Guest Blogger: Sahara R. Chowdhury

When you organize street protests in Bangladesh, certain people will come over to you, smiling, professing support for your cause, making small talk, asking where you live and what you do. They will suggest you tone your rhetoric down, just a friendly recommendation, to demand less of the state. Otherwise, they say, social chaos may follow, although they support your cause wholeheartedly, mind you.

Yet they do not seem quite real. Though they appear as people do, they carry with them something manufactured and hollow, as if a script were speaking through a borrowed face. Give them not a grain of real information. Ask if they work for DGFI. If they say no, ask if they work for the Special Branch or NSI.

There is a man, he goes by Altaf Hossain online. He poses as an Islamic man, he posted pictures carrying bamboo rods in public spaces after August 5th, 2024 claiming to be a July fighter. He is ironically enough a cop, he works for the Special Branch. Part of the state machinery that slaughtered children during July 24, now posing as a voice of the resistance.

He threatened to form mobs against me online, he threatened to gang-rape me when I did my hunger strike on the Shaheed Minar. He posts often about wanting to violently murder homosexuals.

When I and my friends apprehended him for taking our pictures unconsented, he clasped his hands begging for mercy, began crying and shaking out of fear, provided documentation to prove that he is a cop, perhaps his PTSD from having to deal with student activists in July kicking in.  And he came over to me later still in another protest, expecting me to have forgotten his face. Professing himself to be an LGBT ally, he suggested that I beg for more charity and quotas from the state for the “third genders”, rather than marriage rights. These are the same cops and intelligence agencies queer NGOs that preach secrecy and incrementalism work with.

Here the intelligence agencies and the intelligentsia agree. Their symbiotic nature comes to light. Our conservatives and our liberals destroy their Shahbagh-Shaplabagh binary in this case.

“Marriage is only between real men and real women. Marriage is patriarchal. Marriage is too good for you people, and marriage is too bad. Marriage is divine and must not be sacrileged, marriage is profane and must not be allowed to corrupt your lot. The people simply would not accept it, the masses would riot.”

In his essay [1] Umberto Eco posits, Ur-Fascism replaces true democratic majority rule with a theatrical fiction where a dictator claims to interpret the collective, emotional will of a monolithic “People” via media platforms. Who are the people these intellectuals refer to? Who are the masses that would be unaccepting? They’re the DGFI and Special Branch operatives. Facebook bots online who oppose everything from Baul songs to education for female children. The delusion of the liberal clowns made manifest, who think they can waive equality away for  minorities while preserving a handful of liberties for the people whom they deem to be deserving of it. But no amount of concessions will satisfy the fascists, they will demand the ban of girls’ educations, ban on films, ban on Hindu people’s rights to show statues of their deities outside  temples. They will do these things with as much fervor as they hold against homosexuals. So really, when these people say “but what about society?” in regards to the homosexual question, it is not really these fascistic elements they’re being afraid of, it is their own unwillingness to fight for the homosexual cause as they would fight for the theatrical showing of of Banalata Express, they simply would prefer that the endless funneling of homosexuals and transgenders into prostitution would continue if it means not disrupting their quiet.

Trying to strategically self-censor pre-emptively for political purposes is a fool’s endeavour because

1. The Internet is filled with bots.

2. The bots are making it seem like an unsafe strategy to hold certain political opinions.

3. Real life interactions too are being informed by it.

4. So the data you’re getting is poisoned.

5. Even violence in real life doesn’t reflect mass opinion, right wingers are creating mobs and enforcing mob violence strategically to maintain an aura of popular support they don’t actually have, they can’t actually sustainably carry out that violence for prolonged periods of time, they can do it in short bursts as a Shock and Awe tactic to make it *seem* like they can.

6. Any safe strategy you undertake based on this poisoned data will affect outcomes to only reinforce the unsafe nature of your actual ideology, fear breeds fear.

 I have nothing against political strategy. But the nature of today’s algorithm dominated discourse literally creates a loop toward exacerbating fascism. There’s no way to break out of this other than to literally “fuck around and find out”, as the saying goes. When waiting for culture to organically shift, progressives inadvertently grant the state and right-wing actors time to consolidate power. By leveraging advanced surveillance, opaque digital censorship, and bot networks, the state actively manufactures social conservatism to marginalize queer and feminist movements, this is why active political conflict is essential. With technological growth the state is becoming more and more powerful, it hasn’t really given ordinary people as much power. There is a technological disparity. We’ve seen how Bangladesh has culturally regressed in many aspects compared to the 70s-90s era. With Bangladeshi progressives growing ever meeker as they are brainwashed by bots into thinking the ordinary people are doing things or harbor beliefs that are perpetuated by the right wing and state mechanisms. We’ve seen how DGFI, Special Branch etc are actively maintaining misogyny and homophobia through bots and media manipulation. The more that people argue that Bangladeshi culture isn’t ready for feminism or queer rights (with the assumption that culture is a natural weather pattern that must be waited out rather than being produced by incentives, media, law and political conflict), and that people should wait longer and move slower to get them, the more they ensure that the state would grow more powerful with technological growth and would be able to deter progressives further. With longer wait the more power goes to the enemy. I tried to be a proof of concept by repeatedly showing street Igbt activism can in fact be done and that you can live as Igbt in Bangladesh and “the backwards masses” is a myth reinforced by DGFI, special branches and political parties. If you’re an NGO-queer  who doesn’t want their funds to dry up due to legal progress, just say that. If you don’t care about it, just say you don’t care about it. But if you say it’s impossible, then you’re deluded with false-realism.

Liberals are endlessly bewildered, endlessly amused. Why do right wingers keep comparing homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia? Don’t they understand the difference between consensual sexual acts between adults and rape? Are they so ignorant? Are they so illiterate? So irrational? It is the fault of the country’s education system, surely. 

It’s very flattering for liberals to imagine homophobes and transphobes to be ignorant or illiterate, rather than accepting that they are simply greedy and use their prejudices against the marginalized as a tool of exploitation. 

In my book Bangladeshi Queer Manifesto I write:

“Illegalization or lack of recognition for lgbt relationships exist due to the lack of reproduction in Igbt relationships. As capitalism and feudalism both required the ruling class to leave a bloodline to legitimize inheritance based wealth, without which the ownership of private property comes into challenge. As well as requiring peasants to remain in generational servitude and to be able to underpay workers due to equilibrium of wage being lowered with higher worker supply.

While this incentivized reproductive relationships as the stable option, queers were assigned the roles of prostitutes and concubines in secrecy throughout history and present. The side hoes, so to speak. Look at how queerphobia only helps to make queer children vulnerable by making them sunk cost for parents to raise as future investments as they’re bullied out of schools, denied jobs and eventually thrown out of home and thus becoming easier to traffic. And the rich always had an affinity to be pederasts because their class condition is born from exploitation and they cannot sexually gratify themselves if it doesn’t involve sexual exploitation While gays are denied marriage rights due to not being reproductive, marriage’s endgoal remains to maintain reproduction. Ideologies that are against letting homosexuals legally marry will inevitably allow child marriage and marital rape of cis girls and women and the pederasty and coerced prostitution of queers. Women are treated as reproductive properties. Due to this, rape is less a violation of the victim’s body and more a trespassing onto the father’s or the husband’s property. Under this mindset, marital rape can not exist because the husband is the property owner and cannot trespass his own property, child marriage is acceptable as long as the child can birth babies because that’s the condition of marriage being fulfilled. And because un-reproductive bodies are not marriageable, the femboys and trans women become un-rape-able even when they’re funneled into prostitution as children and violated and penetrated against consent. By maintaining medical discrimination the ruling class ensures the early deaths of these prostitutes to keep the supply of flesh forever young and maintain the lack of life long formation of attachments. While the first world legalizes Igbt marriage, it utilizes NGOs and liberal intellectuals in the third world to argue against Igbt marriage rights due to depending on the labor of third worlds. As well as incentivizing third world queers to acquiesce to getting human trafficked by sex trafficking rings to first world countries hoping for freedom from bigotry.

The reason the lgbt issue can’t be fixed with a similar approach to cis people’s issue is because cis people are not mostly comprised of prostitutes and clients, and lgbt people are mostly comprised of prostitutes and clients. So while “most reported sexual violence comes from the family members” applies to cis people, it wouldn’t apply to lgbt people whose suffered violence is coming on a great level from pimps and clients who view them as lesser than family — as well as the abuse of prostitutes generally being underreported and when reported under-documented.

“But won’t homosexual marriage rights reinforce the patriarchal institution of marriage?”  

I’m glad you asked! But no, it won’t. Marriage is patriarchal due to it being designed as a ritual of reproduction. Reproduction legitimizes child marriage as long as the child bride gives birth. It legitimizes marital rape. Because gay relationships do not reproduce, marriage which for lgbts would be a ritual of social acknowledgement- actually subverts patriarchal values. Whereas without marriage, in secrecy lgbt relationships affirm patriarchal assignment of queers within the realm of secret hookups and prostitution. Saying marriage  is capitalistic and patriarchal so gays shouldn’t get marriage rights is like saying “the state exists to protect capital so socialists shouldn’t want a socialist state”.”

So it’s not really so surprising that right wingers compare normalization of homosexuality to the potential normalization of bestiality. These people do not care about consent, both acts do not result in reproduction, and that’s all that matters to them.

Liberals like Rumina Farhana, Nadia Islam and Parvez Alam are endlessly bewildered, endlessly amused about the madrasa rape cases. “Why are they so homophobic, yet engage in sodomy?”, the liberals ask. And they do use the word ‘sodomy’ or ‘balatkar’ if not outright ‘somokamita’ to refer to the rape done to men, individuals with XY chromosomes are un-rape-able to them and the constitution, rapes against males being punished only by the colonial section 377 law in our country, which has been historically utilized in other colonized countries (although not in Bangladesh) to punish consensual homosexual couples. Jannatul Ferdous Jannat writes [2]:

Section 375 of the Code recognizes the act of engaging in sexual intercourse with a “woman” against her will or without her consent as the crime of rape. This provision fails to address rape against men and transgender persons, and also does not recognise marital rape. …Moreover, Section 377 embodies the essence of draconian laws that do not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts of sexual acts so long as it has been committed “against the order of nature”. It is highly unfortunate that what constitutes “against the order of nature” has always been prone to moral and religious interpretations, perpetuating stigmatization and discrimination of specific victim groups. For instance, this provision was initially introduced in the British period to condemn homosexuality. Thus, the sheer terminological distinction between ‘rape’ and ‘sodomy’ reflects the broader bias which minimises a male victim’s experience of specific sexual acts.

It further diminishes the gravity of the crime committed. The punishment for committing “unnatural offences” under Section 377 of the Code can range from 10 years to life imprisonment, whereas the Act in Section 9(1) prescribes the death penalty or life imprisonment as punishment for the crime of rape committed against women and children under Section 375 of the Code.

…The diabolical status of the legal framework concerning rape has been further exacerbated by the societal stigma associated with masculinity, rape, and victimhood. The stereotypical notion that men cannot be violated against their will due to the biological superiority of a “male body” has routinely met with law enforcement agency’s disbelief in those rarely reported cases. The contradiction between the biological construct of the ‘male’ body and what is perceived as the societal expectation of ‘masculinity’ has suppressed the victims from disclosing their vulnerability and violation. This stigmatisation of males, whose autonomy and manhood can be stripped by being sexually assaulted, has isolated these victims from seeking justice.

Since the Code restricts male rape victims from identifying as legally defined ‘victim groups’, there are no targeted services, shelters, or aid available for them either.

It does not require an analytical genius to see how homophobia acts as a tool to oppress male rape victims further [3], to scare them of being identified as homosexual when the discourse propagated by conservatives with meek compliance from liberals makes the social consequences of it seemingly disastrous, it is quite obvious how calling male rape ‘sodomy’ or ‘balatkar’ and maintaining said definition constitutionally only bolsters those rapists [4] and helps them keep committing said those acts, like the recent case in Sylhet [5] where the rapist convinced his male rape victim that he would suffer the consequences as well had he came forward, and used the video of his rape to blackmail him into silence, as the rapist kept raping him further. But it is preferable, for the smug impotent liberals, to call it ‘hypocrisy’ and leave it at that,  rather than recognizing it  specifically as the purpose of the system. Calling the homophobia of these rapists ‘hypocrisy’ is akin to calling the whip the master uses to hurt his slave an instrument of hypocrisy rather than a tool of abuse. Bangladeshi liberals are not interested in dismantling homophobia so that male rape victims can seek justice more easily instead of worrying about suffering legal consequencess, Bangladeshi liberals are interested only in futily attempting to utilize homophobia against madrasa hujurs as a cheap rhetorical device. It will not work, the rapists will not care, our Parvez Alams will not care that the rapists will not care because it’s not about stopping them or improving things for victims, it’s about performing for their pre-established audience. Our intellectuals, when they do demand justice for male rape victims, proceed to frame male children as the only target of said violence [6], as if the male adults are incapable of being raped, and avoid framing women as possibly being perpetrators of rape or demanding legal recognition of female rapists.

The liberals over in America too are amused that statistics [7] reveal the rise of consumption in transgender pornography, while transgender rights are fading [8]. They are quite amused that Republicans are the biggest consumer of pornography containing transgender and femboy individuals [9]. In my manifesto, I write:

Reiterating my point once more, there has been recent research that found the right wing conservative American states with the most amount of anti-transgender laws also have the most amount of searches for transgender pornography.  A lot of people found this funny or hypocritical. But really, there is no hypocrisy in this. What is the consequence of anti-transgender laws? The transgender kids get thrown out of home, they can’t access education without bullying, they can’t get jobs. What’s the consequence of that? They turn to prostitution, becoming porn actors, and concubinism. So really, conservatives are simply maintaining their supply chain of vulnerable trans people to abuse. The purpose of a system is what it does, and this is the system they’ve built. Like I always say, right wingers don’t want to eradicate trans people completely, just like they don’t want to eradicate cis women or black people. They want trans people in the lower station in the pyramid of hierarchy. They want trans people to live as sex objects without any legal recognition of marriage or institutional recognition and die after being abused and exploited. Eradicating cis women, black people, and trans people would mean right wingers can not exploit them any longer, right wingers just want to deny them legal rights to keep exploiting them. And that’s worse.

This pattern[10] has recurred throughout American history repeatedly. One of the first people to come forward to accuse Jeffrey Epstein of being a child predator was a transgender girl, her accusation was discarded and disregarded by the court and media due to her transgender identity while she was mocked for coming forward [11]. According to the Atlanta Youth Count study, while cisgender women are often conceptualized as the main targets for trafficking vulnerablties, transgender respondents had “significantly higher rates of trafficking than their cisgender counterparts (including both male and female cisgender respondents).” [12]  The 1994 report from the Massachusett’s Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth[13] states:

Gay male youth who have been forced out of their homes because of their sexual orientation are more likely to engage in survival sex than their non-gay male counterparts. Other studies collected similar or more drastic data. Steve Obuchowski testified at the Public Hearings about how he lived as a prostitute during his sophomore and junior years of high school:

“The only way I could deal with being gay was to draw inside myself. I felt that I was the only person my age who was gay. I was manipulated by this man into being a prostitute. It was the only place I felt safe and protected. I had to deal with attacks on myself..the death of another boy and several rapes. When I told them I was leaving, I received death threats.”

Youth who feel that they are not understood, or find that their needs are not being addressed, often leave care, joining a significant and growing population of gay and lesbian street kids. Adolescents with a history of multiple placements often leave unsatisfactory settings when they conclude that the streets meet their needs better than the service system. 21

Many gay and lesbian youths, rejected by their families, simply leave home. They run, but often there is no place go. If they do not get hooked into prostitution, they become wards of the state and they are placed into foster care.

Foster families are often no more prepared or willing to deal with a gay or lesbian adolescent than was his or her biological family. So the youths run again. This time they may be placed into residential or group homes. If these homes are not prepared or able to deal with the issues of lesbian and gay youth, the youths run again. This time the street may be their final destination.

Once gay and lesbian youth leave their home/foster home and they begin to live on the streets they often become prostitutes to survive. In a two year study of adolescent male prostitution in Seattle, Boyer (1989) interviewed and observed 47 male prostitutes. Of this sample, 70% identified themselves as either homosexual or bisexual. Most reported that they prostituted as a means of survival. Coleman (1989) reviews the current research literature regarding male-juvenile prostitution activity. In fact, Coleman notes, “many observers believe that the experiences of running away and juvenile prostitution are closely related.

19 Victim Services/Traveler’s Aid, 1991.

20 Kruks, 1991.

21 Athey, 1991; Holdway & Ray 1992; Zide & Cherry. 1992.

According to a NY Times report[14] published in 1995:

About half the transgender runaways are prostitutes, and 20 percent have tested positive for the AIDS virus.

…”These are not just kids you can tell, ‘Oh, go out and get a job,’ ” said Carl Siciliano, program manager for Safespace. “They have the perception that there are no other employment options other than prostitution or selling drugs.” They also have some very practical worries, he said, including whether to check the “M” or “F” box on employment applications and which restroom to use if they do manage to find work.

Even then, the true figures of sex trafficked trans women remains not properly documented. According to the paper Transgender People and Human Trafficking: Intersectional Exclusion of Transgender Migrants and People of Color from Anti-trafficking Protection in the United States [15]:

Most trans participants who reported exploitation did not self-identify as victims of trafficking nor were they identified by police or anti-trafficking organizations as victims. Law enforcement gatekeeping was identified by anti-trafficking advocates as a barrier to meeting the needs of trans clients because they were viewed as “less exploitable” than cisgender women. Discriminatory law enforcement practices resulted in the exclusion and hyper-criminalization of trans migrants and people of color who were profiled not only by gender, but also race/ethnicity and immigration status.

These are all accounts of queerphobia directly helping the sexual abuse and sexual trafficking of queers. Although there is a trend among self-proclaimed leftists to claim that these are mere culture war issues with no bearing on class politics, according to reports, trans people are lowest paid gender or sexual demographic even when they operate outside the trappings of prostitution [16]:

Trans people experience widespread unemployment and poverty at higher rates compared to the rest of the U.S. population. Even if a trans person does get a job outside of the underground economy, discrimination can still take its toll and stunt economic advancement, said Josie Caballero, survey project manager of the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS).

Here is an excerpt from a report about a transgender woman who was held captive and abused for years [17]:

The woman, who in her 50s, suffered beatings, sexual abuse, had markings carved into her body, and a tattoo that registered her as a slave on a website.nShe was chained outside, naked, for two days and nights with no food or water, investigators said. She was kept in a storage shed in the Louisiana family’s backyard. She was found by a town marshal on May 3 near a Louisiana highway with a logging chain wrapped around her, after she managed to escape.

“It feels like an old story in the trans community that this happens over and over again,” said Roxanne Anderson, the director of the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition. She says transgender women are often specifically targeted in human trafficking. “Because of economics situations, they’re often not able to maintain employment….and often then become a part of underground industry,” she said.

It’s not really surprising then, that the Trump administration ordered the state department to erase data of LGBTQ victims from human trafficking report [18], the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children site scrubbed of transgender kids [19] and that the Sexual abuse group’s website erased data about trans people to keep federal funding [20]. They are erasing the data on rape victims. Our postmodernists will, no doubt, be quite happy. People like Parvez Alam who used Foucauldian theory to insist even the label “homosexual” is potentially  oppressive to homosexuals, and so seeking homosexual rights is folly— they will, no doubt, love the erasure of data about exploited demographics. The evidence removed from the crime, they can go back to pretending it’s a culture war issue while the LGBT kids are disproportionately trafficked and raped. It tracks well with the history of postmodernist movements, obsessed with sexual liberation while disregarding legal marriage rights. Foucault after all, has been accused of sexually abusing little boys [21], and though his supporters seek to call such claims false, Foucault had signed documented petitions calling to legalize pedophilia [22] and has claimed in documented interviews that children can consent to having sex with adults and that calling it rape is “intolerable” [23]. Postmodernist icons such as Andy Warhol have created child sexual abuse materials [24] and called it “art” after grooming his child stars into getting hooked on drugs and having sex on camera.  TERFs like Germaine Greer— self-professed [25] pedophile who said “Like all women of taste, I am a pederast” and was swooned over by liberals for it— have written entire books peddling nude pictures of male children [26], claiming that sexually abusing little boys is “liberation”. Poststructuralist  sexual liberation movement of Germany had the Kentler Project, headed by Helmut Kentler, which put around a thousand homeless boys in the “care” of pedophilic men who tended to be figures of authority and power in academia, “Kentler believed pedophiles could make acceptable foster parents, and that any sexual contact would be relatively harmless if it were not forced.” [27] Indeed, the sexual liberation movement and its consequences have been a disaster for the LGBT demographic. It is an undeniable unfortunate fact of history that various groups— like Vereniging Martijn, Project Truth and the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) that had sought to normalize pedophilia and advocated for the legalization of pedophilia had attached themselves to the gay rights movement and were part of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) as recently as 1994 [28]. The NAMBLA group actively helped pedophiles garner information on how to predate on young boys, with a book titled The Survival Manual: The Man’s Guide to Staying Alive in Man-Boy Sexual Relationships published on its website [29]:

“Its chapters explain how to build relationships with children,” Frisoli tells me. “How to gain the confidence of children’s parents. Where to go to have sex with children so as not to get caught…There is advice, if one gets caught, on when to leave America and how to rip off credit card companies to get cash to finance your flight. It’s pretty detailed.”

The founder of NAMBLA, David Thorstad remains a revered figure in academia. While he advocated for pedophilia to be legalized using queer movements, he simultaneously bemoaned NAMBLA’s rejection from anti-pedophilic elements of the queer movement, although he literally advocated for child molestation he proceeded to call the anti-child-molestation ideology to be hysterical and homophobic—  he proceeded to call the rising rejection of NAMBLA from within the gay community akin to the war waged by “lesbian feminists who jumped right on the bandwagon” of what he called the “anti-gay male/child pornography scare” [30]. The famous pedophile Thorstad lamented that the “sexual liberation” politics of the early gay movement was replaced by actual material goals and class war rather than culture war, he vehemently opposed gay marriage rights and transgender rights [31].  This pedophilic invertebrate’s voice is what people like Mohammad Ishrak,  Parvez Alam and postmodernists in general echo when they express similar sentiments, according to Thorstad,  the label LGBT is “the most absurd one of all” and is “far too fixed an identity, eliding the fluidity of sexuality and sexual behavior” [32], he claimed that by demanding marriage rights and rejecting the normalization of pedophilia, the LGBT community has become assimilationist to the capitalist heternormative project. [33] While his attempts at associating noncery to the LGBT community, coupled with every other postmodernist pedophiles’ works that sought to promote pedophilia gave fuel to conservatives to accuse LGBT people of being pedophiles, other academics such as Lee Edelman in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, echoing the sentiment of queer marriage being “heteronormative” and “capitalistic” bemoaned that right wingers  are unfairly associating the queer community with pedophiles and using it to deny queers legal rights or recognition to build families, that the “Child” figure is made sacred by right wingers purely to demonize queers (apparently saying “don’t be a pedophile” is oppressive)— but that queers, instead of battling such allegations, should simply lean into said allegations and exist purely as a “subculture” to challenge “heteronormative norms” (the norms being to not diddle children, I suppose). If one follows my materialist analysis of queerphobia and the taboofication of queer people existing to create queer child prostitutes, it is no wonder  that these upperclass queers were so vehemently against rights like marriage that would actually detaboofy and stabilize queer lives. These people talk about queer lives being a threat to the social order because they analyze right wing hate speech against queer people at face value rather than analyzing the actual goal of their ideology and rhetoric, postmodernists, rejecting materialist critique, can not conceive that queer people existing  as prostitutes and socially exiled and unrecognized individuals is already part of the existing social order, and denying them marriage rights does not make them a challenge to the existing social order but simply a part of it. There is often an accusation from postmodernists, poststructuralists and  postcolonials of socialists being homophobic. In all honesty, I’d rather be sent to a gulag for being queer than be forced to experience what you post-pedophiles conceive to be “anti-assimilationist liberation”. Stalin may have been a pedophile, but at least he didn’t waste thousands of pages writing theories to frame his pedophilia as “radical and revolutionary”.

In my manifesto I write:

One of my acquaintances  went to do charity work for prostitutes with his male friend, and the women (biological cis women who were born as women, for the sake of clarity)  gang-raped that man and robbed him of his money. While he yelled for help they told him “What did you think would happen when you visited whores like us?”  Does this incur disgust in you against prostitutes? Maybe view them as demented creatures? Of perversion?   Think of it this way: if  prostitutes get help from charity — they stop being so vulnerable. Who benefits from the vulnerability of prostitutes? Why, pimps and syndicates controlling them.   Think of it like this: charity comes along trying to build access to a normal life for sex workers— to give them education and jobs — suddenly if they don’t have to depend on their pimps to survive — then the pimps lose their supply chain and their labor capital — which they can’t allow. So the pimps have a vested interest in keeping outsiders from snooping around. To keep them from seeing the abuses prostitutes face, to know of their wealthy clients, to see the child prostitutes. So what do they do? They handpick a few loyal prostitutes, the labor aristocracy, and they get those women to do some unspeakable crimes on outsiders until they either back off or the charity has the pimp syndicate’s people do the work of the middle man.  Let’s talk about Utsha. The transgender one who jumped off a roof and killed herself, not Asif Mahtab. She was physically attacked by a group of hijra women  who declared she was a “fake hijra” trying to acquire money by pretending to be hijra and begging and doing sex work. This incident was conveniently filmed and posted on tiktok. Now, she didn’t do any of that. But think of it like this: in Bangladesh hijra communes are hierarchicals. The guru (of course, not all commune leader gurus are cruel, I’m talking about a specific type who exist nonetheless because the current system inevitably breeds them) profits off the labor of her underlings, be it through begging or prostitution. When an underling defies this order—tries to say, get education or a job,— sometimes the consequence is telling her she’ll never have a place in society as a gender-diverse person etc etc and if she goes through with it, sometimes she can be reported to the cops as “fake hijra” or a sodomite. Then comes the v-coding etc etc. It’s as simple as pimps really, protecting your self-interest, making sure the supply of your labor capital stays intact. Now the tale of Utsha being attacked by hijra groups? For a lot of liberals, it soured them on the hijra community, not understanding the difference between hijra women who are pressured into these activities under threat of losing life support and imprisonment  as opposed to  the one at the top who profits from securing territory and making sure a toll is paid to them by any gender diverse person who dares to exist.  And a lot of conservatives got to use it to fuel their natural hijra vs fake transgender narrative.   But beyond that? What else could be the reason behind Utsha being attacked?  [34] Recently a powerful man has been on the dms of one of my transgender female mutual acquaintances. Threatening her that if she does not have intercourse to him he will organize Islamist mobs against her using his connections, that he will doxx her identity and location to them. Do you see how the attack on the trans female Utsha may have very well been organized?   See, the thing about these organized violence is that they seem spontaneous to casual observers rather than planned. And not only do they hurt the victims, but it also gives feckless liberals a chance to say “society is too backwards to try for progress”. Because they mistake these violent elements trying to secure profit or exploit people as a part of ordinary society as opposed to people specifically benefiting from bigotry.  Anyway, these tales? How transphobia is weaponized against trans people by “normal people” who seek to fuck them? V-coding? As in police syndicates paid by male prisoners putting trans women in male prisons over no real crime just with the express purpose of making sex slaves out of them? This grimy underworld? It wouldn’t exist half as strongly as it does if lgbts had rights. All these mobs and syndicates are just the other face of the government. The Yin to their Yang. If the government didn’t illegalize our existence, they couldn’t exoticize us or sell us. So they need that shit. They need that illegalization.  They need to keep their business going.  The more repressive  the law and theocracy of a state, the stronger and more depraved shall  be its criminal underworld.

Although the large majority of these pedophiles calling marriage “capitalistic” are white — and if not at least bourgeoisie and western in location, because they’ve lost their anti-equality war, the occasional misappropriation of the queer identity by genocidal colonial projects have allowed them the opportunity to claim LGBT marriage rights are themselves an artifact of homocolonialism. Although genocidal states also similarly appropriate everything in existence, including identities that are marginalized in the west, such as that of muslims [35], why any  attempt at furthering queer rights in the third world is met with accusations of “homocolonialism” from intellectuals despite queers worldwide protesting against Israel and America [36] while allowing other appropriated  ideological projects to foster is a question worth pondering.  What these gentlemen mean by insisting that legal queer rights would “deradicalize” queers is also questionable, homosexual people like Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover, agents of state and capitalism, always existed even before marriage rights were acquired by queers, and groups like Queers for Palestine have existed long after marriage rights were acquired.

In my manifesto, I write:

Imagine after civil war if the  black people seeking to gain property rights or voting rights were condemned as “assimilationists” by anarchists and “bourgeoisie” by marxists. I seek legal lgbt marriage rights through illegal violence because the consequence otherwise is the slow systemic death of my people— and I see no contradiction in this.  Hell, we assimilate by existing. Existence isn’t resistance.  The closeted rich queer conservative politician is as much of an assimilationist as is the loudly queer transsexual whore he abuses. Because they’re both within their station of society as is determined acceptable by the status quo. To seek marriage rights which would result in social mobility for queers then is in a way anti-assimilationist…

Queer liberation is such a meaningless buzzword because it implies queers as a community are similarly oppressed. The upperclass queers who own their  property don’t need liberation, they’re the fucking oppressors. There exists no unity between an upper class queer and a lower class one, it’s fiction.  The only liberation that can exist is working class liberation. Now I want reforms within the system for queer people because queers having the rights to marriage and anti-discrimination laws would benefit the lower class ones way fucking more than upperclass ones. Upperclass trans people can already bribe their way through changing their legal papers. Upperclass gays can spend their lives with their partners secluded from family because they can afford to live separately. They can compartmentalize their queerness from their day to day life because they own the resources to hide it. Lower class queers don’t have that. They can’t compartmentalize their lives. When they are  denied by law to build families, to exist within their family, to have non-secret relationships, and they do not have resources to compartmentalize  it, they lean toward being whores and concubines for upperclass gays who do have the resources to do so. Thus worldwide lower class queers become a lumpenprole. What they lack is a social script, marriage is that social script, it’s the normalisation of queerness, I want that fucking shit. I want anti-discrimination laws. I want lower class queers to stop being part of the lumpenprole, to stop being lower than the working class, and become part of the working class so that they can be part of the eventual working class liberation rather than vying for a “queer liberation” separately,  but for that, marriage rights and anti-discrimination laws in workplaces are necessary. Not fucking quotas or reserved jobs, that’d just build resentment within the working class. Not because I think lumpens are morally inferior but because they are structurally excluded from stable relations of production. Marx loathed the lumpenproletariat  because they are structurally unreliable, easily bought, easily terrorized and easily weaponized by reaction. When poor queers are forced into concubinage, informal economies, criminalized sex work or dependency on bourgeois politicians they are  removed from collective labor power. What do we see with NGO queers or queers for whom NGOs are a lifeline going along with oppressive  regimes? What do we see with hijra prostitutes controlled by their gurumas who spout transphobic and homophobic shit claiming to be intersex despite being trans or gay themselves rather than actually intersex?  They are structurally unreliable, easily bought, easily terrorized and easily weaponized by reaction. I want this song and dance to end, I want you people to be fucking normal. Because when you’re not part of the working class, when the working class revolution happens, you will be swept away. You need to make your existence  the normalized part  of society before the revolution happens so that you aren’t sent to fucking gulags. You need to be part of the revolution so that your people are not trod over by it. I was part of a social upheaval against an oppressive regime and when that regime fell, I woke up to the news of Hijra shelters getting destroyed by people blaming the hijras for the prostitution and drug trafficking profession they were trapped by the upperclass in instead of having one fucking moment to celebrate. I don’t want this shit to repeat. I don’t want you people’s survival to depend on the regime’s moods. You were never inherently resistant, your existence isn’t resistance, without legal rights of marriage and anti-discrimination laws your existence is very explicitly sexual pleasure based entertainment for the upper class.”…

…The postmodernists rally against categorizing lgbt people into labels because such categorization would shed eventually light on their purpose within the system as designated by the ruling class. As long as no one names the odd pattern of a people with certain similar characteristics being funneled into prostitution worldwide in an informal caste system who are designed to get used up and thrown away and to die early — then no one can stop the machine which facilitates their fate to be as such.

Although progress in legal rights may have somewhat hindered these esteemed pedophiles’ domestic supply chain of  human trafficked queer child sex slaves, the third world opens up new opportunities for them. Thousands of Latin American (trans) women exploited across Europe [37],  according to the report:

On a large scale, organised criminal networks are bringing vulnerable (trans) women from Latin America to Belgium and the Netherlands. This is according to research by Lost in Europe. The phenomenon plays out across Europe, according to Belgian investigative authorities. It is a multi-million dollar business.

I write in my manifesto:

So the first world benefits from the third world’s homophobia and transphobia in two ways. In intellect and in flesh.

Obviously when the third world countries are highly socially conservative, its intellectuals will be incentivized to get a scholarship abroad and leave their country (which will leave their country all the more vulnerable to regress).

But as we have seen have seen with sex slavery rings of lgbts operating  in the first world, and I mean not just prostitution of their own queer citizens, but downright slavery conditions for  lowerclass queers with zero freedom, the victims tend to be illegal immigrants who left their own country without lgbt-friendly laws hoping for a better freedom abroad through sex trafficking channel. But the purpose of a system is what it does, and there’s a reason foreign ngos actively curb genuine demand for lgbt rights in third world countries and tell the third world queer citizens to only demand charity from the government rather than legal rights.  The inequality must continue being maintained, they must continue to have better legal rights. So our country’s lack of lgbt rights is a literal pipeline through which first worlders get their fill of exotic flesh. A population that is both hyper-mobile and hyper-undocumented due to not being legally allowed to form families, to be thrown out of families. That combination is a trafficker’s wet dream.

Queer trans immigrants being trapped in sexual slavery after being human trafficked to the west is a pretty common story, an article reporting Organizers Of Illegal Latin American Prostitution Network Arrested; Concern For Exploited Transgender Immigrants [38] reads:

The Public Prosecution Service (OM) confirmed the arrest of a 62-year-old woman from Amsterdam and a 69-year-old man from Weert on suspicion of people smuggling. The woman allegedly arranged living and working places for sex workers from Latin America for a fee, though the sex workers were not legally living in the country. The man is accused of transporting them to the addresses, according to the OM…

There are many transgender people among the Latin American sex workers, the OM said. In recent years, the judiciary has seen an increase in this group in checks on prostitution services throughout the Netherlands. They travel to Europe in the hope of a better life, according to the OM.

At least 700 Latin American transgender sex workers reside in the Netherlands, the OM speculated. “This estimate is based on the number of ads by this group on two of the largest sex websites. The actual number is probably higher.”

Another report [39] reads:

Italian police say they have broken a prostitution ring which trafficked transsexual people from Latin America into the country.

Police said they arrested 28 suspected members of the prostitution ring, 24 of whom are already in prison.

The group was made up of Italians and Brazilians who were recruited from shanty towns in Brazil and other Latin American states.

Arrests took place in three Italian regions – Lazio, Campania and Umbria.

The transsexual targets were sent airline tickets for flights from Rio de Janeiro to Madrid, Zurich, Paris, Budapest or Bucharest, from where they would be sent on to Italy, reports said.

Twelve properties which police believe were to be used for prostitution have also been seized.

Another report about an African Transsexual prostitute ring busted by Paris cops [40] reads:

Among the arrested men was the ringleader, nicknamed ‘Andrea Chichi’, who is suspected of having forced nearly 90 transsexual prostitutes into the sex trade. It is alleged he also threatened them with black magic if they refused to obey his orders, French newspaper Le Parisien reports.

After he flew the “recruits” to France, Chichi set them up with two transvestite lieutenants, who managed the prostitutes, sending them to solicit sex primarily in Bois de Boulogne.

“If some of them expressed a desire to leave, Andrea Chichi, who pretended he could use black magic, would threaten to put a curse or a spell on them,” the source said, noting that the threat of “demons” was a strategy commonly used by Nigerian pimps to keep their charges obedient.

A report about Pimps of Thai transexuals on trial in Germany [41] reads:

The trial of a gang charged with operating a prostitution ring across Germany began in the state of Hesse on Tuesday. Prosecutors allege the five members used accomplices to smuggle prostitutes into Germany and hired them out as sex slaves.

The four Thais and a German are charged with forced prostitution, people trafficking, exploitation, withholding pay and tax evasion. The trafficked women, described as transsexuals, were allegedly forced to work on rotation between three brothels in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia before being transferred to others in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland.

A report on Syrian trans women living in Izmir [42] reads:

“Some trans women refugees feel that they are at risk of physical and psychological harm, not only from the community, but also from the police and other state actors. Several participants shared stories of friends who have tried or succeeded in leaving Turkey irregularly, often through dangerous routes organized by migrant smugglers. While the risks associated with irregular migration, such as human trafficking, sexual violence and even death, are well known among the group, many participants felt that these dangerous routes were preferable to staying in Turkey under such hostile conditions.”

A report titled Ladyboys in the Gulf [43] reads:

“The men there love me,” she says. “I don’t know why. Religiously speaking. it’s forbidden. But culturally, it’s among them…. When I walk in the street or in the mall, boys are all over me.”

…Mya says that on April 28, 2010, the second time she went to Dubai to work, she was caught by undercover police who pretended to be clients.

According to Mya, she was released in August, after spending three months in solitary confinement at Al Awir, a men’s prison in Dubai.

“They really treated me like a dog or an animal,” she says. “There are a lot of big criminals-drug dealers, things like that. Those big criminals were allowed to pay to come to my cell. The guard would open the gate and let them enter my cell and rape me whenever they wanted.”

Her tone is matter-of-fact, as if she were discussing what she had for breakfast.

“The harder I fought, the tougher it was for me,” she says. “The first one was the hardest. I fought like crazy. But after the second month, I realized I couldn’t do it anymore, so I tried to be nice and cooperative.”

…Although there is very little data regarding this phenomenon, activists and lawyers who work with transgender sex workers say that the thriving sex trade in the Middle East, especially in Gulf countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, and Bahrain, is attracting hundreds of transgender sex workers, mostly from South Asia and the Pacific Islands.

All these Gulf countries abide by strict Islamic law, outlaw homosexuality, and forbid gay foreigners from entering the country.

Mya there suffered an all too usual instance of v-coding. A report titled Transgender Trafficking Survivors Face a Hard Road Back [44] reads:

• Homelessness and joblessness make transgender Individuals particularly vulnerable to human traffickers.
• If a transgender person is incarcerated, possibly for commercial sale of sex, the prison experience is likely to be exceptionally nightmarish…
• Imprisoned survivors often don’t receive the services they need to reintegrate into society.
• Lacking the reintegration services they need, the transgendered end up back in prison.

It’s a pretty efficient system. Discriminate against, taboofy and stigmatize trans women. Which funnels them into prostitution, a highly abusive and exploitative profession. Arrest them for prostituting in “polite” places, send them to male prisons, sell them to male prisoners as sex slaves through v-coding. When they resist being raped, use their self-defensive violence to further extend their term in prison. Because you arrested them for prostitution, register them as sex offender although they’re the ones who are sexually exploited as prostitutes. Thus skewing the statistics and giving ammo to right wingers while the imprisoned trans women are repeatedly raped. And this skewed statistics representing them as sex offenders can be used to stigmatize them further.

But, indeed, why should only the richer countries enjoy the fruits of hate? Hardly all trans women get to be raped abroad. Most just get raped and killed in their own streets. A report titled The trans experience in Colombia: “This is where we work – and this is where we are killed’ [45] reads:

Three quarters of all murders of trans people take place in South and Central America. In Colombia, fear and prejudice force many into sex work. Will the end of the country’s civil war finally bring acceptance?

…But prejudices are hard to overcome. When she was attacked, Salamanca was working in the sex industry, where trans people are particularly vulnerable (65% of those murdered worldwide were sex workers, according to the TGEU report). Yet prostitution is one of only two jobs – along with hairdressing – available to most trans women in Colombia.

The report Suffering and loss in Istanbul’s transgender slum [46] reads:

Transgender sex workers are surprisingly popular in Istanbul. I walk past a pair of young Turkish men staring at a transgender person smiling through the barred window of a brothel: “… but they’re not women” one said to the other, “but they’re so much better,” the other responds. On one hand, Turkish society condemns transgender sex workers, whilst on the other, they’re a coveted sexual release.

…Some transgender people are now simply too old for sex work. The LGBTT organisation has established a shriter for them in Istanbul, run on a shoestring budget-it is hand to mouth living. It’s located in a rougher part of the neighbourhood.

…She was attacked by two Turkish men while working on the street. “They [abducted] me, beat me, raped me, and left me naked in a wood. I walked for hours, my feet were bleeding. When I came to the main road there was another group of five young men. They also started to assault me. A police car drove past, and the cops said, “Take this faggot, and do whatever you need to.”

…For transgender people in Turkey, these types of incidents, rather than being a tragic crime worthy of prosecution, are almost an inevitability.

Again, this is not hypocrisy. This is the material purpose of queerphobia, this is the global pattern. A report from Nepal titled For most transgender women, sex work remains the only way to make a living [47] reads:

Faced with discriminatory hiring practices, most transgender individuals are unable to get jobs and resort to sex work, which comes with its own hazards.

…Pretty was 15 years old when she first stood out on the streets of Chitwan looking for a customer. Bullied and teased by her teachers and classmates for her identity as a transwoman, Pretty had dropped out of school in the tenth grade to become a sex worker…

The report “25-30% transgender sex workers in Sri Lanka addicted to drugs, new survey reveals” [48] reads:

The organization noted that there is a significant transgender population in the country and most of them have chosen transgender sex work as their occupation.

Many of them opt for this work because, due to their gender identity, they are often sidelined by their families and excluded from their homes.

Bangladeshi liberals, much like the early sexual liberation movement advocates, seek to boil down the issue of LGBT rights into purely sexual liberation rather than economic security of things like anti-discrimination laws and marriage.

The paper “They Chase Us Like Dogs”: Exploring The Vulnerabilities Of “Ladyboys” In The Cambodian Sex Trade [49] reads:

The majority of respondents, or 74%, indicated sexual harassment, and 40% cited physical assault within the past 12 months, and more than half of respondents (55%) who cited being forced to have sex against their wishes. In addition, respondents describe diverse and overlapping forms of stigma and discrimination including: loss of employment (39%) and loss or denial of housing (20%), denial of education (12%) and denial of basic health services (10%) as a result of being transgender. Over half of those citing stigma and discrimination and more than one-third of those citing physical assault say the police are the perpetrators of the violence.

The report from 2021,  “Boys in Thailand would stop selling sex if they could” [50] reads:

Almost half were children when they first exchanged sex for money, goods, shelter, protection, or status.

The youngest was 12 years old. Some were introduced by friends who were already doing it; others felt it was their only way of making enough money to survive. One ladyboy said she felt forced to sell sex because ladyboys are often discriminated in the job market.

In my manifesto, I write:

A lot of people say “I wish homophobic  conservative politicians  had gay children” but you see, it doesn’t matter. Because in the packing order they’ve built, their gay kids will grow up to be married people who fuck queer prostitutes in secret for pittance every once in a while, and dispose their abused bodies like garbage. You see, there is no hypocrisy in a conservative homophobic man fucking other men. Because homosexuality is a social status indicating one’s low worth. And people with access to sufficient wealth can transcend that low social status, they can spend their lives in the closet while abusing gay people who are less fortunate. For them homosexuality must be constrained into the base sexual act. Nothing akin to love must be allowed to blossom because love would mean coexisting with this person and that’d be one less childbirth, one less future worker or soldier to feed into the machine. To be out of the closet? To actually  treat homosexuality as something that demands marriage rights? To see your partner as an actual human? That’s unacceptable. They must be relegated under the street light, to be exploited and disposed of. To live in ghettos built by liberals for  visible lgbt people and die from diseases and hunger. There’s a reason the Bangladeshi middle class loves making jokes about ladyboy prostitutes in Thailand but acts aghast when they get the actual rights and legal recognition that can help them to settle down and marry and move away from a highly risky profession.

While US Evangelical groups push third world countries to implement homophobic laws, as documented in the report Uganda Just Made Homosexuality Punishable by Death. American Evangelical Groups Played a Role [51], our avid postcolonials calling LGBT rights “colonialism” turn a blind eye, but these laws only help to keep funneling LGBT people toward prostitution, a report titled Trans and LBQ sex workers most hit by sexual violence, Uganda report says [52]:

The survey findings show that 29% of all sex workers experienced coerced or violent sex. The level of violent sex was reported highest among the transgender sex workers at 37%, LBQ sex workers at 33% and FSWs at 31%. The MSW were the least affected (12%).

In my manifesto, I write:

There are countless homosexual male prostitutes in Bangladesh and all over the world too who had to rely on that profession because they were too obviously gay to be in the closet and to ever get education due to bullying from classmates and later had no jobs etc. Homophobia is not effective in making sodomy extinct. No. What is it effective in? It’s effective in creating lgbt prostitutes who die before growing old due to lack of stable work access/hospital care due to institutional bigotry.

…Queerphobes say that Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction happened due to homosexuality (although there is argument and fatwas that it happened due to rape, not homosexuality, theocrats have the option to choose the lgbt-friendly fatwas from Islamic scholars like Imam Muhsin or Samar Habib, but they don’t, they reject attempts at reconciling faith with lgbt people, so lgbtphobia is not really about faith is it?) but regardless. Punishment of homosexuality, illegalization of homosexuality isn’t actually stopping homosexual acts. What it’s doing is creating a supply chain of young homosexual and transgender prostitutes for rich people to exploit. Rich people can just build their cishet family while exploiting and abusing these prostitutes for pennies. So if you think Sodom and Gomorrah happened due to homosexual acts, fine, but it didn’t happen due to homosexual marriage. Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t allow lgbts to marry.     So why the fuck do you think natural disasters wouldn’t happen in a society without lgbt rights where rich people abuse and fuck lower class lgbt prostitutes anyway? Because that rhetoric exists not to stop sodomy, but to stop lgbt people from having stability. The purpose of this system *is* to create a higher number of lgbt prostitutes who die off early. Have you noticed how right wingers like Sorowar and left wingers who posit that “lgbts can exist but shouldn’t seek marriage rights because it’s a product of capitalism yadda yadda” agree on one thing? It doesn’t matter whom you screw, you just don’t get to live with them. Your purpose is to make children  who can be workers and soldiers for the state and capital, so the state and capital can pay a workforce desperate for jobs (the workforce which supply exceeds the demand) as little as possible. So they create a system in which homosexual romantic relationships are nipped at the bud. They want to incentivize a dynamic in which people treat homoromance as an early life indulgence and move away from it to build a family.

The paper Trans Women as Sex Workers in Lebanon [53] reads:

There is an overlap between trans women and sex work. As mentioned before, sex work is not always exactly a choice. Economic and social conditions also play a big role in “convincing,” or as others would argue “coercing,” a woman into sex work.

Arguably the most famous trans woman, Suzy resorted to sex work after being abandoned by her family. She first went viral through videos where she jokes around to get paid. She went on Hawa el-Horriye, a television show that tackles social issues, to tell her story and ask for financial help. She was later invited to other shows where she was ridiculed and taken advantage of. At that time, Suzy offered to do handmade embroidery in exchange for money. For years she was able to survive through her own work.

Only when theories are attached to real people’s stories, such as Suzy’s, do we start to understand the difference between theoretical discussions of sex work and the realities of sex work on the ground. Rather than just theoretical discussions, these theories are now real conversations about real people. Suzy, like other trans women, had a tragic story that led her to sex work. The list of reasons that might lead trans women to sex work is long: poor socio-economic conditions, being abandoned by their families for being trans, discrimination in education, ID complications (especially for non-Lebanese women), lack of stable employment, absence of legal protections, and police harassment. Just like women sex workers, trans women sex workers are prone to violence and extreme exploitation, making it even more difficult for trans women sex workers to survive in Lebanon. This is an important area for future feminist inquiry.

The article Kurdistan Region’s transgender sex workers: From hell at home to damnation on the streets [54] containing the accounts of a Kurdish trans prostitute reads:

…”while cisgender female sex workers in licensed hotels receive hundreds of dollars per client, transgender sex workers, struggling for a bite to eat, have no choice but to offer their bodies to an old man or a drunk for five or 10 thousand dinars [3 or 6 dollars]. Sometimes they [clients] do not even pay that and beat them [transgender sex workers] up.”

While the Turkish president blames LGBTS for falling birthrates [55], the Turkey LGBT sex workers struggle to pay high rents [56]:

LGBTQ+ sex workers said they have little choice but to pay, as it is unsafe to live outside of areas known as gay and transgender-friendly districts.

A ban on prostitution outside of government-certified brothels also means sex workers who operate out of their homes have little recourse to report illegal rent rises.

Only unmarried Turkish women can work in brothels, excluding many sex workers.

…“I have to work all the time without taking a break, just to pay these,” they said. “What about the harm it will do to my body, my mental health?”

Notice the account of discrimination against trans female prostitutes in these  regions where sex workers are licensed? A lot of people have asked me that if I care about queer people being prostituted so much why don’t I simply lobby for all prostitutes instead of making it about queers. I feel like this bears elaboration here.

1. If I go for a “sex work is work” approach, this approach must address the issue of pimps’ exploitation of them and children trapped in sex trafficking. Whenever I demand marriage rights for LGBTs, I also demand ban of marital rape and child marriage as outlined in my manifesto, however I haven’t seen Bangladeshi “sex work is work” crowd address the issues mentioned enough.
2. As documented, even when sex work becomes decriminalized or even licensed, without express LGBT rights, the LGBT prostitutes continue being marginalized and unrecognized, so there is no amount of sex work decriminalization that would directly benefit LGBT prostitutes while our  liberals remain too scared to utter the words “transgender” or “homosexual” to include them in their policy suggestions and remain stuck saying words like lingoboichitro to avoid conflict,which due to their vagueness will inevitably be redefined to simply mean “intersex”.
3. If I take the rehabilitation approach, cis gender prostitutes have the option for marriage and building a family. Queer prostitutes don’t have that! Okay! Okay! Let’s say you give alternate employment opportunities for ALL prostitutes. Hell, even specify transgenders! INFINITE EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT QUOTAS FOR THE TRANSGENDERS! INFINITE FREE HOUSING AND RESERVATIONS! But they don’t get to legally build families. They’re not given a social script that allows their partners to give them social recognition. What happens? They just end up remaining taboofied. The “hook up culture/live together culture” of cis people is a choice, that’s not a choice trans people get to make, it’s an inevitability.   Marriage is a ritual of social acknowledgement of relationships among other things. Cis people, even the ones living together, exist in a culture where said ritual exists. A cis couple “living together” is understood as pre-marital or anti-marital. These positions are socially intelligible. Trans relationships, in contrast, are not anti-marriage. They are precluded from marriage. Marriage is a ritual of social acknowledgement of relationships among other things. Cis people, even the ones living together, exist in a culture where said ritual exists. A cis couple “living together” is understood as pre-marital or anti-marital. These positions are socially intelligible. Trans relationships, in contrast, are not anti-marriage. They are precluded from marriage. Trans people and visibly queer people are not living in the queer culture with a ritualized acknowledgement of their relationships, they’re in one of secrecy.    Because the taboofication of lgbt people originates from the lack of legal rights, the live together/hookup scenario isn’t the same for trans women as it is for cis women, the trans women aren’t even getting to be seen with their partners. Even when it comes to employed trans women, without the ritual of marriage, their relationships are going to inevitably adopt the features of prostitution without familial connections. At which point one is incentivized to simply move toward  prostitution. Without access to ritualized social acknowledgment, intimacy collapses into exchange.  You can’t fix it simply by telling chasers to maintain domestic relationships with the trans women they treat like dirty magazines through social campaigns only, that’s preaching without substance, you need actual legal marriage rights to change that. Trans women’s relationships are designed like this: let’s say you’re one of the lucky ones and you got to go to actual university and have a job. You get home from your job or in your offdays, eatshit fucking tired, due to the culture created by lack of rights is your partner gonna be there when you go out in public? Do you get to visit your partner’s family and have a fucking talk with their parents and brothers and sisters and check up on how they’ve been doing? Nah. Do you get to pick up the newborn baby of their sibling and hand it the toy you bought. Fucking nah. You have a job, you’re earning your own fucking money, you’re the one visibly queer keeping your nose clamped at the low wage fucking job you got due to discrimination, you’re the one who has better fucking grades than any of the shmucks in your class who can’t write a coherent fucking sentence but the teachers are too afraid of talking with you cause some of the retards will then send complaint forms claiming you get preferential treatment. And you’re still being treated like a fucking whore because these downlow motherfuckers can point at the lack of rights and say “well constitution doesn’t allow us any better”. So why the fuck would you not be a whore at that point, because you’re not gonna get respected either way and your partners have been socially conditioned to treat you that way?! There’s not even a fucking ladder out of this bullshit even if you grind hard enough. And so even with all your stupid charity and quotas, even with all that, without marriage rights the cultural taboofication that pushes LGBT people toward prostitution will persist. And the sex industry like all other industries will monopolize into abuse hovels and crush its workers underfoot while it does so. 

And what happens when the charity, quota and reservation begging politics instead of equal rights inevitably fail because it’s like pumping water out of a sinking boat without plugging the leaks? Well, the authorities get an excuse to throw their hands up in the air and say “We tried, but these people simply can not be changed.” Reservations without equal rights exist to claim these are just the places we belong in by the natural order upon their failure to fix the issues that afflict us, those reservations will eventually be taken away. Reservations without equal rights exist only to breed state-dependency and then pull out the rug after a while.  The paperBack to Where They Were”: The Socio-Discursive Representation of Transgender Sex Workers and Urban Space in a Television News Report [57] reads:

For the transgender community, and especially for transvestites and transgender women, prostitution is the only option for generating income after their early expulsion from the family home. The same study showed that prostitution was the main occupation of 70% of the transvestites and transgender women, 87% of whom declared that they would abandon that activity if offered a formal job. Age and educational level are directly correlated with this: the higher those two variables, the lower the percentage of transgender women who turn to prostitution for a living.

…The urban conflict around transgender people and public space was particularly noticeable in Palermo, one of the neighborhoods with more transgender sex workers. With moral arguments that condemned prostitution and transvestism as an “obscenity,” the cisgender neighbors of Palermo demanded first the banning of prostitution and then the creation of a special zone-called “the red zone”-where transvestites and transgender women would offer their sexual services away from homes, schools and churches. After many conflicts and negotiations that were abundantly covered by the media, in 2005 the transvestites and transgender sex workers moved to the spot of the Bosques de Palermo (Palermo Woods, the city’s biggest public park) known as El Rosedal (the Rose Garden). The new location, however, did not please the cisgender neighbors and, a few years later, the sex workers had to move again to another part of the Bosques called Florencio Sánchez.

…From these points, I conclude that this news report is pervaded by a discursive naturalization of the status quo. While the transvestites and transgender women are presented as passive, consumable bodies that circulate in and make up urban public space, the Government of the City’s restrictive actions to order that space-and the bodies that inhabit it-appear as effective yet impersonal events. Although the journalists mention that most transgender women would prefer to have a different occupation, the report’s general focus consolidates the idea of prostitution as their “natural place,” with the closing editorial remark describing normality as “going back to where they were”. To use a theatrical metaphor, the report’s discursive stage is crowded with different Actors that represent the transgender women, the Government, the clients and even the economic crisis. However, there is no scenery: no semantic-discursive categories are used to provide background or context. The spotlight falls on the geographical relocation, but the negotiation process that led to it, the role of the transgender movement and the structural exclusion are left out of the spotlight and behind the curtains.

Will marriage rights automatically fix everything? No! I never claimed it would! But you can’t deny us the thing lacking which taboofies us with the intent of prostituting us to begin with! Let’s give examples from a few more countries to drive the point home. Let’s go for… Namibia [58]!

“An emotional Noases, a transgender who regards ‘herself’ as a woman, chronicled her painful childhood, punctuated by rejection by her family after her sexuality started to emerge.

…Noases’ misery started when her mother, a devotee of the Catholic faith, had to choose between Noases and the rest of the family. The mother was not sure how society would view her family by housing a gay son.

Noases says she found herself on the street at the age of 12, after being raped by her own biological father whom she decided to move in with after being rejected by her mother.  

She then made a conscious decision to get involved in prostitution in order to survive.

“That is how I met my trafficker at the age of 17.  My trafficker trapped me into believing that he is kind and loving. However, he saw that I was vulnerable and took advantage of me,” an emotional Noases said.

According to Noases, the trafficker used to take her to exclusive gay parties around the country and forced her to have sex with men against her will, because he knew she was financially dependent on him.”

Let’s go for… Peru [59]! The report “Trans Women: The Unseen Victims of Human Trafficking” reads:

Sharon welcomes us to her home in the baking jungle of Pucallpa. She wears sandals and a long dress with her hair tied back. She has finished serving dinner to her family and invites us into the yard, away from prying ears. She tells us how, at just 20 years old, she has already escaped human traffickers twice.

Back in October 2014, she was just 16 when her life changed. Her parents had begun to accept her trans identity, and she was looking for new ways to bring money home — other than prostitution. When a woman offered her a job as a cashier in a bar in Huánuco, eight hours from her hometown, she leapt at the opportunity. But when she got to the bar, they locked her up, dressed her as a man and offered her up to customers looking for beer and sex.

…In this report, we document the vulnerabilities that surround the lives of trans adolescents and adults when they leave their homes, whether to simply express their sexual identity or whether they are driven out by violence from their families, and how this uprooting makes them easy targets for human trafficking or the child sex trade.

The main route for this kind of exploitation runs through the Peruvian jungle to Lima, then continues into countries such as Argentina and Italy. However, the full nature of this violence eludes most victims because they believe it is the price to pay for being who they are.

…But it is unknown how many of the alleged victims belong to the LGBTI population because the government registration system is binary, meaning it only allows victims to be classified as male or female. Appealing to the memory of the officials who handled the cases is the only way to learn a victim’s LGBTI status. Because of such oversights, stories like Sharon’s become invisible, disappearing into statistical data that does not recognize the existence of trans people.

…Of all the members of the LGBTI population, trans people have the least opportunity to escape from this cycle. A 2016 survey of 118 trans women across six regions of Peru, by the organization No Tengo Miedo (I Have No Fear), found that 38% had not completed elementary or secondary school and 50.8% had no medical insurance of any kind.

Nor do they have national identification documents. In some cases, they may choose not to obtain or renew them because they know it will not reflect the gender they identify as.

Without family, school or a workplace that accepts them, trans people survive in a world of exclusion.

The report Transgender sex workers among China’s most marginalised people [60] reads:

Although the Chinese government does not actively punish transgender people for their identity, the country’s lack of non-discrimination laws and basic medical resources for transitioning leaves many transgender people feeling permanently trapped on society’s bottom rung.

The report says a “considerable percentage” of transgender women in the Asia-Pacific region are engaged in sex work.

In Afghanistan, Under The Taliban Rule: Transgender Individuals Treated as Sexual Slaves [61]. In India, 90% Of Transgenders Are Forced Into Prostitution, But Healthcare Still Remains A Distant Dream [62]. The report Porn, Prostitution, or Death: Being Trans in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa [63] reads:

The Khwaja Siras live in their own communities led by a Guru (teacher), adopting young boys who are rejected by their families or flee. The community is generally self-sustaining, though many members work as professional dancers or sex workers. Given limited work opportunities, they are at high-risk for being targeted with violence when performing at weddings and parties. They’re often targeted when performing sex work, as well.

While some postcolonials call LGBT rights “colonialism”, other postcolonials seek to glorify  “local queer identities” which are organized under a bonded labor system. They glorify the Guru, our indigenous word for “pimp”, who sell us to indigenous clients that rape us most indigenously. Another report from Pakistan titled Trafficking haunts transgender community [64] reads:

“These guru mafias are operating all over South Punjab. They coerce transgender persons into dancing and prostitution and even sell them for bids as high as Rs 10,000,000 by sharing seductive videos of their dances with potential bidders through social networking applications like WhatsApp. In case a transgender person dares to refuse the guru’s orders, they are ruthlessly battered to the point where some even lose their lives,” disclosed Nigaheen.

According to Saba Gul, a transgender rights activist associated with a non-governmental organisation (NGO), almost 3,469 incidents of violence against transgender individuals have been registered during the past five years, with many ending in the death of the victim.

A report from India titled Family bond or bonded labour: What ails the guru-chela relationship in the hijra community? [65] reads:

Within the community, only the senior-most chelas can sing and dance. Next in the hierarchy is those who beg and collect shaguns, or alms in exchange for blessings at events, and finally, the sex workers. In exchange for a roof and food, chelas take on household chores including some with shades of servitude, like cleaning the guru’s “thukdaan”, or spittoon. They must also contribute either a portion or the whole of their savings to their gurus.

…When Rose decided to run away, she said, her guru and a few of her chelas “kidnapped me, dragged me home, hit me with brooms and slippers, and even chopped my hair to brand me an offender”.

While Rose still engages in “hijarpan”, that is the community’s traditional activities – begging and attending functions to offer blessings for alms – to make ends meet, she has managed to make inroads into more mainstream professions too.

“The elders hold us back from joining mainstream professions, partly out of selfishness and partly out of protectiveness,” she said.

Of course the pimps don’t want their exploited underclass to have mainstream professions! The chela cannot have mainstream professions because the knowledge of abuse and bonded labor within Hijra communes and the sexual slavery of the underlings can not go mainstream!  The same article goes on:

These rules might seem excessive but they are necessary, according to Zara Siddiqui*, another Mumbai-based guru who lives with her own guru and two of her chelas.

“Disciplinary beatings are sometimes required,” said Zara, who is around 45 years old. “The new generation is greedy: they want to keep everything they earn. For us, everything is our guru’s and will eventually be passed down to us.”

While Rose says she would leave the system at the first real opportunity she gets, it’s almost unheard of to do so. “You usually get captured and punished. You cannot work in any of the community’s occupations without the affiliation of a guru and gharana” she said. “One can distance themselves gradually.”

…Neysara, the founder of Transgender India, an online transgender community, said the hijra community is “not a child-friendly place equipped to handle trauma”. “What is vulnerable is traffickable,” she said, “and most that join are disenfranchised.”

She recalled being young and scared and turning to the hijra community, only to be met with its most “brutal side”. “When my family was trying to honour-kill me, I sought the hijra jamaat for help,” she said. “They outright told me that I can’t have a call centre job and could only stay with them if I do sex work and earn for them. The capital for the entire operation comes from traditional occupations, making everyone manpower.”

Our postcolonials point at this and say “Why should the LGBTs require more rights? They have this!” In the child prostitution pyramid scheme they see an ocean of indigenous knowledge to extract. The same article goes on:

“There will be a hundred opinions based on a hundred people’s experiences, and they are all valid,” said Sowmya Gupta, deputy program manager at Humsafar Trust, an organisation working to advance health, advocacy, capacity building & research for the LGBTQIA+ community. “But as the only structure resembling a family, it needs reform, not abolishment.”

Sowmya argued that even within families, collective earnings are handed to one person to budget for the entire household.

Ah, yes, of course. As we know, it is very typical of “families” to routinely whore out the children. We can’t have marriage rights, and in the absence of marriage rights, we can have rape-families instead. Alternative family indeed, Epstein Island was a theme park with fun for the whole family too!  Remember Helmut Kenter of Germany? The poststructuralist who put homeless boys in the “care” of pedophilic foster parents? Oddly enough I’m reminded of that particular atrocity in our precious little LOCAL INDIGENOUS rape culture. I remember particularly when the story of a Bangladeshi immigrant guruma [66] sex trafficking hundreds of trans people [67] over the border to India, and our lovely post-pedophiles defending her using identity politics. Suddenly the owner of private property and human capital became a subaltern. It reminds one of Jeffrey Epstein’s wife, oops I committed misogyny by identifying her by her husband’s name, sorry, Ghislaine Maxwell — child rapist— playing identity politics to say [68], “if you look at this crime, this overall crime, it’s all about men abusing women for a long period of time… and it’s only one person in jail — a woman”. Equality win! The South Asian trans woman child rape accomplice with enough capital gets to play identity politics just like a white  biological  cis female child rape accomplice!

The article Islamization of Bangladesh’s Electoral Politics and its Anti-trans Implications [69] reads:

Another critical argument to draw out is that the word ‘transgender person’ has no place in Bangladesh’s current legislative framework, especially in the absence of a transgender bill. As no school or place of employment wants to take in transgender individuals, the only recourse for young transfeminine individuals is to enter a hijra ‘gharana’ (influential house). There are no barriers to entry into a gharana, as one has to pay a certain amount of money to the ‘guru’ who runs it. This payment of money is in return for her protection and to become bonded labor within this house of transfeminine individuals. The gharanas are a deeply violent and hierarchical community. The gharana network’s proliferation and its funneling of trans people into sex work operate simultaneously alongside Bangladesh’s Islamist state and ultimately, the global clampdown on trans rights.

While the hijra underlings get raped and killed by their clients [70] in this sexual slavery system, our fetishistic post-colonials like Adnan Hussain have determined, based on their personal experience, that said clients do not hold any advantage in the power dynamic and in fact are submissive to the prostitutes sold in hijra brothels, in his academic paper published abroad this invertebrate wonder writes in his shitty Beyond Emasculation Pleasure and Power in the  Making of Hijra in Bangladesh  [71]book:

While I do  not contest the wider societal denigration associated with the receptive status  and the production of gender in such erotic encounters, it would be reductive  to assume that this disproportionate power dynamic structures the lived erotic  practices between hijras and their panthis. In other words, despite the wider  societal valorization of penetration, penetrators do not necessarily exercise  greater dominance in the actual erotic play. Rather, based on my interaction  with hijras, I would argue that the power dynamics in actual sexual practice  is often if not always reversed, with hijras taking the style and position of  a stereotypical masculine man. Ethnographic episodes mentioned earlier  about the hijra sense of discomfort and embarrassment about genital status  expressed in relation to their partners indicate that my interlocutors often  dominated the actual play in terms of determining what could and could not  be done during sex. Given that, the assumption that receptivity is tantamount  to submissiveness is analytically naive. Nor is the pleasure of penetration  illustrative of a superior dominant position at all times.

“It’s okay, guys! The prostitutes have all the power because I had BDSM sex where I was the submissive a few times!” Hahahaha! Fucking wanker! In my manifesto I write:

On a class interest level, the hijra underling and the transgender are not opponents— but the hijra guruma and the transgender are in class conflict and are opponents.   Transgenderism introduces an idea of gender deviancy in this region that does not require submission to an authority or leadership figure like the guruma.   Because the guruma exploits the underling’s money from begging and selling them into sexual contracts (with the client base often extending to India), on an existential level the idea of gender-deviants not flocking together and instead  trying to establish  their legal rights/ability to perpetuate life  outside the hijra system is a threat to gurumas’ labor capital. [This does not mean transgenderism without trans rights would end trans people’s funneling toward sex work, it would simply either 1) make them their own solicitor or more likely 2) make a pimp who is not the guruma the solicitor, which nonetheless destabilizes their power]   Of course there are “good” gurumas, as there are feudal lords who maybe personally a “good” person, but on a systemic level the hijra caste is not sustainable in a way that does not leave the underlings traumatized and exploited. And people who can not think systemically and are hooked on addlepated  micro-narratives will be offended at the suggestion.  Whereas the Awami League constitutional  framing of hijra as an “intersex” identity is ahistorical and many hijra guruma want a form of legal recognition that recognizes it as an identity adjacent profession (in simpler term a caste and their goal being to legally perpetuate this caste due to their benefit incentive), the transgender identity if legally recognized would be so outside this caste system.  The hijra legal recognition right now does not really fully benefit even the gurumas as it limits the definition to “intersex” (and only the ones whose genitalia are variant, not the chromosomal or hormone variant ones) so on a legal basis  most of them are not covered by it, although the gurumas can still use this to control their commune members by reporting to cops of the ones trying to leave the hijra system without forsaking their gender presentation as “fake hijras”, which the legal definition of hijras as intersex would get the hypothetical underling in trouble cause the cops will be checking the underling’s genitals rather than the wealth-backed gurumas’.  Fuckass libshits will frame this as a colonial individualism (trans) versus traditional collective (hijra) issue, rather than a non-feudal identity versus feudal identity or non-labor-exploitative versus labor-exploitative  issue.

The fake hijra/real hijra nonsense was further propelled by charity and quota politics. When instead of equality (like access to institutions like marriage) all you have is charity and quota, the marginalized groups’ individuals will inevitably turn against one another and declare one another fake to destroy the competition. Bangladeshi news media further propelled this cannibalizing spectacle [72], which led to the attack on the trans woman Utsha by hijras [34].

People like Adnan Hussain approach queerphobia as a cultural issue rather than an ideology which backs material exploitation, and thus their analysis is upside down. And so they think they can fix this issue through cultural means without raising awareness of the material incentive and class politics behind it. 

Among our Bangladeshi intellectuals there is an impression, that just because a few homosexuals like Xulhaz and Tonoy got killed, that homosexual rights are impossible and that just because hijra people have the guts and no other option but to be themselves openly out in the streets that “hijra people are more accepted”. Hijra people are not “accepted” any more than homosexuals are on a material level. Right wingers saying “we accept hijras, not transgenders or homos” doesn’t make the prostituted hijra underlings “accepted” materially. It’s the acceptance that gets them raped by clients and have their surplus value of labor stolen by hijra gurumas. It is the acceptance of the blacks as slaves by the slave owning whites. This “acceptance” then means nothing. And that “lack of acceptance” also means nothing. Innumerable hijra prostitutes got murdered since Xulhaz and Tonoy. The hijras’ murders didn’t make our intellectuals think “these people are not accepted”. But Xulhaz and Tonoy’s murders means “homosexuals are not accepted”. Perhaps because the dead bodies of lower class sex slaves have become so normalized in our eyes that it feels natural to us. While the murder of two middle class homosexuals ”traumatizes” the whole community into a decade of secrecy. None of it means anything. Hijra people are not “more accepted” than transgenders and homosexuals. Transgenders are not “more accepted” than homosexuals. Trying to get transgender rights without getting homosexual rights will just lead to the same old “fake hijra/real hijra” debacle, in which who is the “real transgender” and who is the “homosexual pretending to be a fake transgender” will be determined by material incentives and whims of the right wing. Hence for transgender rights to exist, homosexual rights are essential.  But while the cis homosexuals go further into the closet in fear of queerphobia, due to their lack of fight for queer rights and the secrecy culture — the taboofication of queers  only becomes stronger. And it ultimately hurts trans people all the more. The visibly queer people continue to get deplatformed, and the closeted queers think, “Good. Why can’t they be like us and radically fuck away in secrecy?” 

An article titled Transgender Kyrgyz seek unlikely refuge in Russia [73] reads:

Amid the hostility, most cisgender members of the community – people who identify themselves as having the gender they were assigned at birth – have chosen to conceal their sexuality in public.

But anonymity has proved difficult for the transgender community, the majority of whom find themselves caught up in the sex industry due to discrimination in the workplace.

It is against this backdrop of violent transphobia that many members of the community are voluntarily moving to Russia – a country renowned for its hostile attitude towards LGBT people.

Sex work is work, sure, but an entire community shoved into it without the legal ability to build families (and no, don’t tell me the brothel is a family, you wouldn’t send your own children to live there), without the social script to build families,  means the entire community dies at a disproportionately higher rate every time faraways wars destabilize the economy of a country removed from that war even slightly [74], plague, or climate disasters break out. “If I don’t have sex I’ll die of hunger” a trans prostitute says in an interview during covid-19 [75].  An article titled How climate change is hitting vulnerable Indonesian trans sex workers [76] documents:

…That’s because many trans women, like Patiha, are shut out of the formal economy and survive as buskers and sex workers, occupations that rely on them being able to solicit clients outdoors.

…The rainy season was lasting longer across the West Java province, winds were stronger and in some particularly bad years Patiha lost up to 80% of her earnings.

Here’s a joke for you, the Bangladeshi intellectual says to the slavery abolitionist, “Instead of doing identity politics around the slave, why don’t you simply build an utopian world so that the slaves live in luxury enjoying the fruits of utopia.”

“Boo hoo, marriage is a capitalistic and patriarchal institution” they say, as if prostitution or any other institution which exists under capitalism and patriarchy are not capitalistic and patriarchal. Also, Marx didn’t view capitalism as ontologically evil, he thought it was a developmental step necessary to develop society from feudalism to socialism. So denying queers marriage rights and keeping them trapped in feudalistic hijra identities is to deny them said development. I am often asked by socialists whose ideal state would abolish marriage what I think in regards to that. To them I say,

1) The goal is getting legal rights before socialism, so it’s kind of as irrelevant what happens after socialism as much as the question is irrelevant to the discussion of what will happen to the equal inheritance rights for women after private property is abolished.

2) State will be forced to recognize some form of family and/or partnership for the allocation of resources among other factors/data collection on different demographics for research purposes etc, so whatever new form arrives will be a reinvention of the same form.What Soviet Union did was instead of abolishing marriage, just make divorce/dissolving of marriage extremely easy, and whatever new form of state recognition of relationships in future socialist models (born out of the necessity of data collection for resource allocation purposes) arrives, will also essentially go the same route of dissolving those forms as easily.

 While the Hijras are forced to sell themselves in the sex trade and live among their own communities as outcasts in Bangladesh [77], our liberals claim any effort at advancing lgbt rights are “delusional” because “marital rape and child marriage are still legal”. But marital rape was banned in America years after the Stonewall riot. In South Africa marital rape was banned one year after LGBT marriage was legalized. Historically worldwide women’s rights have progressed intermingled  with LGBT rights. It is because the normalization of relationships that do not produce offsprings inherently subverts patriarchal norms of coercing women into reproductive roles. But our liberals can only view LGBT rights as an afterthought, even the ones who view themselves as allies see queerphobia as a mere byproduct of misogyny that originates from the “hatred for the feminine” rather than existing to exploit queer people trapped in mechanisms of sexual slavery as disposable products. And in doing so they butcher their own movement which they prioritize.

Lgbt rights at once exists and do not exist in Bangladesh.  Technically, section 377 doesn’t prosecute homosexuals and technically LGBTs can marry under the special marriage act, but also LGBT marriage is not legal and LGBTs are illegal.  This destabilizing element, this pharmakon, exists not to unsettle the status quo but to destabilize lgbt activism. As you demand marriage rights, you’ll be told “what’s the point of seeking it when queers are not decriminalised yet?” and as you demand abolition of section 377, you’ll be told “it doesn’t prosecute consensual adult gays and only prosecutes the rapists and pedophiles in Bangladesh, so why bother?” And thus are we trapped in a loop of nothing going nowhere. We must  un-neutralize this pharmakon, by  either proving  that it’s against us or by making it work for us.

Ultimately, this is my proposal for now:  Try to get two legal males registered under special marriage act as husbands. We just need a lawyer to draw up the paper and submit it to a magistrate. We do not need to win or have it approved by the magistrate, even if we do the necessary paperwork but fail to get it registered, there will be a document to definitively show that the “modern Bangladeshi constitution” espoused by politicians is a myth. This is not a gay marriage rights bill or something that would require years of ground planning. This is trying to get a gay marriage registered through existing legal pathways and if failing, then documenting the failure.

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