With the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia being observed on 17 May, Dr Pierre Brouard, Director of UP’s Centre for Sexualities, AIDS & Gender, reflects on this year’s theme, ‘No one left behind: Equality, freedom and justice for all’.

The International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) is commemorated on 17 May, and aims to coordinate international events that raise awareness of LGBT rights violations and stimulate interest in LGBT rights work worldwide.

Slogans can be rallying calls or clickbait. The theme for this year’s IDAHOBIT is ‘No one left behind: Equality, freedom and justice for all’. What does this mean for people who are marginalised and disempowered? Who has the power to “leave” others behind, and what does this say about forms of exclusion?

In a reflection on this slogan, the civil society network for global change, Bond, notes that this principle is enshrined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and has the potential to spur unprecedented change for the world’s poorest and most excluded people. However, Bond says, there is a danger that development actors are not paying sufficient attention to what is needed to “leave no one behind”.

They identify three concrete steps that development actors are taking, or can take, to fulfil this intention: identifying who is left behind; understanding the reasons why people are left behind; and taking action against the exclusion of “left behind” groups and individuals.

Each of these steps, important as they are, can be subjected to critique when examined through the lens of LGBTQI+ (hereafter “queer”) lives and experiences. And indeed, this critique can apply to questions of race and gender, among others.

Firstly, identifying who is left behind is not without its challenges. Large-scale social surveys, for example, often exclude those who come from the queer community. South Africa’s recent census was critiqued because it failed to ask questions about sexual orientation and gender identity: this failure can affect the extent to which the state can plan for sexual and gender minorities. This can be the result of outright bias, or lack of competence to incorporate sensitive questions, or there can be anxieties about outing people who live in situations where they are not free to declare themselves. But the end result is the same – failing to identify queer people and their needs means they are effectively left behind.

Secondly, queer people are left behind because the world is organised in a way that renders these people invisible. The dominance of ideas of heteronormativity – that heterosexuality is the default for “normal” – and what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory” heterosexuality – ways in which society enforces and rewards heterosexuality – work together to make queer people absent. Similarly, societies reward cisgender identities, where people identify with their sex assigned at birth. These social forces are not passive processes; they actively exclude through language, social institutions and organisational cultures. This is important – queer people are left behind not just because of individual acts of discrimination, but through systemic exclusion wired into how societies function. 

Thirdly, taking action against exclusion can run the risk of paying lip service to change, rather than meaningfully changing the terms of engagement around social, political and economic planning. It is seldom possible to bring an excluded social group into the mainstream by “going back to fetch them”. Rather, we need to rethink how people on the margins can be at the seat of power when we plan for a more inclusive world, so that they are not left behind in the first place.

What could this look like in the real world? We should think about marginal identities as a doorway to understanding what power and dominance look like, shining a light on who sits at the decision-making table. In some contexts, holding onto marginality can be a strategy for survival and meaning; we should be careful of trying to blend everyone into a bland “kumbaya” culture.

And finally, we can think about how we use language, how we set up our institutions, how we organise our workplaces: queer people have sometimes been ‘left behind’ before they have even stepped through the door.