Every year on May 17, activists across the world commemorate IDAHOBIT \u2014 the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia. The date marks the 1990 decision of the World Health Organization to remove homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders.<\/p>\n
For many in the West, this was undeniably historic. It represented a break from centuries of criminalization, psychiatric violence, church-led persecution, and medical pathologization. The struggle against homophobia in Europe and North America emerged from real suffering and resistance.<\/p>\n
But for many societies outside the West \u2014 especially in parts of Asia, Africa, and Indigenous cultures across the world \u2014 the story is far more complicated.<\/p>\n
The question we must dare to ask is this:<\/strong><\/p>\n Why must the entire world celebrate liberation through a framework created by the very civilizations that once classified diverse sexualities and genders as diseases in the first place?<\/p>\n And why does a global day supposedly about diversity still speak almost entirely in the language of Western identity categories?<\/p>\n Where, in IDAHOBIT, are the Hijras, the Two-Spirit peoples, the Metis, the Jananas, the Kothis, the Thongis, the Vipurushikas, the Halfwomen, the Halfmen, the third-gender shamans, the gender-role-fluid monks, the sacred dancers, the temple guardians, the divine androgynes, and the countless Indigenous gender-sexual traditions that existed long before the words \u201cgay,\u201d \u201clesbian,\u201d \u201cbisexual,\u201d or \u201ctransgender\u201d were invented?<\/p>\n Their absence is not accidental. It reveals something deeper: the continuing coloniality of global LGBTIQ discourse.<\/p>\n For centuries, Western medical and religious institutions treated homosexuality as pathology, sin, degeneracy, or criminality. Psychiatry in Europe and North America subjected queer people to forced institutionalization, electroshock \u201ctherapy,\u201d chemical castration, and moral condemnation. Homosexuality was formally classified as a mental illness by Western medical authorities before eventually being removed under pressure from activists and changing scientific consensus.<\/p>\n Yet today, the same civilizational framework that once exported homophobia now exports the language of liberation.<\/p>\n The irony is profound.<\/strong><\/p>\n In many Eastern and Indigenous traditions, gender and sexual diversity were never universally understood through the lens of disease. In numerous societies, people beyond the male-female binary were not merely tolerated \u2014 they were spiritually recognized, ritually important, socially integrated, and in some cases considered divine.<\/p>\n South Asia offers many examples. The Hijra communities of the Indian subcontinent have existed for centuries, with deep cultural and spiritual roles connected to blessings, fertility, and sacred ceremonies. Ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts contain stories of gender-role transformation, diverse embodiment, same-sex intimacy, and non-binary existence. Ardhanarishvara \u2014 the divine fusion of Shiva and Shakti \u2014 represents masculinity and femininity existing simultaneously in one body. Temples across Nepal and India contain erotic carvings and gender-diverse imagery that challenge patriarchal moral binaries.<\/p>\n Nepal itself historically recognized multiple lived gender realities long before the arrival of modern Western LGBTIQ terminology. Indigenous communities maintained diverse understandings of social and gender roles. Ritual performers, shamans, dancers, ascetics, healers and spiritual practitioners often crossed conventional gender expectations. Even today, many Nepali cultural practices preserve traces of these older understandings.<\/p>\n Among many Indigenous nations in North America, people now collectively described as \u201cTwo-Spirit\u201d historically occupied respected ceremonial and social positions before European colonization violently imposed Christian gender norms. Similar traditions existed across Polynesia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.<\/p>\n This does not mean precolonial societies were utopias. Discrimination certainly existed in different forms. But the dominant philosophical foundations were often fundamentally different from Victorian Europe\u2019s obsession with sexual policing and binary categorization.<\/p>\n Colonialism changed that.<\/strong><\/p>\n European empires exported not only borders and armies, but also moral codes, legal systems, and medical classifications. British colonial law criminalized same-sex intimacy across South Asia, Africa, and beyond. Missionaries condemned Indigenous gender systems as sinful or primitive. Colonial anthropology exoticized local identities while simultaneously helping erase them. Later, Western INGOs and international institutions, like UN agencies, ILGA world…, often replaced local vocabularies with universalized LGBTIQ frameworks that fit donor language better than cultural reality.<\/p>\n Even the modern category \u201ctransgender\u201d cannot fully capture many Eastern identities, because some are not based primarily on internal gender identity as understood in Western psychology. Some are ritual roles, social categories, kin-ship locations, spiritual callings, or community formations that do not separate sexuality, gender, spirituality, and social function into neat boxes.<\/p>\n Yet global activism increasingly demands that everyone translate themselves into Western-approved terminology to become legible internationally.<\/p>\n This creates a troubling contradiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n A movement claiming to celebrate diversity often recognizes only those diversities that can be explained through Euro-American frameworks.<\/p>\n What happens to identities that do not fit?<\/p>\n What happens to communities whose understanding of personhood is not built on Western liberal individualism?<\/p>\n What happens to cultures where gender variance is not merely an \u201cidentity\u201d but a cosmological role?<\/p>\n Too often, they disappear from global discourse.<\/p>\n This is why IDAHOBIT feels culturally distant for many people outside the West, just like the Pride Festivals in June. It commemorates a milestone within Western psychiatric history \u2014 the removal of homosexuality from a disease manual created by institutions that once helped define queerness itself as pathology.<\/p>\n But many cultures being asked to celebrate this day had entirely different historical trajectories.<\/p>\n For them, gender and sexual diversity was not \u201cdiscovered\u201d by modern Western activism. Nor was dignity granted by European psychiatry. In many traditions, diverse genders and sexualities already existed within spiritual, social, and cultural life before colonialism attempted to suppress them.<\/p>\n This is not an argument against solidarity.<\/strong><\/p>\n Homophobia, violence, exclusion, forced marriage, family abuse, criminalization, and discrimination remain real across the world, including in Asia and Africa. Many gender and sexual minority (GSM\/LGBTQIA+) people continue to face severe injustice and danger.<\/p>\n But solidarity should not require cultural erasure.<\/p>\n A truly global movement must become intellectually decolonized. It must acknowledge that Western LGBTIQ history is not the universal history of all queer and gender-diverse peoples. It must recognize that some societies need liberation from colonial moral systems imposed upon them \u2014 including imported Victorian laws and imported identity frameworks alike.<\/p>\n The future of global queer politics cannot simply be the globalization of Western terminology.<\/p>\n It must become a dialogue among civilizations.<\/p>\n That means making space for Indigenous philosophies, Eastern cosmologies, local vocabularies, ancestral memories, and spiritual understandings of gender and sexuality that do not conform to Euro-American categories.<\/p>\n It means recognizing that liberation is not only about inclusion into modern identity systems. Sometimes liberation is also about recovering what colonialism tried to destroy.<\/p>\n And perhaps the deeper challenge for IDAHOBIT is this:<\/p>\n Can a movement born from resistance to exclusion also confront its own forms of exclusion?<\/p>\n Can it recognize that diversity includes epistemologies, civilizations, and cultural understandings \u2014 not only identities approved by Western academia and NGOs?<\/p>\n Until that happens, many Indigenous and Eastern peoples may continue to feel that global GSM\/LGBTIQ discourse speaks about them, advocates for them, categorizes them \u2014 but rarely truly sees them.<\/p>\n True diversity begins when the world stops assuming there is only one way to understand humanity itself. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every year on May 17, activists across the world commemorate IDAHOBIT \u2014 the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia. The date marks the 1990 decision of the World Health Organization to remove homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders.
\nFor many in the West, this was undeniably historic. It represented a break from centuries of criminalization, psychiatric violence, church-led persecution, and medical pathologization. The struggle against homophobia in Europe and North America emerged from real suffering and resistance.
\nBut for many societies outside the West \u2014 especially in parts of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":14385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,1081,8,621,5,490,3,2065],"tags":[2260,2262,1005,1420,2261],"class_list":["post-14384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-issue","category-explanationawareness","category-human-rights","category-news","category-opportunity","category-slider","category-society","category-top-stories","tag-biphobia","tag-gender-and-sexual","tag-homophobia","tag-idahobit","tag-interphobia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14384"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14387,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14384\/revisions\/14387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}