After enduring sexual violence in the DRC conflict, Steven Kighoma fled to Uganda where he became an activist with the NGO, Men of Hope Refugee Association, supporting male victims of conflict-related sexual violence. The experiences of male victims include rape, being forced to watch family members being raped, being beaten on the genitals, and enduring other kinds of abuse. Compounding their trauma, men who have suffered sexual violence in the region are often seen as not properly masculine and face homophobic violence and criminalization, regardless of their sexual orientation. In addition, they face exclusion from survivor support services which assume that only women face sexual violence.

The biggest challenge is “the ignorance of the government, the medical institutions, the community, not knowing a male victim of sexual violence exists,” says Kighoma. “There is a confusion when you talk about male victims of sexual violence. People confuse it with homosexuality.”

As Kighoma says, being a male victim of sexual violence is not the same as homosexuality. Sexual violence can happen to people of all sexual orientations. So why am I writing about sexual violence against men in an article for pride month? Because the same kinds of systematic discrimination that make things worse for male victims of sexual violence also make things worse for LGBTIQ+[1] people. One of the many lessons from Kighoma’s experience is that whatever your gender or sexual orientation, heteronormativity can make things worse.

What is heteronormativity and how does it make things worse?

Heteronormativity is more than just the belief that particular stereotypical forms of heterosexuality are the default, preferred, or normal mode of relationships and expression; it’s also the systematic privileging of those kinds of relationships and expressions.

People who don’t fit these expectations face social disapproval, exclusion from health and education systems, and economic disadvantages. For example, health services may discriminate against pregnant women who are not in heterosexual marriages. In Bangladesh, transgender people face high levels of harassment in school which may cause them to drop out and limit their opportunities for education. If they are open about their desires, lesbians in the informal economy in Peru may jeopardize the community relationships on which they depend to take part in the informal economy. And lesbians and gay men in Zimbabwe may be thrown out of their homes if they openly seek same-sex relationships.

Heteronormativity can also penalize people in heterosexual relationships that don’t fit norms, such as interfaith relationships in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which recently passed a law criminalizing Muslim Hindu marriages.

Heteronormative understandings of men as playing a proactive, rather than victim role, in sex makes sexual violence against men a powerful weapon in conflict because it can be understood as a destruction of their masculinity. Heteronormative framings also compound the impacts of sexual violence against women, transgender people, and people with nonconforming gender identities. In addition to being potentially devastating on an individual level, sexual violence against women can destroy the honor of the woman and her community. Hostility to divergence from heteronormative behaviors can drive violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people.

If responses to sexual violence remain heteronormative, for example by assuming sexual violence is only targeted at women, then male victims of sexual violence will be excluded, as will people with nonconforming gender identities. And responses will remain stuck in gender stereotypical ideas of sexuality that assume women need protection instead of agency; the right to say no, but never the right to say yes or to ask for what they want.

Is the international development sector heteronormative?

10 years ago I wrote an article critiquing the international development sector as heteronormative. Household models assumed that a family consists of a heterosexual married couple, with a man as household head. Population policies failed to mention that sex is still the way most babies are conceived. Sexuality was dealt with directly only in relation to sexual violence or disease, where an “obsession with bad sex” was apparent. These discourses generally framed sexuality as a problem to be dealt with, rather than an experience which could encompass pleasure and well-being. Heterosexual and gender stereotypical relationships were assumed to be the default, with men always seen as the perpetrators of violence or vectors of disease, women as victims, and any other gender identities nowhere to be seen.

Have things changed? Yes and no. The Global Philanthropy Project documents several fold increases in funding for LGBTI communities. In 2011, the United Kingdom’s then Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to British colonial laws criminalizing sexual relations between people of the same sex and made development aid conditional upon LGBT rights. That same year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” after which President Obama instructed U.S. aid agencies to take account of LGBT rights. In 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed solidarity with LGBT people and opposed related conditionality on aid. This was in line with arguments by organizations like Sexual Minorities of Uganda that opposed aid conditionality on the grounds that suspending aid harms populations more broadly, and makes the LGBT community scapegoats for reduced resources.

However, funding for the LGBTI community still remains a tiny proportion of total development spending. Even what money there is reflects gender normativities, as well as HIV funding priorities, with less going to organizations focused on the ‘L’, ‘B’, ‘T’ or ‘I’ than on the ‘G’. And in reality the support is largely limited to small-scale, stand-alone programs. Development aid has not been reviewed more broadly to examine its impact on gender and sexuality, and to ensure people with nonconforming gender and sexualities are supported rather than harmed.

Furthermore, simply including LGBTIQ+ people in existing approaches may not address injustices in the development sector. Where LGBTIQ+ people are included, this is sometimes done using narrow understandings and problematic labels reflecting western framings of sexuality, and is presented as a way for the more “backward” majority world to catch up with the more “civilized” west.

In the colonial era, same-sex sexuality in the Global South was seen as a sign of backwardness. Now it’s the other way round, with homophobia taken as an indicator of backwardness. In both cases, sexuality is deployed in a colonialist ranking of the Global North as more civilized than the Global South. Note how right-wing nationalist parties in Europe have deployed feminism and LGBT rights to call for the exclusion of immigrants who are posited to be more homophobic and sexist than Indigenous populations.

Mirroring colonialist deployments of gender and sexuality discourses, Global South governments and movements are able to deploy anti-gender narratives as a move against colonialism, and anti-colonialist narratives to combat LGBTIQ+ and gender equality. For example, Uganda’s President Museveni has called homosexuality “unAfrican” and a Western import, and approved anti-homosexuality legislation as a political ploy to appeal to nationalists and gain popularity. In reality, the UK brought homophobia, not homosexuality, to Uganda, imposing laws criminalizing homosexuality during colonial times. And in the current era, American evangelists have actively promoted further criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda.

How can the international development sector become more inclusive?

How can the international development sector become less heteronormative and more inclusive for all? How can it include LGBTIQ+ people without being co-opted by a colonialist agenda? How can it support men like Kighoma?

Identity politics—organizing around particular identities—can be hugely powerful in mobilizing marginalized groups. LGBTIQ+ mobilizing remains immensely important and valuable. But at the same time, identity politics can constrain people within identity boxes. And it can be used by those from across the political spectrum, whether LGBTIQ+, women, Black Lives Matter, Incels, or white nationalists. Beyond identity politics, we need joined up thinking and solidarity across and beyond diverse sexuality causes that cannot be twisted to other purposes or used to pit one progressive cause against another. We need an integrated approach to sexual rights, intersecting with other justice issues, and north-south solidarity.

This kind of vision is applied by Sexuality Policy Watch, which analyzes how the world today interacts with gender and sexuality, addressing a wide range of issues at many different levels. For example, their series on Sexual politics in times of pandemic analyzes how COVID-19’s economic impacts have disproportionately hit women, particularly in the service sector (including domestic workers and sex workers).

The series highlights how domestic violence has increased against women and young LGBTIQ+ people trapped with their families during lockdown. In Burundi, Kenya, and Uganda, social controls, ostensibly to limit the virus, have been an excuse for increased state violence, including against LGBTI+ people. In some countries in Latin America, gender segregation has been enforced in public spaces as a mode to contain the virus—on certain days only men are permitted out in public, and on other days only women—leaving people with non-conforming gender expression in a bind. Governments, like those in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, have used COVID-19 as an opportunity to enact anti-gender and anti-abortion laws, with public protests constrained by lockdowns, and media focused on the pandemic. Additionally, the series highlights how anti-gender forces have connected up globally and are interacting with COVID-19 conspiracy theories around sexuality.

By unpacking the (intended or unintended) consequences of heteronormative policies on individuals’ well-being, this kind of integrated, critical, and political sexuality analysis can help development to become less heteronormative without requiring people to identify with particular categories. It can help identify the entry points to making international development more relevant to people like Kighoma, who suffer from heteronormativity even if they are heterosexual. It can bring together sexual rights with north-south solidarity to challenge neocolonial deployment of LGBTIQ+ rights. In these dark times of global pandemic, climate crisis, and right-wing populism, this kind of vision can help us address these interconnected crises with a genuinely inclusive international development agenda.