Racism and violence experienced by South Asian LGBTQIA+ New Zealanders

Tuesday, 1 November 2022

Hijra, who are eunuchs, trans or intersex people, watch a performance at Hijra Pride 2014 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Although in 2013, Bangladesh officially recognised Hijra as a third gender, homosexuality remains illegal under Bangladeshi law, inherited from the British Indian Government’s Section 377.

The largest study of LGBTQIA+ people of South Asian descent in Aotearoa has found 84% have experienced discrimination, and of that group, the racism they faced came “from within the LGBTQIA+ community itself”, says one of the researchers.

The report authors say “being LGBT+ does not absolve white privilege … we consider that the racism of the mainstream LGBT+ community carries higher culpability than the racism of society at large, because the mainstream LGBT+ community is one that propounds acceptance and inclusivity”.

The study released on Tuesday was conducted by Adhikaar Aotearoa, a charity which advocate for LGBTQIA+ people of colour, predominantly from South Asia.

The organisation estimates at least 13,800 people in New Zealand who identify as such.

Scholar-advocate Vinod Bal is the co-founder of Adhikaar Aotearoa, a charity which advocates for LGBTQIA+ identifying people of colour predominantly of South Asian descent.

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The study included 43 participants of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan descent between the ages of 17 to 51.

Key statistics in the report reveal that 93% of respondents did not have access to ethnic queer stories when they first identified as one, and 84% have been discriminated against, and 44% have experienced violence.

While they've won greater freedoms for members of the rainbow community, activists say there is still room for progress. (Video first published February 2022.)

Co-founder and co-researcher Vinod Bal says that “ethnic LGBT people live lives of erasure; people don’t think we exist … ethnic LGBT people constitute the largest queer and trans population on Earth yet if you looked at queer popular culture, you would struggle to apprehend that fact.

“While much of the information posited … is negative in nature, this should not be used to affirm already existing stereotypes of ethnic communities ‘being backwards’ … We are the products of their environment … we bring up negative information because it is our duty to show where improvement can be made, not because we intend to be accusatory,” Bal and his co-researcher, Cayathri Divakalala, write in the report.

Bal says that the conflation of queerness as whiteness was the most interesting finding of the study.

From experience, he relates to the phenomenon of being “denied access to gay clubs because I don’t meet the white standard of queerness”.

Bal said it manifests through dating and the notion of racial preferences, explicitly racist comments and through denied access to queer spaces.

One of the respondents said “racism is hidden within the pretext of preferences. Even when they say yes, I was part of their fetishes … I have been asked if I can wear a turban as part of sexual role-playing”.

Bal says the implication is that “our ethnic communities consider that it’s a white disease [while] our mainstream white community has been scripted power to go ahead and define what queerness does and does not look like, that brown people don’t fit into that typology of queerness”.

Respondents spoke of how their family members believed that queerness was a Western concept.

One said that they believed that many LGBTQIA+ South Asians “choose to value [their] family relationship through not coming out, and not being a source of conflict in the family dynamic”, which she said was not recognised in the mainstream white narrative.

Bal says that queer identity has been recorded back to 200BC and that queerphobia has been an imposition of colonisation. “In India’s case, for instance, the British came to India, they introduced section 377 to the Indian Penal Code and then that criminalised LGBT identity.”

Gender and sexuality-queer South Asian communities include Hijra, Aravani, Thirunangaigal, Khwajasara, Kothi, Thirunambigal, Jogappa, Jogatha, Nachchi, and Shiva Shakti.

“So it was a conservative ethos of criminalisation to erase LGBT identity, because of their own perceptions of Victorian puritanism.”

The report makes recommendations to policy and lawmakers, service providers and community workers, educational institutions, media, and to society at large.

The next steps for Adhikaar are to “provide LGBT, culturally astute resourcing that is in … South Asian languages and have it ready for our community to use in the next year or so”, says Bal.