activities, ambassadors linked to the ERC (under the banner Diplomats for Equality) marched in Pride parades in European capitals this summer (38 ambassadors showed up in London, of the 44 member countries of the ERC). They also marched in Amsterdam and Vienna.

Conservative countries, meanwhile, are represented in the ERC by NGOs only, as opposed to the country governments themselves.

Why foreign policy?

Membership of the ERC is part of western governments' international development programmes ("development" meaning rich countries funding anti-poverty/human rights programmes and activities as part of its foreign policy.)

In the past couple of decades, the plight of LGBTQ people has become a focus of development agencies, originally because of AIDS but more recently because of the other dire outcomes caused by discrimination against sexual minorities, and how those outcomes contribute to poverty overall.

Hard data on the link between poverty and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is scarce. The World Bank is trying to accumulate it, and it's why your government is probably currently floating the idea of listing LGBTQ questions on your national census.

Sweden has always been a pioneer in LGBTQ foreign policy, having intro'd the world's first LGBTQ-inclusive international relations agenda in 2005. Obama copied them in 2011 and things have really been beefed up globally since then.

(As an aside: when the Sustainable Development Goals were negotiated in 2014/15, western diplomats and NGOs failed in their attempt to get an explicit mention of sexuality or LGBTQ rights in the text. Thus the phrase "no one left behind" is widely understood in the field to refer to the promise to include in LGBTQ people in its priorities.)

The idea for the ERC seems to have originated with the Dutch foreign ministry. But European governments have always been careful not to make LGBTQ rights appear as an imposition by the decadent West - which is probably why the ERC always operates on a rotating leadership roster of one European country paired with a Latin American country.

Back in 2016, Uruguay was happy to host the launch of the ERC to grow its reputation as a global leader in LGBT rights, alongside its neighbours. This regional speciality - Latin America as a bastion of LGBTQ progress - can be linked to the high number of same-sex attracted transsexual males who work as prostitutes in countries in the region - disparagingly called "travestis" (though now you're supposed to just call them "women") - and the "culture of bisexuality" that goes along with them.

To be clear, it's not really about openness or kindness. People in central and south America are still incredibly socially conservative. It's that there are so many of these men in the region, and they are stigmatised and exploited so badly, that they are overrepresented among the poor. For example, in Uruguay, a country with some of the most progressive legislation on LGBTQ rights, transsexual males have an average life expectancy of just 45.

So if you want to do something about poverty in the region (and especially the devastation wrought by AIDS), you're going to come across a lot of transsexual male prostitutes.

Meanwhile the governments in rich countries, particularly the Netherlands and Sweden, have long seen it as their sacred duty to bring gay rights - as we understand it in the West - to the rest of the world via their development programmes. However, in recent years, they have increasingly adopted a queer interpretation of sexual identity over the stuffy old understanding of "gay" and "lesbian".

To give them credit, whether we like it or not, gay and lesbian are culture-specific words that are attached to stereotypes (think the village people, or leatherdykes) that don't really translate in say, Ulaan Baatar. It's why SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) is more often used in international fora as opposed to LGBTQIA (which is a list of western-specific identity categories, with even more hyper-specific ones being added every day).

This queer turn in international development, in my opinion, is not just inspired by deconstructionist theories of truth and reality that famously grew out of American universities in the late-80s/90s. It's also part of a more pragmatic approach that accepts that in order to be left alone as a gay/effeminate man in some countries, the culture has long dictated that you have to assume a female role. And if you're an international development agency that wants to help lift these men out of poverty, it's probably easier to just go along with that.

I think that explains why it's trendy now for academics to blame colonial-era anti-sodomy laws as the root cause of homophobia and transphobia in former colonies: it's not that men were free to be gay men before the big bad Brits/Dutch/Spanish arrived. They were often assuming the role of women. The interdiction of the act of sodomy was the thing that caused the problem, according to this framing.

From my western chauvinist perspective, "third genders" (and it's almost always men pretending to be women) look an awful lot like a workaround for too-effeminate androphilic males.

Anyway, now these former colonisers are back, baby, and they are ready to help use their diplomatic firepower to rewild the native homophobia. In a nod to the "local contexts" on the ground, the ERC are promoting legal sex falsification, otherwise known as self-ID or legal gender recognition, in some of the most homophobic places in the world.

The arguement, made ad nauseum, is that having "the wrong gender identity marker" leads to all kinds of problems for transsexual males, and granting legal gender recognition would fix those issues. This is cited as relevant in terms of administrative procedures, but importantly, health and education too.

Thus legal sex falsification is going to get all those blokes out of prostitution and onto HIV drugs, even though research keeps showing that they like working in prostitution because it helps validate their gender identity as women AND it helps pay for their boob jobs.

Here's an example of how the ERC works:

In countries that are resistant to changing laws for LGBTQ people, the diplomatic missions and other assorted government reps are linking up with, training (and funding) civil society on how to utilise international non-binding but influential treaties and conventions to change domestic legislation.

Below is a webinar in which ERC representatives discuss how they helped a Sri Lankan NGO use the CEDAW convention (the UN convention on sex-based discrimination against women) to pressure the government to not only decriminalise sex between women, but also to encourage them to ultimately allow males to identify legally as female.

In March 2022, the CEDAW Committee handed down an opinion that found that the Sri Lankan government had violated a number of the Convention’s provisions. The host of the webinar, Tea Braun, head of the UK's Human Dignity Trust (one of the UK's foreign dvelopment-focussed LGBTQ NGOs), boasts that the CEDAW decision covers men who masquerade as women, too.

The Human Dignity Trust provided a team of pro-bono lawyers to support the case brought by the Sri Lankan activist, a woman called Rosanna Flamer Caldera, against her government. A panellist from Latin American then speaks about how CEDAW was used to get protections for transvestites in the inter-American court system (the Americas' version of the @ECHR_CEDH). She actually used the word "transvestite" because, in the cultural context of the region, many transsexual men who dress as grossly exaggerated female charicatures - travestis - don't pretend to actually be women. In fact, they are renowned for their exceptional levels of misogyny.

The World Bank and UNAIDS are on the executive committee of the ERC. A bunch of private unnamed philanthropists are helping keeping it juiced. This year a permanent secretariat was opened in Brussels (at ILGA World’s HQ) under the leadership of Amnesty and Stonewall alumna, Leanne MacMillan.

The ERC has the people and the resources to do some terrible damage to women's rights all over the world, particularly in countries that depend on keeping rich countries happy if they want to advance their own economic development. It's probably one to watch out for.

Watch the CEDAW webinar here, other references to follow: https://equalrightscoalition.org/webinars/1651/

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