White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki held firm Tuesday under questioning from Fox Radio on President Biden’s commitment to transgender rights, asserting under questioning about transgender kids in school sports: “Trans rights are human rights.”
The reporter with Fox Radio asked Psaki about the executive order Biden signed on his first day in office ordering federal agencies to implement the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which determined anti-LGBTQ discrimination is a form sex discrimination.
The executive order, the Fox Radio reporter said, could lead to situations where “trans girls and cis girls…may end up competing against each other” and “lawsuits and some concerns among parents.”
Psaki, responding to the reporter’s question on whether the administration had guidance to schools, affirmed she’s “familiar with the order.”
When the Fox Radio reporter clarified the inquiry was seeking “a message for local schools officials” on disputes that includes situations where students are competing for college scholarships, Psaki held firm.
“I would just say that the president’s belief is that trans rights and human rights, and that’s why he signed that executive order,” Psaki said. “In terms of the determinations by universities and colleges, I would certainly defer to them.”
The executive order signed explicitly states kids in should be able to go to school without being “denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” The Department of Education has yet to issue guidance on this order as it pertains to school sports.
LGBT+ people have joined in the ongoing protests against the military coup in Myanmar, demanding the freedom of the country’s elected officials.
Over the past four days, tens of thousands of people across Myanmar have taken to the streets in protest of a military coup which removed power from the country’s elected officials. Myanmar’s elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her party were arrested on 1 February by the military after it declared the country’s November general election results fraudulent.
Now, LGBT+ people in Myanmar have joined in the protests.
Myanmar freelance photographer Kyaw Htet captured photos of LGBT+ people who were walking among the protestors. Htet shared the photos, which were dated 8 February – the eighth day of the military coup, with the caption “queers for democracy”.
Three drag artists are featured in the pictures with a Pride flag and signs that read “Power to the people” and “We want our leader. Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi”. In other photos, there are signs that read “gays for democracy” and “queers for democracy”.
Journalist and filmmaker Ali Fowle also shared a picture on Twitter which showed the LGBT+ community would be joining in the protests. In the picture, four individuals wear Pride flags on their backs.
Hnin Zaw, a journalist and former Myanmar correspondent for Reuters, posted pictures of the LGBT+ community participating in a general strike in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, against the military.
What has happened in Myanmar and why?
Myanmar is located in south-east Asia and neighbours Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, China and India. It has a population of roughly 54 million people. The country gained independence from the British Empire in 1948 and was ruled by the armed forces from 1962 to 2011, when the it returned to civilian rule.
The military seized control on 1 February and put the country’s elected officials, including Suu Kyi, under house arrest, after Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election by a landslide in November.
The military backed the opposition, claiming widespread fraud, and has declared a year-long state of emergency. However, the election commission said there was no evidence to support these claims.
Protests have been largely peaceful, but there have been reports of the police using water cannons against protestors. In Yangon, protestors have given police fizzy drinks, cakes and other refreshments, according to The Guardian.
Who is in charge now?
Commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing is now in power in Myanmar. In his first TV address since the coup began, Hlaing said the electoral commission failed to investigate irregularities over voter lists in the November election and had not allowed fair campaigning.
He promised new elections would happen and a new “reformed” election commission would oversee it. Hlaing said the country would achieve a “true and disciplined democracy” and told citizens to “go with the true facts and not to follow feelings of your own”.
The Biden administration is now reportedly considering targeted sanctions in response to the military takeover in Myanmar. White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said the administration believed it could work with Congress on a “package of sanctions to impose consequences in response to this coup”.
“We will also be working with allies and partners around the world,” Sullivan said during a White House news briefing. He added: “We are reviewing the possibility of a new executive order, and we are also looking at specific targeted sanctions, both on individuals and on entities controlled by the military that enrich the military.”
The armed forces have imposed a curfew and banned gatherings of more than five people in the country’s two biggest cities. Gatherings are now illegal in at least seven areas in Yangon and Mandalay. People are also banned from leaving their homes between 8am and 4pm.
Two gay men who escaped torture in Chechnya but were returned by Russia police are in “mortal danger” with no access to a lawyer, the Russian LGBT Network has said.
Salek Magamadov and Ismail Isayev, who is just 17 years old, managed to escape to Russia from Chechnya, the site of deadly so-called gay purges, in June 2020.
Having been tortured by the Chechen special police for running an opposition Telegram channel, the Magamadov and Isayev were relocated by the Russian LGBT Network to Nizhny Novogorod, a city around 400 kilometres east of Moscow.
But on Thursday (4 February), the Russian LGBT Network reported that the pair had gone missing and when their lawyer, Alexander Nemov, rushed to their apartment he found signs of a struggle.
The Russian LGBT Network has now provided an update on their situation, and insisted the two men are in “mortal danger”.
Nemov said he found out that Magamadov and Isayev had been captured by both Russian and Chechen authorities, who were working together, and that the gay men had been taken back to Chechnya by car.
He followed them there, but authorities refused to tell him where his clients were being held or the reason they were being detained.
On Saturday (6 February), Magamadov and Isayev were moved to the interior ministry in Gudermes. The Russian LGBT Network reported that they appeared “exhausted and intimidated”, and that they had been “pushed” to decline legal representation.
The two men were then moved again, this time to the village of Sernovodskoe, and Nemov followed with members of the men’s families.
Once they arrived, he was again refused the opportunity to see or speak with his clients, and was forced to file “complaints and applications” from the street outside. The Russian LGBT Network sent a second lawyer to Sernovodskoe, who was also denied access.
Russian LGBT Network spokesperson Tim Bestsvet told Moscow Timesthat the men are in “mortal danger”.
Two mothers’ fight for their baby’s right to EU citizenship will be heard by the European Court of Justice.
In 2019, Bulgarian-born Kalina Ivanova and Gilbratar-born Jane Jones welcomed a child, Sara, who was born in Spain (not their real names).
Under Spanish law, the baby cannot be considered for citizenship as neither of her mothers are Spanish citizens.
Jones tried to apply for Sara to be a UK citizen, as she is of British descent. However this was denied, due to Jones having been born in Gibraltar and not in the UK, meaning she cannot pass on her citizenship to her child.
As a last-ditch attempt, Ivanova requested Bulgarian citizenship for her child. This was rejected by the government, which argued that a child cannot have two mothers and refused to issue a birth certificate stating as such.
As a result Sara has been deprived of citizenship and has no documentation of any kind. This poses a significant risk to her health, education and social security, and prevents the family from leaving Spain.
The case will be brought before the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on 9 February. According to the mothers’ legal representatives, Bulgarian authorities are violating the rights of a European citizen on the grounds of sexual orientation, namely the rights to free movement and to family life.
The citizenship battle is a breach of the fundamental principals of the EU, the court will hear.
Arpi Avestisyan is head of litigations at ILGA-Europe, which is supporting Bulgarian LGBT+ rights group Deytsvie with the citizenship case.
Avestisyan has called on the court to make things easier for all LGBT+ families to gain citizenship.
“Through this case, the CJEU has the opportunity to clarify that parentage established in one member state must be recognised across the EU, and all EU citizens and their families equally enjoy freedom of movement.”
Avestisyan also referred to the words of EU president Ursula Von der Leyen.
“In her state of the union 2020 address, president Ursula von der Leyen said: ‘If you are parent in one country, you are parent in every country’.
“However, thousands of same-sex-parented families in the EU currently live at risk of not having the parental relations recognised and face legal turmoil due to differences in member states’ national systems.
The U.S. has joined the growing calls for the Venezuelan government to release five HIV/AIDS service providers who were arrested on Jan. 12.
A press release from Programa Venezolano de Educación Acción en Derechos Humanos (PROVEA), a Venezuelan human rights organization, notes members of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence on Jan. 12 raided the offices of Azul Positivo in Maracaibo, a city in the country’s Zulia state.
“After questioning directors of the organization present at the headquarters for a period of six hours, without a legal order or allowing outside contact with them, the officials proceeded to arrest six members, including its president Johan León Reyes,” says PROVEA in its press release that it released on Jan. 13. “None of these people have been released and their current situation is unknown.”
A source in Venezuela on Saturday told the Washington Blade that authorities released a driver who is heterosexual the following day. The source notes León and his four other colleagues — who they said are gay men with HIV — remain in custody and are in a Maracaibo hospital because they have the coronavirus.
“They are still in jail, but they have been temporarily moved,” said the source. “They are handcuffed.”
James “Jimmy” Story, the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, on Jan. 21 called for the men’s release.
“We call for the release of the five Azul Positivo employees and we condemn the attack against this NGO that provides assistance to seropositive people in the state of Zulia and that leaves the poorest communities more vulnerable,” he tweeted, while adding the raid “leaves the poorest communities more vulnerable.”
“Enough criminalization of humanitarian aide,” said Story.
Story in a Jan. 29 directly criticized President Nicolás Maduro and his government’s continued crackdown against NGOs in the country.
“On this Day of the Social Worker, the world asks why employees of the NGO Azul Positivo, which has been working for the health of seropositive people in Zulia for more than 16 years, have been detained,” he tweeted. “What does Maduro want by attacking NGOs? What kind of peace for the people is this?”
UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet are among those who have also called for the men’s release.
“I call on the Venezuelan authorities to release from police custody the five humanitarians working for the nongovernmental organization Azul Positivo, and to return essential equipment seized at the time of their arrest,” said Byanyima in a Jan. 29 UNAIDS press release. “A strong and empowered civil society plays a central role in providing much-needed services to the most vulnerable people and is critical to making progress against the HIV pandemic and other health threats in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
More than 100 Venezuelan NGOs and human rights organizations have also called for the Azul Positivo staffers’ release.
“Azul Positivo is an allied organization of United Nations agencies, contributing to UNAIDS by carrying out tests for the detection of HIV in a fast, safe and free way to communities of popular sectors,” they said in a statement contained in PROVEA’s Jan. 13 press release. “Azul Positivo is an important partner of the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) for contributing to the implementation of projects in the border area with Colombia on sexual and reproductive orientation for teenagers, young women and pregnant women.”
The source in Venezuela with whom the Blade spoke noted Azul Positivo receives UNHCR funds. The source also said Azul Positivo provided food and medications to “homeless and starving people” on the country’s border with Colombia.
“It’s not convenient,” the source told the Blade, referring to the Venezuelan government when asked why it decided to arrest the Azul Positivo staffers.
The arrests took place against the backdrop of Venezuela’s worsening economic and political crises.
Millions of Venezuelans in recent years have migrated to Colombia and other South American countries.
French police shut down an orgy with at least 81 participants in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris because it breached coronavirus regulations.
Police were called to Collegein – about 20 miles outside Paris – after locals alerted them suspecting a party was taking place in the warehouse on Friday (29 January).
Officers arrived on the scene at around 9pm and found 11 people in the car park, who were fined €135 for breaking France’s coronavirus curfew which restricts movement from 6pm to 6am.
At 11pm, officers were granted legal permission to enter the warehouse where a large number of people were engaged in an orgy. The police also confiscated sound systems, light installation and alcohol in the raid.
A total of 81 people were handed fines for breaking curfew, and three people thought to have organised the “libertine party” were taken in for questioning.
An investigator told The Independent: “The event was in breach of the curfew, and there were also problems with masks and social distancing.
“Those involved in the libertine party cooperated with the police, and there was no resistance to the police.”
It’s the latest in a line of European orgies to breach COVID rules in the past months.
In December, Belgian police broke up a 52-person orgy in a house near a COVID clinic. It emerged later that far right Hungarian MEP Jozsef Szájer was caught taking part in the “lockdown party” – an “orgy” involving 25 naked men and several diplomats.
Szájer, a founding member of the governing party and longtime ally of prime minister Viktor Orbàn, helped draft the country’s constitution a decade ago that defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, and pitched a proposal that could block same-sex couples from adopting.
He later resigned from his role as an MEP. He said in a statement that his “misstep” was “strictly personal”, adding: “I ask everyone not to extend it to my homeland or to my political community.”
Professor Paul Johnson, lord Alistair Lexden and lord Michael Cashmancelebrate the Armed Forces Bill, which will finally fix a centuries-old mistake and pardon soldiers and marines for historic gay sex offences. And not a moment too soon.
We’re thrilled that the Armed Forces Bill, which was introduced in parliament this week, contains an important clause that will address centuries of persecution of gay and bisexual men who served in the Army and Royal Marines.
The bill will grant posthumous pardons to any soldier or marine who was convicted of or cautioned for the now-abolished offence of buggery – an offence that was used for hundreds of years to criminalise men who had sexwith men.
Although the Policing and Crime Act 2017 granted similar posthumous pardons to some armed forces personnel, it did not apply to historical offences relating to the Army and Royal Marines prior to 1881.
The Armed Forces Bill will grant posthumous pardons to any person convicted or cautioned for an offence of buggery by the courts martial under Articles of War, which were made under annual Mutiny Acts passed by parliament stretching back to 1688.
There is a poignant coincidence that this breakthrough comes at the time when It’s a Sin is such a talking-point, focusing much attention on past injustice and suffering.
A pardon will be automatically granted, when the legislation passes, to a soldier or marine if the other person involved in the conduct constituting the offence consented to it and was aged 16 or over, and any such conduct would not be an offence under a provision in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 concerning sexual activity in a public lavatory.
Back in 2017 we were delighted to work with the government in order to make adequate provision to grant Royal Navy personnel posthumous pardons extending back to 1661. Since then, we have worked consistently for the last four years in an attempt to gain posthumous pardons for those soldiers and marines who were badly treated by cruel laws now rightfully repealed.
We are pleased to see clause 18 of the Armed Forces Bill which, when enacted, will make reparations, as far as they are possible, to those men so sadly let down by the country that they were serving. These were men who, simply because of their sexual orientations, were prosecuted and punished.
The persecution of LGBT+ people in our country has a long history. With the Armed Forces Bill, our country will take one more very important step in addressing that persecution and making sure that it never happens again.
There is a poignant coincidence that this breakthrough comes at the time when It’s a Sin is such a talking-point, focusing much attention on past injustice and suffering.
The posthumous pardons that we have worked hard to ensure be granted will now be considered in a bill that was presented to the House of Commons by secretary Ben Wallace with the support of the prime minister, the attorney general, secretary Priti Patel and other ministers. When it passes, it will close a desperately sad chapter of our history, and right some very great wrongs of the past.
We continue in our work with the government to ensure that the disregard scheme in England and Wales – which allows those people living with a conviction or caution for a repealed homosexual offence to have this disregarded and be pardoned – is extended to further address past injustices suffered by LGBT people.
Erdoğan made his comments during an online address to members of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Monday (1 February), according to Duvar.
Speaking to young people in Turkey, Erdoğan said: “We’ll carry our youth to the future, not as LGBT+ youth, but like the youth from this country’s glorious past.”
He continued: “You are not the LGBT+ youth. You are not the youth who vandalises, but you are those who mend those vandalised hearts.”
He went on to claim that he “respects” all views and identities as long as they are not linked to “terror, immorality, perversion and violence”.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thinks LGBT+ people are ‘poisoning’ the youth
This is not the first time Erdoğan has spoken out against the LGBT+ community – the Turkish president has a long history of making offensive remarks about queer people.
In July 2020, he accused LGBT+ people in Turkey of “sneaking up on our national and spiritual values again” and said queer people have tried to “poison young people” throughout history.
“I invite all members of my nation to be careful and take a stand against those who exhibit all kinds of heresy that our Lord has forbidden, and those who support them,” Erdoğan said at the time.
He urged citizens to “come out against those who display any kind of perversion forbidden by God”.
He also took aim at queer allies. He said those who support “such marginal movements contrary to our faith and culture are partners in the same heresy in our eyes”.
“We will not let you step on human dignity,” he wrote. “We will protect nature and the mental health of our children.”
Erdoğan’s latest comments come just days after four students were detainedand called “deviants” by Turkey’s interior minister over an artwork that reportedly depicted rainbows alongside the Kaaba, a sacred building in the centre of the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
The controversy erupted after Erdoğan appointed a party loyalist to a senior position at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
Student-led pushback erupted earlier this month, as demonstrators, many holding LGBT+ Pride flags, argued that the presidential appointment of professor Melih Bulu as rector went against the university’s 158-year-long history of electing its own.
As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day, PinkNews remembers all those in the LGBT+ community that were persecuted by the Nazis — and how the pink triangle, used to identify gay or bisexual men in concentration camps, became a symbol for gay rights.
When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party seized power in Germany in July 1933, the dictatorship moved to persecute and murder minority groups, including Jews, LGBT+ people, the Romani people, and political prisoners.
Beginning in 1933, the Nazis built a network of concentration camps throughout Germany, where “undesirable” groups were detained, including Jewish people and gay men.
This persecution continued following the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and, between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi Party systematically murdered six million European Jews — as part of a plan known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” — in extermination camps and mass shootings. This genocide is referred to as the Holocaust, or the Shoah in Hebrew.
In total, up to 17 million people, including thousands of gay and bisexual men, were systematically killed at the hands of the Nazis.
Holocaust Memorial Day is held on January 27 annually — marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp — and remembers the millions of people killed by the Nazis and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Holocaust Memorial Day: Nazi persecution of gay men and the LGBT+ community
Under Nazi rule, the persecution of homosexual men intensified, although gay sex between men had already been illegal since 1871.
It’s estimated that the Nazis imprisoned more than 50,000 gay men, including an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 men who were sent to concentration camps, according to research by historian Rüdiger Lautmann.
Although sex between women was not officially illegal in Nazi Germany, lesbians were also persecuted. Benno Gammerl, a lecturer in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London, tells PinkNews that the persecution of lesbians is “much harder to trace” because they weren’t included in the penal code and there was no specific categorisation of gay women in concentration camps (although some were made to wear a black triangle badge used to denote “asocial” prisoners).
Trans people, too, are known to have been persecuted under the Nazis, including being sent to concentration camps. According to Transgender Day of Remembrance, in 1938 the Institute of Forensic Medicine recommended that the “phenomena of transvestism” be “exterminated from public life.”
Again, Gammerl acknowledges that there have been demands for further research on the plight of trans people under the Nazis, saying: “At the moment, we simply [do] not know enough yet.”
Holocaust Memorial Day: The pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps.
In Nazi concentration camps, a pink triangle was used to identify some gay men. Gammerl, who describes the pink triangle as a “Nazi invention,” says it is “not quite clear” why the Nazis used the colour pink for this purpose.
In concentration camps, LGBT+ inmates were subjected to starvation and forced labour, as well as facing discrimination from both SS guards and fellow inmates.
Pierre Seel, a gay survivor from the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp near Strasbourg, who passed away in 2005, recalled one traumatising incident in his memoir. Seel wrote that a group of SS guards stripped his 18-year-old lover naked before releasing a pack of German Shepherd dogs which mauled him to death.
“There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste,” Seel wrote in his 1995 book I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror.
“Other prisoners, even when between themselves, used to target them.”
Gay men were also subjected to torture — including forced sodomy using wood — and human experimentation at the hands of the Nazis. There are records of gay men being forced to sleep with female sex slaves, and lesbians being made to perform sex acts on males, as a form of gay conversion therapy.
There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste.
Still, Gammerl argues that, although “there is evidence that homosexuals received worse treatment,” the available records make it hard to claim with certainty that gay people were consistently treated worse than other inmates.
“It is difficult to make definite claims about homosexuals being at the very ‘bottom’ of the camp hierarchy,” he says.
“All inmates were living under the permanent threat of being beaten or raped or killed by guards and there was also violence happening between inmates, some of that was certainly also homophobic.
“So, I would say, all inmates lived horrendous lives far beyond what I can imagine.”
He stresses that, given that Jewish people predominately populated the concentration camps, “one certainly cannot say that homosexuals were treated worse than they were.”
All inmates were living under the permanent threat of being beaten or raped or killed by guards and there was also violence happening between inmates, some of that was certainly also homophobic.
Thousands of LGBT+ people are believed to have been murdered by the Nazis. However, the Nazis’ poor documentation of LGBT+ people means that historians have been unable to calculate an exact estimate. Lautmann has argued that the death rate for gay men could be as high as 60 percent of those detained in concentration camps.
Gammerl also stresses that some Jewish and Romani people killed by the Nazis may also have identified as a sexual or gender minority.
“When talking about numbers, it is important to bear in mind that part of the people who were persecuted as Jews, Communists, Sinti and Romanies, or as members of other groups the Nazis sent to concentration camps, that a certain number of these people may also have been LGBT+,” he adds.
Gay men after WWII and how the pink triangle was reclaimed as a gay rights symbol.
After the end of World War II, the persecution of gay and bisexual men continued. Same-sex sexual activity between men remained illegal in East and West Germany until 1968 and 1969 respectively.
Gammerl notes that, while authorities in East Germany were “more lenient” towards gay men after Word War II, the persecution of gay men in West Germany was “rather intense” in the decades afterwards with “large waves” of arrests in cities like Frankfurt.
“Same-sex desiring men and women had to make sure that they lived their lives not too publicly and for men there was the permanent fear of being sent to prison,” he explains.
There are also accounts of gay men being re-imprisoned using evidence obtained by the Nazis. For decades after the Second World War, the Nazis’ treatment of LGBT+ people went unacknowledged in many countries.
It took until 2002 before the German government apologised to the gay community and annulled the convictions of gay and bisexual men under the Nazi regime. In 2005, the European Parliament passed a resolution including homosexuals as part of those persecuted during the Holocaust.
Poignantly, as the gay rights movement gained momentum in West Germany in the 1970s, the pink triangle started to be used as as a symbol for marking the history of anti-gay violence.
In an act of defiance, the pink triangle was reclaimed — and often inverted, with the tip pointing upwards — as a sign of gay activism. It became known on an international scale during the 1980s, when a six-person collective, called the Silence=Death Project, used an inverted version of the triangle on posters that the group plastered around New York to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis.
The upwards pointing pink triangle was later used by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in its campaigns during the AIDS epidemic. It was also used in memorials to remember LGBT+ victims of the Holocaust in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Sydney.
A lesbian who was forced to flee Zimbabwe after facing death threats from her own family has been denied refugee status in Ireland.
In April 2019, an International Protection Officer (IPO) recommended that the woman – who has not been named – be denied asylum, arguing that her claim lacked credibility.×
The woman said she forced into two separate marriages as a child in Zimbabwe at the ages of nine and 13. She claimed she was forced to flee her home country after her family found out that she was a lesbian, leading to threats of violence.
The woman subsequently brought judicial review proceedings in an effort to have the 2019 IPO recommendation overturned – however, Justice Tara Burns denied her request on Friday (22 January), The Irish Timesreports.
In her appeal, the woman argued that her sexuality was a “core element” of her asylum claim and that the IPO had failed to determine her sexuality when it recommended that she be denied asylum.
Before making a recommendation on her asylum claim, the IPO asked her questions about her sexuality and found that she was not aware of any LGBT+ support groups in either Ireland or Zimbabwe.
The IPO used her responses to questions about her sexuality, and other information about the woman, in reaching a recommendation that she should be denied asylum in Ireland.
In her ruling, Justice Burns said the IPO had reached a determination on the question of her sexuality. Her appeal to have the IPO recommendation overturned was denied.
She can now appeal the matter at the International Protection Appeals Tribunal, the judge said.
The case comes just months after a bisexual healthcare worker who fled anti-LGBT+ discrimination in Zimbabwe had her application for asylum in Ireland rejected because she doesn’t “seem bisexual”.
That ruling sparked international backlash, with the healthcare worker and another queer Zimbabwean woman speaking on condition of anonymity to CNN about their experiences seeking asylum in Ireland.
The Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI) told PinkNews that it is “appalled” by recent decisions for LGBT+ refugees.
“The Irish state assumes to have the authority to validate or invalidate a person’s sexual orientation in order to deny them protection,” said spokesperson Bulelani Mfaco. “Nowhere in Irish law or practice would the Irish state treat its own citizens in such a manner.”
Mfaco said the Irish government “ignores the difficult and life-threatening conditions LGBTQ+ asylum seekers escape in their home country”. He said queer people in some countries could face prison or death if they were to join an LGBT+ organisation.
“The Irish government doesn’t have the authority to validate a person’s sexual orientation,” Mfaco added.