Sarah Kohrt, project lead LGBTIQ*-platform for human rights, Berlin
Start making sense of this mess: Build alliances, defend democratic institutions and strengthen international cooperation
Thank you so much for the invitation, I am really excited to be hear with all of you.
“The Pink Factor – LGBTIQ+ Rights, Geopolitical Conflict, and the Fight for Values and Resources” is the name of the project that I am leading at the Hirschfeld-Eddy Foundation. It highlights the active role played by queer people in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. In this project we expose and call out how LGBTIQ+ people are being instrumentalised in attempts to roll back human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
[For example, LGBTIQ+ projects are used to ridicule development cooperation (in the USA), hinder the work of critical NGOs (in Russia), and divert attention from crises and serve as scapegoats for political failure (in Uganda, Ghana).]
How can we take action against these developments? Many studies have been written about this. Studies that unfortunately often use the same insidious language of the destructive forces themselves, even in their titles.
We frequently read that we’re currently in a time when it’s all the more important to be building alliances and defending institutions. That’s absolutely right. And therefore:
I would like to take a closer look at these two points (namely “building alliances” and “defending institutions”), by posing three questions:
1) With whom can we work together in alliances?
2) How do we recognize which institutions need to be defended?
3) And what does that mean for our work in an international context?
1) Building alliances: What should we be willing to do?
We can build alliances with everyone who thinks we belong. We as queers, we as migrants, we as religious people, we as Black people and people of colour. This “we” refers to everyone.
We should be willing to recognize diversity also in the form of opinions. For diversity is a fact, not a quality. Moreover, diversity includes that which does not necessarily suit us, and that which we ourselves are not.
We should be willing to work in many languages: academic and non-academic, with native speakers and speakers of second or third languages, and to acknowledge means of expression that do not correspond to our own.
We should be willing to build alliances with people who are different from us. Who have a different belief system, or origin, or lifestyle, or different conceptions of homeland, family, gender or justice.
We need non-partisan alliances. We need alliances that transcend our individual interests: Gay men who speak out for the right to terminate pregnancies, trans people who promote the rights of lesbians, white people who march on the streets against racism, wealthy heirs and heiresses who defend the social welfare state, people without children who support parental subsidies.
We should work in ecumenical alliances above and beyond denominations and religions. One example here would be the Global Interfaith Network in South Africa. Religious people and atheists should join forces as well.
An alliance needs a positive goal. The goal can be large or small, but it needs to be there. Everyone should also understand that the aim is to approach the goal, to improve the current situation, to move in a certain direction, but that 100% achievement will not be possible.
We have common goals: Recognizing and implementing the universality and indivisibility of human rights.
In a very polarised atmosphere, it is important to connect with other people. Personal encounters are the only way to overcome preconceived notions ─ whether these notions refer to different races, sexualities, or other groups. Meeting other people is an opportunity to improve our abilities to listen and to ask questions.
2) Which institutions should and must we defend?
We hear calls to “defend institutions”. But how do we recognise which institutions are worthy of being defended?
Surely not by their lack of mistakes. Surely not by their absence of discrimination. But rather by whether they follow two principles:
These are:
• First of all: The right to be different.
• Second: The right to belong.
The right to be different is the essence of a democracy based on human rights. It is the right to individuality in the sense of divergence from the majority.
The second principle – the right to belong – refers to all human rights in general. For example:
The right to belong to those who may start a family (long impossible for gay men, lesbians and trans people). The right to belong to those who may go to school (denied to women and/or trans people in many countries). The right to vote and be elected to office (long prohibited for women, and refused to Black people).
Issues pertaining to LGBTIQ+ people are all laid out in the Yogyakarta Principles.
Without the right to be different and also the right to belong, everything moves toward homogeneity and exclusion.
3) What does that mean for our international cooperation?
First and foremost it means: Do no harm.
The most important guideline here is to recognise that the requisite expertise is always found locally, in the respective communities. The best way to know what is needed in a particular place is to talk with the people there.
The desire for emancipation arises within and from every country in the world. To claim that the struggle for LGBTIQ+ human rights and for women’s rights is part of a neocolonial agenda is wrong, and dangerous.
As Ymania Brown, executive director of TGEU and a proud tran fa´afine woman from Samoa has said: “Only you in Europe have just woken up to realize that there are more than two genders. We have been living with more than two genders for 2000 years and peacefully, every country has a name for people like me.”
We need to think in intersectional terms, which means understanding that poverty is a constant threat to queer activists in the Global South. And that the call to cut development assistance to countries that persecute queer people needs to be viewed with the utmost caution. For otherwise precisely the people one wants to protect can thereby be made into scapegoats and subjected to even harsher threats.
Organisations that receive funding may neither persecute queer people nor applaud others who do so. Our lowest common consensus has to be: No violence.
We need to set international cooperation on a new course. It should be decolonial, cooperative and flexible. That is what our project partners call for. We need transcontinental alliances of solidarity. And churches are in an excellent position to offer structures for shared efforts of this type.
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