AWID celebrates IDAHOT with Ideas of a Queer-Positive World

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As the years before, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) is marking the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia with a special message.

With the reports, such as the TGEU’s Transgender Murder Monitoring or the State-Sponsored Homophobia Report by ILGA showing that we are far away from a world with LGBTI-Phobia, AWID asked activists from around the world to share their vision of a Queer-Positive World. The questions are: what would it look like and also what is necessary to achieve that vision.
Read here a couple of examples of the inspiring answers people gave. You can find all the statements here.

Leigh Ann van der Merwe | South Africa:
A queer world will be one in which we don’t have to constantly explain what LGBTIQA means. A world in which I can get onto public transport without the constant stares and whispers. A queer world will be a world where I am not expected to apologise for my identity, for my androgyny, and where I will be employed or promoted because I am qualified and not denied because of my expression and embodiment. In a queer world we will talk openly and without awkwardness of homosexuality, without invasive questions of sexual practice but meaningful dialogue based on identity rather than sexual practice.
We need many more people working on themselves through education and information. We need to shift the focus from these educational models of engaging our communities and presenting our lives as theory and make it real for ourselves and for other people to understand. We need to break free from the cages of normativity where we straddling from hetero to homo, to trans-normativity and focus on disrupting these normative understandings of our lives. There needs to be a radical shift in the ways we talk about queer issues. Finally, we need to have the resources to be able to undertake such radical change and building resistance and resilience.

Mariam Gagoshashvili, | Georgia:
What I call my queer utopia is in reality a necessity without which there is a little chance for equality between genders. Feminists have long realized that gender is a marker that draws a line between those who are oppressed and those who benefit from others’ oppression. Thus, we are going in circles, chasing our own tales, unless we are working towards the erasure of gender markers, and towards the ultimate elimination of it as a category. How would humans look if they got rid of all gender markers? Or how would they look if they applied all gender markers at the same time? Would we look like Neanderthals, our ancestors from the prehistoric past? Or would we look like futuristic cyborgs in drag? In either case, I think we would look so much alike that it would be difficult to identify our genders and put us in relevant boxes. In this case it would be almost impossible to discriminate or privilege based on perceived gender. It would be hard to police and monitor each other’s behaviour, including sexuality. The normative connection binding sexuality to gender would be destroyed. All would be openly and comfortably queer and have as many genders and as many sexualities as there are humans.